Fred Hersch’s Solos in Quarantine

It recently occurred to me that there is an aspect of this site that amounts to a reflection on how Samuel Pepys used his diary to provide an account of the progress of the Great Plague of London. This was clearly a very personal account, telling us more about how Pepys conducted himself under lockdown conditions rather than a systematic analysis of plague conditions. To a great extent, many of my accounts of both audio and video recordings entail similar reflections on how performing musicians are dealing with the impact of COVID-19.

courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz Communications

I spent this morning listening to the latest solo album from jazz pianist Fred Hersch entitled Songs from Home. When lockdown was first imposed, Hersch responded with his “Tune of the Day” project, uploading a single track to Facebook day-by-day for almost two months. In many respects this paralleled classical pianist Anyssa Neumann’s project to make a video performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 988 set of “Goldberg” variations by uploading videos of the individual variations on a similar day-by-day schedule. Like Bach’s variations, there is considerable diversity in both Hersch’s selections and his styles of interpretation. However, Songs from Home sounds more like a free-association project in contrast to many of the architectural foundations found in BWV 988.

My guess is that Hersch could have called his album My Favorite Things had that phrase not already been indelibly associated with Oscar Hammerstein II and The Sound of Music (not to mention the radical rethinking of Richard Rogers that became a calling card for John Coltrane). What is likely to strike the attentive listener is just how much diversity there is in Hersch’s “favorite things.” At one end we have “After You’ve Gone,” which dates all the way back to 1918 and was sung by the likes of both Sophie Tucker and Bessie Smith. At the other end Hersch serves up his own compositions, “West Virginia Rose” and “Sarabande.” (There is also the Scottish folk song “The Water is Wide,” whose lyrics date back to the seventeenth century and whose tune may well be even older.)

The only track that gives me pause is Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman.” In 1968 one could appreciate the poignancy of a telephone worker up at the top of one of those poles eavesdropping on the voice of a woman “on the line,” imagining her to be the solution to his ongoing problem of loneliness. These days such eavesdropping would be viewed as a dangerous obsession, if not a psychopathic one. In the world the Internet has made, it is not that difficult for anyone to eavesdrop on anyone else, making the risk of sociopathic consequences much greater than they were almost half a century ago.