Bob Hurwitz: a tribute

BOB HURWITZ: 25 Years at Nonesuch

(remarks made at the 25th anniversary celebration of the Bob Hurwitz era at Nonesuch Records, November 15, 2009)

The thing that’s always impressed me most about Bob Hurwitz is that he’s a family man, fiercely devoted not only to his family of Carol, Kate and Nick, but also devoted to this big sprawling family of which all of us here at this Nonesuch celebration are a part.

Of course the expression “family values” conjures up some angst-producing images to most of us. But Bob’s values have always been of the first order. Over the past twenty seven years that I’ve known Bob he’s consistently amazed me by the imaginative things he’s done with Kate alone, or with Nick alone, or with Kate and Carol, or Carol alone, often to the point that I’ve muttered to myself “why didn’t I think of that??” It’s always been a measure of the meaning he gives to close, longstanding relationships.

I’ve been a lucky recipient of Bob’s spirit of adventure for a long time—seems almost like my entire adult life. Every place we’ve been together is always associated in my mind with music that Bob brought along to listen to. My first memory of beholding the astonishing beauties of his beloved Arches National Park in Utah is inextricably bound in my mind to the sound of K.D. Lang singing “Constant Craving” coming at top volume over the CD player of our rental car. I can recall vividly, later on the same trip, descending the sheer drop from the top of the high mesa that leads down to the floor of Valley of the Gods. It was sunset and the landscape was bathed in deep reds, oranges and golds. The music was Glenn Gould playing from Book II of the Well Tempered Clavier.

Another time we spent several days together in the California high Sierra, using my cabin as home base and making day hikes over rugged mountain terrain. It was in the days before the iPod, so Bob carried a Sony Walkman with him. That summer he was into Joni Mitchell, and I still have in my mind’s eye the image of him, walking ahead of me as we humped over one high mountain pass after another. For these excursions Bob’s outfit of choice was his customary business shirt with sleeves rolled up, over which he’d slung a backpack with two liters of water and about a dozen CD’s, everything Joni Mitchell had ever recorded plus of course some Bach. He listened as he hiked, and every so often he’d make a comment to me in that strangely loud voice that people use when they are listening through earphones.

I’ve been with him on some of the darkest days of his life, when the implacable ironies of American corporate life have threatened to make a mockery of everything he’d worked so hard to achieve. I’ve seen the look of genuine pain in his face as he yet again had to face one of those impossible Sophie’s Choices that the commercial music industry visits on their executives. At those moments I realized how deep was his love and sense of responsibility to all of those who worked for him at Nonesuch. It seemed like he could barely pull himself out of feeling hopelessly depressed. But then a test pressing of a new Brad Mehldau album or one Schubert song by Dawn Upshaw with Richard Goode at the piano would pull him out of the dumps and fill him with a supreme sense of joy for everything that Nonesuch and his whole life stands for.

And each time that crisis and catastrophe loomed, Bob, like a latter day Houdini, somehow would figure out a way to keep the company intact and do it without sacrificing his artistic integrity or business scruples.

Last August, as part of his extended sixtieth birthday celebrations, he and I took a three-day drive through rural New England. I told friends who asked about it that they should just imagine it as Neal Cassidy and Jack Kerouac in Dockers, thirty years older and this time driving an Audi. Which towns we visited and where we stayed were matters of only small importance. The main issue was which CD’s he would bring. So my memory of the trip was of a lot of maple trees and cute Vermont cottages, but mostly Miles Davis Filles de Kilimanjaro, Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Frank Rich’s latest column, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Mozart Violin Concertos, reading and rereading War and Peace, apologetic embarrassment over the Yankees extravagant payroll, the prosody of Sondheim’s lyrics, Youssou N’Dour as a cultural force in Africa, what’s in David Harrington’s backpack, and Simon Rattle’s Mahler Fifth (which we had a mild tiff over due to the fact I thought it too depressing for driving through the Berkshires).

Please note that not everyone on that list was a Nonesuch artist. But that’s largely because neither Stravinsky nor Miles survived long enough to sign with Bob. But I’m confident that if they had they would have come over and joined his amazing family.