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Hersch looked cheery in a pale-lemon, open-neck, wide-collar sport shirt from the ’50s. I would write the chords as in example F, knowing the player would add the 9ths. In fact, he came so close to dying that his paranoia seemed practically justified. Giant Steps (alternate take) Recordings December 2, 1959 John Coltrane (tenor sax), Wynton Kelly (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), Jimmy Cobb (drums) Naima (original album) Observe that the March sessions were not used in the album, Giant Steps and the other compositions (except Naima) were re-recorded in May changing pianist and drummer. As he took his seat at the piano, Hersch fluffed the back of the silky mushroom brown shirt he was wearing, so the bottom of the fabric draped over the bench as the tails of a tuxedo would. Giant Steps 7 mins. I didn’t want it to stand in the way of achieving what I wanted to achieve. I wouldn’t be doing what I do if I hadn’t learned from Fred, and I think that’s true of quite a few other people.”, Jazz — a music energized by the tensions between tradition and innovation, between collaborative cooperation and individual expression — has gone through multiple phases over the years since Hersch started playing professionally more than 30 years ago: a craze for jazz-rock fusion; a celebrated rediscovery of the work of iconic masters (chief among them, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, exemplars of swing, orchestral jazz and bop, respectively); a retro lindy-hop fad; an arty “downtown” kick; and a leaning toward world music. Coltrane, who had been practicing these chords for months by this time, sails through his solo as if he were playing the blues. Another (Mostly) Sax Attack; Reassessing. “You could hang out at the bar, and there was Art Blakey, smashed and hitting on the woman next to him. 22 years later, in 1982, Flanagan recorded “Giant Steps” with his own trio, as if to show the world that he could, indeed, play the tune as well as anyone else!!! HERSCH PLAYED a handful of gigs in New York last year as he grew stronger, and one was a run at the Jazz Standard with the Pocket Orchestra, to introduce the group’s first CD. He has made more than 45 albums as a solo performer, composer, bandleader or duo partner since 1991, when he released his first record of original material, a collection of unclassifiable songs composed for jazz rhythm section, tenor saxophone and cello, aptly titled, “Forward Motion.” His body of work is clearly recognizable as a manifesto of contemporary jazz. While advanced or intermediate jazz pianists might be playing 4 note voicings of the chords, since we are just beginning we are goin… I had more to express, and what I had to say didn’t require pyrotechnics. After Pollock, de Kooning and their peers in postwar American art established Abstract Expressionism, the precursory importance of prewar iconoclasts like Kandinsky became clear. In the recording studio, “Fred always knows what he wants,” says his longtime engineer, Michael MacDonald, with whom Hersch has made more than 40 albums. “The compliment I get the most often is, ‘My, you sounded really beautiful.’ I used to think, I want them to say something else, because I felt like that was a kind of, Oh, yeah, you’re gay — so of course you play lyrically and you’re one of the great ballad players. “Fred is unique among pianists his age as a musician who really paid his dues as a jazz player,” Ethan Iverson says. “In fact, he was always a bit of a prima donna.” Also at age 10, Hersch composed a musical play about Peter Pan for his elementary school and rejected the faculty’s demand that he cut or amend the music. You only hear his humanity.”. “I wouldn’t quite say that’s bull, but it’s a very dangerous idea,” Hersch said, slowing his gait. All rights reserved. John Coltrane - "Giant Steps" . His cheeks were hollow, and his skin was gray, though his eyes were bright and his playing was strong. TED.com translations are made possible by volunteer I think music should be beautiful. “I was leading a dual life — being gay and being a jazz musician and not knowing how those were going to meet,” Hersch said. That group was the New York-based John Coltrane Quartet, whose original lineup included Trane on tenor and soprano sax, McCoy Tyner … The piece called for Lawry to precision-scat a wildly complicated melody in unison with the piano, and she flew through it. “He’s got this incredible core of what he wants and who he is that is kind of amazing to me. He has what some people call an artistic temperament.”. “I was in a lot of physical pain and discomfort. You’re trusting other people — there’s an intensity and shared emotion of creating something together, and I felt that if people knew that I was gay, they would mistake my intensity for sexual attraction. Jo Lawry, the Pocket Orchestra vocalist, remembers as the “foundation stone” of her relationship with Hersch his phone call to her the day after he first saw her sing. In fact, in its emotive urgency, expressive range and beauty, Hersch’s music had rarely been so potent. “I never wanted to be a classical pianist, because that takes a lot of discipline, and it takes chops, and I don’t particularly like to practice, and I don’t care very much about chops,” Hersch said. Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan and Jimmy Rowles all used Bradley’s as their base, and each of them was at least 25 years older than Hersch. A piano is an acoustic instrument that has internal strings. He’s perfection.”, Hersch, among the most sensitive of jazz pianists, is acutely sensitive to the proposition that his sensitivity makes his music “gay.” I took up the subject on a walk with him along the gravel path behind his country house. The child can compose their own rhythm by creating fun songs of different musical genres … . His tense "Street Life" begins ominously with softly plucked strings in the distance, while the keyboard suggests being followed on a … For a lot of other pianists, that would be the end point.”, What I recall most vividly about Hersch’s playing from his early years is its striking technical facility; I found him impressive — though not as moving as I would find him years later. I decided I was going to open up about everything and just be myself, and the period of coming out was the beginning of my gaining confidence as a composer. His new record, My Favorite Things, was released in 2015. But now I just don’t care at all what people think. I’ve been trying to come to terms with what I went through, and the best way I know is to try to express it in music.”, What form will that music take? “Alexander's solo piano rendition of “’Round Midnight” was magnificent not only for the virtuosity -- plenty of prodigies have outsized chops -- but for the maturity and perception he brought to the Monk standard.” — Jeff Tamarkin, JazzTime, Life stories. John Coltrane was known for coming into the studio with unrehearsed songs, and "Giant Steps" was no exception. Around the same time, he entered a musical competition and showed up with only a short sketch; he announced that he would play an original composition titled “A Windy Night,” improvised most of it and won first prize. It will encourage your children to explore music in a new and creative way by helping a band of friendly monsters to prepare their concert. Giant Steps: Remastered & Super Deluxe Editions by Chris May Radio. “Some people think I sound like Fred,” says Mehldau, who like Iverson is a former student of Hersch’s. If his music is sometimes mistaken for soft, its composer never is. Kids Piano Melodies is a musical game for children so that they can learn how to play the piano and identify instrument sounds in a fun an easy way. It’s fair to call it “post-Marsalis,” in that it leaves behind the defensive, canon-oriented musical conservatism of ’90s jazz (as both Branford and Wynton Marsalis themselves have done in their best work of the past decade). It became one of those iconic jazz standards that have been covered numerous times by many great artists. In the corner of his parlor, a tiny, half-octagon-shaped room-within-a-room betrays its past as a drum chamber. He has three completed works as yet unrecorded: a song cycle about art and photographic images, which he wrote with the poet Mary Jo Salter (some pieces of which were performed in a tribute to Hersch’s music at Jazz at Lincoln Center a few years ago); a collection of jazz tunes honoring a quirky range of artists (musicians, writers, dancers) whom he admires; and a suite derived from themes by Tchaikovsky. “This is my home. If you were sincere and you had talent and you’re the kind of guy people want to play with, they didn’t care what color you are — you could be purple — but gayness was a different matter.”, Around the time Hersch recorded his first album as a trio leader, “Horizons,” for Concord, in the mid-’80s, he found out he was H.I.V.-positive. “I can’t even imagine what it was like to play night after night with Joe Henderson or Art Farmer and to play at Bradley’s in front of the most horrifyingly heavy judges, juries and executioners. People will tell you what you want to hear, or they’ll be not-quite truthful, because they don’t want to hurt your feelings, but Fred’s allegiance is to the music.”. By contrast, Coltrane never recorded Giant Steps, the title track, again after the album was released. Open Translation Project. Download and print in PDF or MIDI free sheet music for Giant Steps by John Coltrane arranged by apuah for Piano (Solo) Recordings from the end of the decade, such as Giant Steps (1959) and My Favorite Things (1960), offer dramatic evidence of his developing virtuosity. On his Telarc disc, Ray Brown teams up with five different piano players but, rather than this being a tribute to the veteran bassist (who has solo space on every selection), the CD ends up being a celebration of the great Oscar Peterson because Benny Green, Dado Moroni, and Geoff Keezer have, to various degrees, based their styles on Peterson's, but the indivual standout is … “Fred has pushed me to become a better musician, a better singer — in ways, a better person,” she says. Fred’s musical world is a world where a lot of the developments of jazz history and all of music history come together in a very contemporary way. Janis Siegel, with whom Hersch has recorded several albums, has come to rely on Hersch’s scrutiny and candor. I’m attracted to beauty and lyricism, but I don’t play the way I do because I’m gay. He was unable to consume food or liquids of any kind, including water, for eight months. “It’s kind of a miracle that I’m here at all,” he said matter-of-factly. Get access. “That’s because Fred was a major influence on me and on a lot of the players around today. “It was an incredibly bizarre and sometimes terrifying experience,” Hersch said. His determination to do things the Fred Hersch way has intensified considerably since the early ’90s, when he made public his diagnosis of AIDS. The "big deal" is that Tommy Flanagan isn't a decent pianist, he's one of THE cats…..so the fact that he folds on Giant Steps illustrates how far ahead of the game Coltrane is. The piece is an attempt to make art from the only life he knew for months, to give musical form to the dream images and cryptic narratives he still recalls vividly from his days and nights in a coma. If I want some straight-ahead feedback, I go to him. Indeed, Hersch’s range and prolificacy are such that he has needed half a dozen record labels for as many purposes: Nonesuch for Hersch the solo pianist; Sunnyside for his unorthodox quartet, the Pocket Orchestra; Palmetto for his quintet, the Fred Hersch Trio +2; Naxos for his hybrid jazz-classical concert music; various labels for his duet projects with singers as varied as Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer, the veteran Brazilian vocalist Leny Andrade and the classical soprano Renée Fleming; and Concord for his concert at the Maybeck Recital Hall. “That’s when I realized, What the hell am I doing?” he recalled. "Giant Steps" was composed and recorded during Coltrane's 1959 sessions for Atlantic Records, his first for the label. There’s nothing wrong with beauty. When you listen to somebody with a lot of chops, you say, ‘Wow!’ But you don’t really come away feeling very much.”. Hersch’s music — luxurious, free-flowing, unashamedly gorgeous jazz — is idiosyncratically, unmistakably a creation of his own. Fred absorbed the whole jazz tradition in the deepest possible way, and that’s only the foundation of his playing. Last year, he released two albums: a concert performance of his Pocket Orchestra CD, issued in the spring, and a solo piano record, “Fred Hersch Plays Jobim,” released (to immediate acclaim) in the summer. “It impressed me that he was willing to go against the grain from a career perspective,” Morgan went on. John Coltrane eventually asked Flanagan to play on what would become Giant Steps, now hailed as a masterpiece. “It’s interesting — I had to learn to work with a more limited palette, technically, as a pianist. Giant Steps. “He doesn’t have time to goof around. “He looks good,” said Fred’s brother, Hank, who left a busy late night at work to go to the Jazz Standard with their mother, Flo Hoffheimer (who is divorced from her sons’ father and remarried). From the story of two Texans that calls into question what it means to be “American” to a talk from a tech pioneer who founded a software company for women in the 1960s, enjoy our recaps of these […]. Sonny's Crib; Red Garland's Piano; Piano; A Garland of Red; Album Review. After a long stagnation, in my opinion, Green has become an awakened giant at the keyboard, playing stuff that's fiery new. Here are some recommended recordings/videos: “So my whole career as a leader has had this cloud over it,” Hersch said. Influenced by Monk, Coltrane and his mutual fan, Herbie Hancock, Alexander's style is "technically fluent and harmonically astute," says the New York Times, and marked by large-canvas musical ideas -- as seen in a legendary rehearsal-room take on "Giant Steps" in which the shifting chords and dizzy runs fly out from his tiny fingers. They don’t really understand everything that’s going on. Dado Moroni, Lewis Nash & … A 2­5­1 is a short chord progression that happens very often in jazz piano. Now 80, she flew in from Cincinnati that day for the occasion. A native of Bali, Joey Alexander taught himself to play piano by listening to classic jazz albums his father shared with him. Go deeper into fascinating topics with original video series from TED. Hersch paused abruptly, and said, “Hold on — I need to keep hydrated.” He took a long gulp of iced tea and swallowed, with a bit of difficulty. He lost renal function and had to undergo regular dialysis, and he required a tracheotomy. The way that pianists of my generation have learned about the music is through the sort of artificial world of records and scores, and not really natural assimilation. At the same time, I felt stronger than ever, creatively. Flanagan first took up the clarinet, then the piano from the age of 11 - listening to Fats Waller and Art Tatum, and later to his contemporary, Hank Jones, to Bud Powell and the graceful Nat Cole. “If you ask him a question, he’ll never say, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He always has an idea.” Twenty-five years ago, MacDonald says: “Fred was a petulant, stubborn, incredibly talented egomaniac eccentric who would dominate a recording session. After a term in general studies at Grinnell College in Iowa, Hersch dropped out and moved back to Cincinnati for a year and a half. I’m completely comfortable with what I do, and I just don’t care what other people are doing.” He coughed a bit of iced tea into a paper napkin. Watch, share and create lessons with TED-Ed, Talks from independently organized local events, Short books to feed your craving for ideas, Inspiration delivered straight to your inbox, Take part in our events: TED, TEDGlobal and more, Find and attend local, independently organized events, Recommend speakers, Audacious Projects, Fellows and more, Rules and resources to help you plan a local TEDx event, Bring TED to the non-English speaking world, Join or support innovators from around the globe, TED Conferences, past, present, and future, Details about TED's world-changing initiatives, Updates from TED and highlights from our global community. He has a thing for vintage clothes, which provide him with a way to dress with flair, economically but without slavishness to the fashions of the season; as such, they connect loosely to his music, down to his work’s winking humor and element of homage to musicians he admires. But of all the hair-raising originals on Giant Steps, the one that became most important to Coltrane's repertoire was Naima. ... let alone play the piano. The hystogmam below is the result of such an analysis perfoemed on Giant Steps.mid- And one day when he was 3 years old, I was pushing him around in a cart in the grocery store, and a woman — a stranger, I had never met her before — saw Fred, and she stopped in her tracks, and she looked at Fred, and she said, ‘And who do you belong to?’, “And Fred looked at her, and he said: ‘I don’t belong to anybody. I belong to myself.’, “That was Fred,” his mother said, “and it still is.”, Giant Steps: The Survival of a Great Jazz Pianist. His openness as a gay man is no help here and has surely conspired to feed hoary stereotypes of Hersch and his music as light stuff. Hersch has concerned himself with none of them. “Being sick and knowing my time is precious has made me want to be totally myself in my music. On a cool Saturday morning last summer, Morgan relaxed on the deck of the nice vinyl-sided house he and Hersch have built on the side of a hill in the Pennsylvania woods, and he reflected on Hersch’s image as a gay artist. On top of this explosion of Hersch music, a documentary about him — “Let Yourself Go: The Lives of Fred Hersch,” directed by the German filmmaker Katja Duregger — also came out last year. Basically, when you haven't seen changes like that before, no one, not even the best, can fall back on their previous vocabulary/training. He had just finished giving a private lesson to a young pianist named Jeremy Siskind in the SoHo loft that has served as his professional headquarters and his New York residence for 30 years. Clearly, we are gay, but our lives are not defined by the ‘gay community’ or by being gay.”, If anything has inhibited the ability of Hersch’s music to achieve the broader acceptance that, say, the work of the Marsalis brothers has achieved, it may be the subtlety and sheer loveliness of it — its warmth, its quality of melancholy, traits that Americans conditioned to equate “edginess” and “darkness” with gravity can be slow to take as seriously as music that hits the ears more assaultively. "Giant Steps" - Simple Patterns go back to the Guitar main page "Giant Steps" is a jazz tune composed by John Coltrane back in 1959. Benny Green, by the way, is now performing regularly with clarinet/sax-player Anat Cohen. Simple Player Versions Simple Player Versions Draft Pretty Notes - 9th's. This is my life. Recorded in 1959 and released in 1960, “Giant Steps” is iconic in part because it contains the first-issued recording of one of Coltrane’s most important compositions, also titled “Giant Steps.” 1. As Ben Ratliff described him in a New York Times review of a Village Vanguard performance in 1997, Hersch is “a master who plays it his way.”. The Piano Players 11 Songs More by Ray Brown Trio. Over time, the physics of Hersch’s musicianship inverted; he gave up impressing and worked, increasingly, to move. It is the same concept as in four part chorale writing. land. He has brightened the almost lightless space by choosing splashy, Southwestern-ish pastel fabrics for the furnishings, and by placing, here and there, whimsical decorations like the toy piano on the top of the bookcase. And singular among the trailblazers of their art, a largely unsung innovator of this borderless, individualistic jazz — a jazz for the 21st century — is the pianist and composer Fred Hersch. virus migrated to his brain, and Hersch developed AIDS-related dementia. “Giant Steps” is saxophonist/composer John Coltrane’s first LP (long-playing vinyl disc) as bandleader for Atlantic Records. As a result of his prolonged unconsciousness and inactivity, he lost nearly all motor function in his hands and could not hold a pencil, let alone play the piano. Giant Steps. “It’s interesting how many other pianists who come into the club remind me of Fred.” That is to say, jazz has come around to doing it Hersch’s way. I decided that I wasn’t interested in playing hip music for hip cats. He lived for a time in mental and physical seclusion, hallucinating under the delusion that he had the power to control time and space and that everyone around him was plotting his demise. Some jazz standards, such as Giant Steps by John Coltrane, are entirely 2­5­1 chord progressions changing from key to key during the song. Never a grandstander, unconcerned with publicity, Hersch has been a fiercely independent but unassuming presence on the New York jazz scene since he moved to the city at age 21 in 1977. I’m hoping music can.”. So I don’t pander to an audience. 1960 was a major turning point for John Coltrane (born September 23, 1926, died July 17, 1967). The Newport Jazz Festival is under way this weekend in Newport, Rhode Island. While incapacitated, he was bound to his bed in St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His style has a lot to do with thinking as an individual, and it has a lot to do with beauty. Then, with attention to the artists in that school comes recognition of their influences, their antecedents and their mentors. a legendary rehearsal-room take on "Giant Steps", An 11-year-old prodigy performs old-school jazz, Life stories: A recap of the moving talks in Session 5 of TED2015. Facing the sofa is a 1921 Steinway grand piano at which Hersch, a jazz cat who has lived several lives, just gave a lesson to one of his many emulators. “There are no words to describe it. He was always playing brilliantly, but it was a whole lot more egocentric. Among this music’s most celebrated and duly admired practitioners are the pianists Brad Mehldau, Ethan Iverson (of the trio the Bad Plus), Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer. I play the way I do because I’m Fred.”. Maybe if he gyrated and groaned and squinted his eyes and made it look hard when he played, they would get it. The piano — the real one — once belonged to Hersch’s paternal grandmother. ... just a V to modulate to any temporary tonic. 4:20 PREVIEW Love Walked In. Alexander’s father recognized his son’s ear for jazz, and soon he was sitting in on jam sessions with senior musicians. “One of the reasons that I was attracted to his music was not just his music but the fact that he was an out, gay musician early on — I had him on a pedestal as a musician and as a person,” said Morgan, who has studied both piano and voice and can play standards in the manner of a good rehearsal pianist. It was in 1960 that the big-toned saxophone giant left Miles Davis' employ for good, made modal jazz (as opposed to hard bop) his main focus, and formed a highly influential group of his own. Browse the library of TED talks and speakers, 100+ collections of TED Talks, for curious minds. To many jazz fans, Fred Hersch is perhaps best known as a gay jazzman — or the gay jazzman, despite the fact that the jazz world, like every sphere of human endeavor in and out of the arts, has always had a homosexual population. Ahmad Jamal, Lewis Nash & Ray Brown. He shook his shoulders loose and wiggled his bottom into a position he liked. Influential artists sometimes click in the public consciousness only after the rise of the movements they have influenced. Benny Green, by the way, is now performing regularly with clarinet/sax-player Anat Cohen. Hersch, slim all his adult life, was about 15 pounds under his usual weight. Melodic Bass Lines: The Magic of Ray Brown - Part 1 9 mins. At his sickest, late that year, Hersch fell into a coma and remained unconscious for a full two months. Growing up as a child music star in Cincinnati, Hersch was composing little pieces by age 7, and by the time he was 10, he was appearing weekly on a local Sunday-morning kids’ program, “The Skipper Ryle Show.” “The fact that he was on TV and had this prodigious talent gave him a lot of confidence,” recalls his only sibling, Hank, an editor at Sports Illustrated who is about two years younger than his brother. “Now, let’s do it even faster, and I’m not going to play the melody with you anymore,” he said, and Lawry survived being pushed beyond reasonable limits. In the fall, Hersch began work on a major new project, a long-form work that will deal explicitly with his recent traumas in words and music. Just when you think you've had this tune in the bag for years, someone calls it near the end of a session - you know, after you've already had a few drinks - and you realize: A) It may well have been in your bag, but maybe the zipper wasn't done up as tightly as it should have been, and B) Maybe that fourth beer wasn't such a … Building chords off of those scale degrees gives us those chords and chord quality (such a minor 7th, dominant 7th, and major 7th). “Fred,” says his father, Henry Hersch, an attorney, “was and is, um . 1995 Preview SONG TIME Bags' Groove. 7. Giant Steps by John Coltrane - Evan Chow, pianist - YouTube Giant Steps: The Survival of a Great Jazz Pianist. “But when he’s sitting at the piano, you don’t hear the ego. As the pianist Jason Moran points out: “Because Fred’s playing is so beautiful, some people don’t take it as seriously as they should. . Hersch told her that the way she swayed to the beat onstage was a distraction from the music and that she was “jumping all over the place” in her improvisations rather than fully developing her musical ideas. In addition to Hersch’s piano, the instrumentation of this orchestra includes trumpet, percussion and voice. Become a more creative guitar player! After the second number, a lightly bopping composition called “Lee’s Dream,” which Hersch wrote in tribute to the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, Hersch’s mother leaned back in the corner banquette where she was sitting with Hank and a few others, and she said, to no one in particular, “Fred was such a fat little thing.”, At the end of the set, she elaborated: “When Fred was a boy, he was the most beautiful, chubby little thing you ever laid eyes on — he was a blimp with appendages. Few jazz musicians in Hersch’s generation rose as fast as he did. “I thought every album I did was going to be my last album,” he went on. Young piano player Joey Alexander has an old soul's gift for jazz. Whats the difference between a grand and baby grand piano? Fred at the piano is like LeBron James on the basketball court. After Getz rang Hersch’s buzzer, Hersch found himself scooting to his bathroom to hide his boyfriend’s toothbrush. Gumbs displays surprisingly maturity for a composer only in his mid-20s at the time of the recording, performing a series of thought-provoking originals. .” — longer pause — “I don’t want to use too loaded a word, but I’d say ‘high-strung’ or ‘mercurial’ or whatever. Graduating with honors, he moved to New York for the postgraduate education of sideman life. “Now let’s do it at a preposterous speed,” Hersch announced; the group did, and Lawry got through it surprisingly well. “Fred is one of those rare musicians who can do many things well and never tries to sound like anyone else,” says Seth Abramson, who books the Jazz Standard. 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