Fred Hersch

Fred Hersch (born October 21, 1955 in Cincinnati, Ohio)^[1] is a American jazz pianist and composer. Proclaimed by Vanity Fair magazine, “the most arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade or so,"^[2] five-time Grammy nominee Hersch balances his internationally recognized instrumental skills with significant achievements as a composer, bandleader, and theatrical conceptualist, as well as remaining an in-demand collaborator with other noted bandleaders and vocalists. As a solo pianist (he was the first artist in the 75-year history of New York's legendary Village Vanguard to play week-long engagements as a solo pianist; his second featured run is documented on the 2011 release, Alone at the Vanguard); as leader of a widely praised trio whose album Whirl found its way onto numerous 2010 best-recordings-of-the-year lists; and as the impetus behind the ambitious 2011 production, My Coma Dreams, a full-evening work for 11 instruments, actor/singer and animation/multimedia—Hersch has fully lived up to the approbation of the New York Times who, in a featured Sunday Magazine article, praised him as “singular among the trailblazers of their art, a largely unsung innovator of this borderless, individualistic jazz – a jazz for the 21st century.”^[3] He was nominated for two 2011 Grammy Awards for Alone at the Vanguard - for Best Jazz Album and Best Improvised Jazz Solo; these are his fourth and fifth nominations. His newest trio album, the two-CD Alive at the Vanguard, has been garnering wide critical acclaim as one of his best releases in his 30-year recording career. It has been awarded the 2012 Grand Prix du Disque by the Académie Charles Cros in France and it was named one of the Best CDs of 2012 by Downbeat Magazine.

In addition to his more than three-dozen recordings as a leader/co-leader, his numerous awards include a 2003 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for composition, and a Grammy® nomination for Best Instrumental Composition, as well as two Grammy® nominations for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance. Hersch has featured himself as either a solo performer or at the helm of varied small ensembles, which in addition to his trio, include a quintet, as well as his "Pocket Orchestra" featuring an unconventional line-up of piano, trumpet, voice and percussion. Hersch is considered to be the most prolific and celebrated solo jazz pianist of his generation. In 2006, Palmetto Records released the solo CD Fred Hersch in Amsterdam: Live at the Bimhuis and 2009 welcomed his eighth solo disc, Fred Hersch Plays Jobim, cited as one of the year's Top Ten jazz releases by NPR and the Wall Street Journal. Alone won the "Coup de Coeur" de l'Académie Charles Cros in France and 2011 also saw Hersch place fourth in the Downbeat Critic's Poll and win as Jazz Pianist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association. He is nominated again in 2013 for Jazz Pianist of the Year.

Hersch’s career as a performer has been greatly enhanced by his composing activities, a vital part of nearly all of his live concerts and recordings. In 2003, he created Leaves of Grass (Palmetto Records), a large-scale setting of Walt Whitman's poetry for two voices (Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry) and an instrumental octet; the work was presented in March 2005 in a sold-out performance at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall as part of a six-city US tour. More than 70 of his jazz compositions have been recorded by Hersch and by numerous other artists. His 2010 multi-media theatrical project My Coma Dreams is a full-evening work for actor/singer, 11 instrumentalists and animation/computer-generated imagery; it was based on dreams he retained after emerging from a two-month coma in the summer of 2008.

Hersch has collaborated with an astonishing range of instrumentalists and vocalists throughout worlds of jazz (Joe Henderson, Charlie Haden, Art Farmer, Stan Getz and Bill Frisell); classical (Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Christopher O'Riley); and Broadway (Audra McDonald). Long admired for his sympathetic work with singers, Hersch has joined with such notable jazz vocalists as Nancy King, Norma Winstone and Kurt Elling. Hersch has received commissions from the Gilmore Keyboard Festival, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, the Gramercy Trio and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. A disc of his through-composed works, Fred Hersch: Concert Music 2001-2006, has been released by Naxos Records; these works are published by the prestigious firm Edition Peters.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1955, Hersch began playing the piano at age four and was composing music by age eight and winning national piano competitions starting at the age of ten. He has been awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, grants from Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer, and seven composition residencies at the MacDowell Colony. In addition to a wide variety of National Public Radio programs including Fresh Air, Jazz Set, Studio 360 and Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, Hersch has also appeared on CBS Sunday Morning with Dr. Billy Taylor. A committed educator, Hersch has taught at The New School and Manhattan School of Music, and conducted a Professional Training Workshop for Young Musicians at The Weill Institute at Carnegie Hall in 2008. He is currently on the Jazz Studies faculty of the New England Conservatory.

A passionate spokesman and fund-raiser for AIDS services and education agencies since 1993, Hersch has produced and performed on four benefit recordings and in numerous concerts for charities including Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS that have raised over $250,000 to date. He has also been the keynote speaker and performer at international medical conferences in the U.S. and Europe.

Hersch's influence has been widely felt on a new generation of jazz pianists, from former Hersch students including Brad Mehldau and Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus, to his contemporary Jason Moran, who has said: "Fred at the piano is like LeBron James on the basketball court. He’s perfection.”

An artist of unbounded imagination, ambition and skill, Hersch is, as Downbeat magazine aptly declared, "one of the small handful of brilliant musicians of his generation."^[4]

Discography

As leader

As sideman

With Jane Ira Bloom

• Mighty Lights (Enja, 1982)

With Art Farmer

• Mirage (Soul Note, 1982)
• You Make Me Smile (Soul Note, 1984)

With Billy Harper

• Billy Harper Quintet in Europe (Soul Note, 1979)

"With Matt Kendrick"

• "Other Aspects"

See also

• List of jazz pianists

References

External links

• Official Website
• "Let Yourself Go - The Lives of Fred Hersch", documentary about Fred Hersch on DVD
• "In Conversation with Fred Hersch" (Jazz.com)
• "'Live' With The Fred Hersch Pocket Orchestra By Kevin Whitehead - NPR Fresh Air"