Ravinia 2019, Issue 3, Week 6

“It just kept feeling good, and then feeling better. It’s like any relationship: There has to be trust; there has to be surprise; there has to be respect. Fun.” trust; there has to be surprise; there has to be respect. Fun. Shared values.” It’s easy to imagine the title of Hersch’s forthright and compelling au- tobiography, 2017’s Good Things Happen Slowly , applying to any of these close personal connections. The title seems even more perfectly suited to a jazz mu- sician’s memoir, given how it describes artistic evolution. The real beauty behind those four words is their univer- sality—and their origin. Hersch didn’t hear them at a key point in his musical development, nor were they delivered by a teacher or professional peer. Instead, his doctor uttered them to his husband when Hersch had already spent a month in a coma in the ICU: “In a case like this, good things happen slowly. But bad things happen fast.” The story of his near death and re- covery is, naturally, detailed in the book. The short version is: AIDS is still a very dangerous disease. That fact is easy to overlook in first-world countries today, thanks to the incredible advances in drug therapies that occurred in the late ’90s (and have continued to improve since then). But some long-term sur- vivors with HIV, including Hersch, still have health challenges, and his more serious bout began in late 2007, while on a doctor-approved “drug holiday”—a plan designed to give his body a break from years of treatment. The virus surged in his body, and Hersch developed AIDS-related demen- tia in 2008. That led to a roller coaster of health issues and hospital visits, culmi- nating in septic shock, pneumonia, and a medically induced coma. That near- death journey “was the BC/AD point of delineation in my history as a man and as a musician,” Hersch would later write in his memoir. His artistic growth on the long road to recovery included the 2011 project My Coma Dreams , which drew directly on the visions he experienced while seemingly unconscious. With a collabo- rator writing lyrics and libretto, Hersch composed for “one actor, who also sings, and 12 instruments.” The multimedia work includes animated visuals based on dreams he vividly remembered after coming out of the two-month coma. (Fascinatingly, Hersch doesn’t typically remember the dreams he has during regular sleep.) Given the complexity and uniqueness of the project, Hersch and his collabora- tors came up with a hybrid name for its genre: “We called it jazz theater,” he says, “because it’s not really a musical and it’s not a jazz concert. It was somewhere in the middle.” It was the second such large-scale piece he’d composed, having developed a 2003 musical adaptation of Leaves of Grass , Walt Whitman’s celebra- tory collection of poetry. “I would call that jazz oratorio,” he says. “The focus is on Whitman’s words, with two singers and an octet.” Hersch still composes new music, although he hasn’t found anything to inspire a project on the scale of Grass or Coma Dreams . “I’m constantly on the lookout for something that might inspire me to tackle another big piece with text or theatrical elements,” he says. “Nothing has hit me quite yet. In the meantime, I’m writing lots of tunes.” In addition to composing, Hersch continues to record, tour, and perform. Whether playing solo or with his trio, every concert is different; he doesn’t generally map out his sets. “I just see what mood I’m in,” he says. “I have a pretty big repertoire of original pieces, tunes by great jazz composers, and what we usually call American popular song, which goes up to Joni Mitchell and The Beatles. Then I just decide as I go. “I hope a set of music will have vari- ety of mood and feel and intensity,” he continues. “My goal as an improvising musician is to spontaneously explore a theme that I lay out, which is the song that I’m playing, and to take the audi- ence with me on the journey. They’re discovering it as I’m discovering it. I hope that people trust me to tell a story in music.” Web Behrens covers arts, culture, and travel for the Chicago Tribune and Crain’s Chicago Business . He’s also worked as an editor and contributor for Time Out Chicago and the Chicago Reader . DAVID RUBIN/NEGEV PHOTOGRAPHY 30 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 1 – JULY 14, 2019