In Walt Whitman, he’s found poetry

Jazz, like the music business in general, is passing through a strange and curious time. With no iconic figures dominating the scene, with sales barely holding steady, it would be easy to see the new century as a period of decline.

Viewed from a broader perspective, it’s also possible to see it as a period of opportunity -- a time for musicians here and around the world to explore new creative pathways, unhindered by the need to follow in the footsteps of a Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis.

And that is precisely what many artists are doing -- not always with high-profile record companies, rarely with sufficient promotion to provide broad visibility. But their music is well worth seeking out as the energetic precursors to a jazz expansion into all sorts of new and fascinating directions.

Fred Hersch’s “Leaves of Grass” (Palmetto Records) is a good example. Always drawn to the Walt Whitman work, the pianist-composer grappled for years with the question of whether it could be approached from a jazz point of view. The concept, he says, finally came together when he began to see Whitman’s “idiosyncratic and improvisatory language, his freewheeling verse, his subject matter and irreverence” as a direct link to the Beat poets of the ‘50s and, through them, to jazz.

“Leaves of Grass” is more than 600 pages long, so Hersch obviously had to pick and choose which parts to use, in the process creating a version of “Leaves of Grass” that -- with the music, the song versions of poems and the spoken poems with accompaniment -- stands on its own. Although he omitted the Civil War poems, the New York poems, the Calamus poems, as well as familiar items such as “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain, My Captain,” there was plenty left to set for his 10-piece ensemble, plus singers Kate McGarry and Kurt Elling.

McGarry sings a lovely version of “Song of the Universal,” and Elling is particularly vital to the project. It is his vocals and his spoken voice that carry the 11 poems of the “Songs of Myself” section, and he handles the job with exquisite sensitivity to the lyricism of Whitman’s words and the arching melodies of Hersch’s music.

Among the instrumental high points: Bruce Williamson’s alto saxophone, interjected into “I Exist As I Am”; Erik Friedlander’s cello in the lovely orchestration on “I Am He That Walks”; Mike Christianson’s Bubba Miley-like plunger-muted trombone on “My Lovers Suffocate Me.”

Where’s the jazz in all this? Everywhere. Despite the shifting tempos, the pauses for arias and spoken passages, despite the moving, textural underscore of cello, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, etc., it is music that has an implicit jazz feeling in its phrasing and coloration, performed with the individuality of sound and emphasis that is second nature to jazz artists. One suspects that Walt Whitman, always a lover of new ideas, would be delighted by what Hersch has done with his poetry.