Free Streaming of Fred Hersch Documentary

Poster design for the documentary film being discussed (courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz)

My recent efforts to keep working while dealing with the impact of COVID-19 has led me to return to performances streamed through cyberspace. Yesterday’s effort involved my second visit to the Digital Concert Hall of the Berlin Philharmonic since the restrictions of social distancing had been imposed. Today I had the opportunity to balance sources from the concert hall with those in the domain of jazz.

This morning I learned that The Ballad of Fred Hersch, a documentary made by Charlotte Lagarde and Carrie Lozano in 2016, had been made available for free streaming courtesy of the directors. Regular readers probably know that Hersch’s recordings have received considerable attention on this site. However, in the overall context of Hersch’s biography, my listening experiences have come relatively late in his extraordinarily prodigious career. The scope of the film goes all the way back to his earliest engagements with Art Farmer in 1978 and goes all the way up to his now regular appearances at the Village Vanguard.

In spite of this breadth, the film also homes in on what was probably his most ambitious effort, My Coma Dreams. The title refers to a medically induced coma that Hersch sustained in 2008 and his retrospective impressions after regaining consciousness. The music he composed for this project was organized around a script written by Herschel Garfein, who directed what amounted to an amalgam of a monodrama for a narrator embedded in an instrumental ensemble augmenting a jazz combo with a string section. Some readers may recall that when this show was “taken on the road,” the tour included a performance in Herbst Theatre presented by San Francisco Performances.

In spite of this focus, Lagarde and Lozano are more than generous in providing opportunities to listen to Hersch making music, primarily as a soloist but also in combo settings. I have to say that the film had strong personal impact when attention was turned to the Village Vanguard. The Vanguard had provided me with my first opportunity to listen to Thelonious Monk play, back when I was a graduate student. I could barely get my head around what he was doing, and his very presence scared the daylights out of me. Nevertheless, I accepted the fact that the only way in which I could learn to listen to Monk’s music was to listen to Monk playing it.

There was thus a certain irony in that the account given of My Coma Dreams in this documentary included an extended section devoted to Hersch’s own take on Monk’s music. The title of that particular movement is “Dream of Monk;” and it involved a poignantly elegant deconstruction of “Crepuscule with Nellie.” I suspect that one of the reasons that Lagarde and Lozano allowed so much attention to this excerpt was because it amounted to an almost clinical account of efforts to recover memories in the wake of the coma experience.

My other major takeaway involved Hersch’s composition entitled “Whirl.” This shows up on several of his recordings and was also the title of the 2010 album that marked the first recorded appearance of his trio with John Hébert on bass and Eric McPherson on drums, a trio that has now been playing at the Vanguard for over a decade. I had always thought that the title referred to an underlying sense of dynamic energy; but, thanks to this cinematic biography, I now know that the music was inspired by the ballerina Suzanne Farrell!