Songs of Whitman: jazz pianist Fred Hersch crowns a lifetime of achievement with Leaves of Grass, an evening-long composition based on the poetry of protoqueer poet Walt Whitman. (music).

"I've been dogged by my musical choices," says jazz pianist and composer Fred Hersch. "Yes, I chose to play Billy Strayhorn and Cole Porter, who were gay. But flit wasn't great work, I wouldn't have been great in playing their stuff. Their being gay was incidental. In 2003 it's not fundamentally interesting that somebody is gay."

Now, Hersch--perhaps the most prominent gay jazz--turns to Walt Whitman, arguably the father of all gay icons, for his new full-evening piece, Leaves of Grass, debuting in Michigan in late March, then traveling to New Jersey and Washington, D.C., in early April. But it's not because Whitman was gay.

"It's about love, it's about nature, about family," Hersch says of his new work which uses familiar and unfamiliar Whitman poems as vocal text and instrumental inspiration. Scored for two vocalists, piano, trumpet, trombone, alto and tenor say, cello, bass, and drums, Leaves of Grass will feature a top-notch international ensemble, including Grammy-nominated vocalist Kurt Elling, 2001 BBC Jazz Vocalist of the Year Norma Winstone, and award-winning Amsterdam-based multi-reed player Michael Moore as well as six of New York's most versatile and distinctive musicians.

Hersch's career as a jazz musician that led him to Leaves of Grass began some 30 years ago with a different song about leaves. During the winter of 1973-1974, an energy crisis closed down Iowa's Grinnell College, where Hersch was a freshman, and he found himself back in Cincinnati, his hometown. "I went to a little jazz club on a freezing Tuesday or Wednesday night; there were only a handful of people in the audience. I asked to sit in," Hersch recalls. "I was 17, maybe 18, and looked younger. The tenor sax player asked if there were tunes I could play, and I told him I could play `Autumn Leaves.' After the session, he took me in the back and got me pretty stoned and played me Ellington's Live at Newport '57 with Paul Gonsalves playing 26 choruses [of `Autumn Leaves'], the crowd just going bananas. He made me sit and listen and told me I needed to get records and listen to them over and over again."

Hersch immediately went to a local record store and bought every record with "Autumn Leaves" on it. "Ahmad Jamal, Miles [Davis], Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan, I think Oscar Peterson," Hersch remembers. "It was an epiphany. You couldn't pick out which was the best one. They were all different." The young pianist realized that "you could be personal, playing this stuff."

Hersch kept hanging out in the Cincinnati jazz clubs. "What attracted me to the music was the people, not only the musicians but the audiences in these places. Danger, a little romance," he says. "Them was no commercial reason for anyone to be playing jazz in Cincinnati. They didn't care what part of town I came from, who my father was. I could be accepted."

Being known as an openly gay artist took longer. "I knew I was gay when I came to New York in the early '80s," says Hersch. "I wondered what people would think. I didn't talk about it." But by 1993-1994, 20 years after he walked into the Cincinnati jazz scene, he was working with Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS, an organization--now merged with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS--that supports performers with HIV/AIDS. Hersch also found himself in Newsweek and on CNN in the winter of 1994--not only because of his music, not only because he was gay, but also because he was out as being HIV-positive.

"It didn't seem to matter," he says. "Two years later I was signed by [major jazz and classical label] Nonesuch. What I do is important. I am a musical artist, a composer, a pianist, a jazz musician. Being gay is a side dish, not an entree."

"And what I assume you shall assume /For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you," Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass. As Hersch gears up to premiere his own Whitman work, the poet's words resonate not only with his music but also with the trajectory of his life and career.

Fries's memoir Body, Remember will be reissued by the University of Wisconsin Press in the fall.

Find details about performances of Leaves of Grass and Previous Hersch interviews at www.advocate.com