Fred Norman is Gone
Its 2:30 in the morning. I woke up around 12:30 and haven’t been able to fall asleep again. I can’t stop thinking about Fred.
I was sitting at work around six last night when I got a call from my wife, Kris. “Terry Jones called here for you.” she said. “He heard that Fred Norman passed away. He said that you kept up on what was going on with him so he wanted to find out what you knew.” I had known a few weeks ago that he had been having some serious health issues (he has been going to dialysis for about a year) and that he had been in the hospital but that was all that I knew. I instinctively called a the sax player, Sandon, to find out what he knew. I just got his answering service and left a message for him. I went online to the Idaho Statesman’s website to see if there was any record. I couldn’t remember his real last name, but searched anyway.
In the death notices I saw “Fred Ghertler (Fred Norman).” He had passed away at the hospital on Sunday. Ah, man, that wasn’t what I had expected. There wasn’t an obituary, so I didn’t know any details about a funeral. I remembered playing with Jeannie Hochstrasser and Fred was always the pianist of choice for her when I played with her. I called her to see what she knew. She was in the same position I was in, as was everyone else. She said that they (I’m assuming every other musician that loved Fred that she had talked to) had tried to get in contact with Fred’s daughter who lives here in town but hadn’t had any luck. That’s right where the nerve was hit for me.
A little over a year ago I was doing a gig down at the lounge in the Owyhee Plaza with Sandon Mayhew (sax) and Terry Jones (piano). Who should appear at one of the front tables but Fred Norman and his daughter (I can’t remember her name right now). I had played with Fred on a number of occassions before that. There was something compelling about his playing that I hadn’t ever heard in anyone else I had played with before. He had this sense of joy that pervaded every song he played. There was this sort of unsinkable hope that always came through and just made it wonderful to play with him. The thing that added interest to me about his playing is his life history.
I mentioned to him multiple times before that I wanted to sit down with him and just turn on a recorder and talk with him about his various experiences in his life. When I first met him a couple of years ago he had just kicked cancer. He fought in WWII and was captured by the Germans. By some blind luck, even though he was Jewish, he remained in the POW camp. He said at one point before he had been transferred to the POW camp he was actually in a concentration camp. So here he was Jewish, but not stuck in the concentration camp to be terminated because the Germans who had processed him after capturing didn’t register that by his last name (Ghertner) that he was Jewish, and they didn’t ask either. After WWII he played piano around in NYC. He then got a gig touring around the US and ended up through that in Boise.
At the aforementioned gig that Fred and his daughter showed up at I got to talking with his daughter. She mentioned how lonely Fred was at the time and when I mentioned my interest in recording Fred’s life history she lit up. “Oh, please do that. You both would be so good for each other.” I agreed that I would do it.
Time passed. I got involved in other things and every so often would feel the prick of the commitment I had made with Fred’s daughter. So now here I am with the promise unfulfilled and an amazing person gone from the world. Why didn’t I stop by the hospital even at least once when I found out that he was there? Why didn’t I even just call him to say hello? I guess I can take consolation in the fact that I didn’t know when his time was going to be up, and I wasn’t intentionally ignoring him, but still…
Fred was a light in the world that will be dearly missed.