Green piece

The City of Broad Shoulders has not been too supportive of Fred Hersch. The well-respected New York–based pianist and composer puts it generously: "I have an odd history with Chicago."

Hersch's last show here, in 2003, was confined to a small room with "a pretty bad piano" at University of Chicago. Several years prior, he played HotHouse's former Wicker Park locale with his trio—again with a bad piano—and consequently received a critical beatdown from a Chicago Tribune writer. That the show garnered "one of the only bad reviews I've ever had" not only says something about Hersch's undeniable résumé, but also leaves him relishing the opportunity to finally prove himself to Chicagoans.

As part of the opening weekend of Traffic Jam, Steppenwolf's tenth annual multidisciplinary arts festival, Hersch will make his Chicago premiere of his adaptation of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. With Hersch's choice of Chicago's own Kurt Elling on vocals, Traffic is coming full circle: Tim Evans, now the producer of the series, caught Elling at the Green Mill ten years ago and was starstruck enough to create a space at Steppenwolf where artists like the poetry-spouting Elling would be celebrated.

Hersch's idea with Leaves (for which he set poetry to music) is a centuries-old practice, whether it's Handel's Messiah or Kerouac improvising over a jazz trio. The problem with Leaves is that it's an overwhelming 600 pages. "Putting the libretto together took a lot more time than composing the music," Hersch admits from his vacation home in Northeastern Pennsylvania. "You have to pick and choose. I basically went through and marked poems or parts of poems that hit me. I typed them into the computer, cut them up, and put them on the floor and played with them." Although the project took a total of seven months, the music came in a last-minute burst of only three and a half weeks.

Leaves, released on Palmetto Records this year, is Hersch's most ambitious work to date: It's a sumptuous and mesmerizing oratorio with grand, Aaron Copland–esque horn statements couching complex, post-bop harmonies. But most important, it all buttresses the words. There is little improvisation—eminently odd for a disc with jazz musicians—and featured guests, such as jazz vocalist Kate McGarry (who also performs alongside Elling and Hersch this weekend), who show considerable skill in their inflections rather than their solos.

But why pick Whitman—a dated icon, to be sure—as a muse? "Whitman represents what's really positive about [the concept of] America," Hersch says. "He had the guts to say what he thought, write it down, and though he wanted people to hear his message, he didn't give a shit what people thought." For Hersch, that iconoclasm has a personal resonance, too: "As a gay musician in the jazz world, and as an HIV-positive artist, I've always admired [that aspect]." Although openly gay musicians in jazz are almost unheard of, Hersch answers those uncomfortable with his sexual orientation the same way he answers those who lazily tagged him in the past as a Bill Evans acolyte. "I play the way I play and I am the way I am, and if you can't deal with it, well, there are other people who can."

As much as Hersch loves Leaves, though, he acknowledges the flaws of it and its author. His selections reflect what he calls the "Buddhist Whitman" of "I Exist As I Am," but there is also Whitman the notorious self-promoter, writing glowing reviews of his own work and then submitting them under various pseudonyms. And Hersch defends the stream-of-conscious wordplay, which has been criticized as tedious, by comparing it to jazz. "Sometimes you have to go through a patch in a solo or maybe a performance to get something that's really beautiful," he says. "I mean, look at a typical Keith Jarrett concert. You have 45 minutes of G major and a lot of moaning, but then you get to ten minutes of something that's transcendently amazing. [The same with] Beethoven. There's a lot of self-indulgence, but when you get to the great stuff, it's kind of all worth it."

Hersch performs with Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry as part of Steppenwolf Theatre's Traffic Jam Series on Friday 2 and Saturday 3.