Fred Hersch – Out Some Place
…from the liner notes of “4 in Perspective,” from Fred Hersch:
Out Someplace (Blues for Matthew Shepard) is an arrangement of one movement of a dance score that I composed for the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1999. The eight movements of the score loosely illustrate different meanings of the phrase “out someplace”; social, geographic, gay identity, zaniness, etc. But around the time that Bill and I were conceptualizing this piece in the Spring of 1998, a young man named Matthew Shepard was lured from a bar in Laramie, Wyoming, by two men who brutally beat him and tied him to a fence on the prairie where he was left to die in the freezing cold. When the body was discovered the next day, the only way that the police knew initially that it was a human being was that they could see the pink of his cheeks where his tears had exposed the skin. That somewhat programmatic piece was my musical reaction to the tragedy of this innocent victim of incomprehensible hate being left alone and “out someplace” – a place where, in a kinder world, no one would ever be.
– Fred Hersch
Musicians: Fred Hersch – pianist & composer, Norma Winstone – voice, Paul Clarvis – percussion, Kenny Wheeler – trumpet.
Recorded live, Oct. 1999
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hersch
Fred Hersch speaks in the Music Department’s weekly convocation on Friday, Oct. 5. at 1:25 p.m.
