Jazz is too often portrayed as an art form defined by
blazing young artists. It's true that many jazz masters reach a mid-career
plateau marked by small variations on a mature style. But there's also a
vanguard of players and composers who continue to refine and expand the art
form in middle age and beyond, like Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Henry
Threadgill, and piano maestro Fred Hersch, who is marking his 60th year with an
astonishing creative surge. Slated for release by his longtime label Palmetto
on August 12, 2016, Hersch's new recording Sunday Night at the Vanguard stands
as the most profound and enthralling trio statement yet by an improviser whose
bands have embodied the enduring relevance of the piano-bass-and-drums format
for three decades.
With Sunday, Hersch's trio gracefully leapfrogs past its
already daunting accomplishments. Featuring the exquisitely interactive bassist
John Hébert and extraordinarily sensitive drummer Eric McPherson, the ensemble
has recorded a series of critically hailed albums over the past seven years,
including 2012's Fred Hersch Trio - Alive at the Vanguard, a double album that
earned France's top jazz award, the Grand Prix du Disque, and 2014's lavishly
praised Floating, a double Grammy®-nominee (both on Palmetto).
Recorded at the storied venue that's become Hersch's second
home, Sunday Night at the Vanguard unfolds with all the dramatic intensity and
narrative drive that make his performances a revelatory experience. Ebulliently
playful and ravishingly lyrical, rhythmically elastic and harmonically
exploratory, the trio plays with an extraordinary level of trust, assurance,
high-wire poise and musicality throughout the set. "The thing that's
beautiful about Eric is his touch," Hersch says. "He's the straight
man and John is the loose guy, though sometimes they reverse it."
Hersch had only played "A Cockeyed Optimist" with
the trio a few times when he called the rarely heard Rodgers and Hammerstein
gem as the evening's opening tune. From the first notes of the gentle intro he
sensed the group was in a special zone, and aside from two pieces drawn from
the night's second set the album unfolds exactly as the trio delivered it.
"I'm always looking for tunes on the obscure side," Hersch says.
"The trio had played it a couple of times, but never to open a set, and as
soon as we started I knew it was going to be a good night. This is by far my
best trio album and it represents about as well as we can play."
There are familiar Hersch touchstones along the way, with
several memorable new pieces. The latest in his long line of character studies,
"Serpentine" was inspired by a close associate of Ornette Coleman's,
and the tune captures her mysterious and alluring air. "The Optimum
Thing" is his clever contrafact based on the chord changes to Irving
Berlin's "The Best Thing for You," and it exemplifies the trio's
elastic sense of time, as the song opens at a brisk, tumbling tempo and
accelerates into a sweat-inducing gallop (other nights it's a study in
deceleration).
Of the album's numerous startlingly beautiful passages, the
trio's aching rendition of Lennon and McCartney "For No One," stands
out. He recorded the song with Janis Siegel on the 1994 duo project Slow Hot
Wind and uses essentially the same arrangement here. But now it's Hersch's
piano delivering the melody at a dolorous tempo, drawing out the tune's quiet
desperation. While the Beatles recording is more snappy than despondent,
"it's really a song about a break up, and maybe the saddest lyric they
ever wrote," Hersch says. "I slowed it down with Janis and added some
beats on 'linger on.' When we play it people really react to it."
Hersch recorded Kenny Wheeler's jubilant "Everybody's
Song But My Own" as the title track of a 2013 Japanese trio album focused
on standards. He played the terpsichorean tune with Wheeler many times, and now
it serves as a gripping tribute to the brilliant trumpeter/composer, who died
last year. He follows with a recent original, "Blackwing Palomino,"
which not coincidentally is the name of the storied writing implement with
which Hersch notated the bluesy piece. A self-confessed pencil geek, he notes
that the brand "was the favorite of Tennessee Williams. The company just
started making them again, and I buy them by the dozens. I was rehearsing with
Ravi Coltrane recently and we started talking pencils and he said I should
write a tune with Blackwing in the title. The slogan on the pencil is 'Half the
pressure. Twice the result.'"
Cryptic, open-hearted and filigreed, Hersch's
"Calligram (for Benoit Delbecq)" is dedicated to the brilliant French
pianist who often renders compositions with graphic scores that he calls
calligrams. They did a double-trio project with electronics several years ago
("I think he's a genius," Hersch says), and he wrote this pleasingly
unresolved tune with Delbecq in mind. If "Calligram" evokes a Rube
Goldberg playground, Jimmy Rowles' sylvan ballad "The Peacocks," is a
shimmering pastel landscape. Recorded several times previously by Hersch (who
got the original sheet music from Rowles himself), this extended version is
transcendent.
He closes the set with a rollicking rendition of "We
See," a Monk tune he's never recorded before. And then returns for a solo
encore, "Valentine," a tune that earned a Grammy nomination for best
instrumental composition when it was released on 2002's Live at Bimhaus.
"I always end with Monk," Hersch says, "and always play
'Valentine' as an encore, which leaves the audience feeling groovy and
happy."
No artist in the past three decades has used the Vanguard
more effectively than Hersch. He made his debut at the jazz Mecca in the late
1970s with a 12-piece band co-led by bass legend Sam Jones and rising trumpeter
Tom Harrell, the first of dozens of sideman stints at the club. He performed
there regularly with Joe Henderson throughout the 1980s, often with Ron Carter
and Al Foster ("That was graduate school," Hersch says). He made his
Vanguard debut as a leader in 1996 with his celebrated trio featuring Drew
Gress and Tom Rainey. "I think I could have played there before 1996 had I
been willing to hire an all-star rhythm section, but I wanted to wait until I
could do it on my own terms," Hersch says. "Now they say do what you
want to do, and it doesn't have to be a concept or tribute. I'm so honored and
humbled that my photo is on the wall, next to Coltrane, Bill Evans, and
Mingus."
And the Vanguard is hardly Hersch's only showcase. He
returns to the Jazz Standard in May for his 10th annual Duo Invitation Series
with trumpeter Avishai Cohen, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Julian Lage, Kate
McGarry, Yosvany Terry, and Anat Cohen (with whom he's touring the West Coast
in June).
Born and raised in Cincinnati, Hersch studied music theory
and composition in elementary school and sang in high school theater productions.
It wasn't until he started attending Iowa's Grinnell College that he turned on
to jazz. (Grinnell is awarding him an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters this
year). But the bug really bit him when he went home for the holidays and
happened into a Cincinnati jazz club. He ended up dropping out of school and
earned his stripes with veteran musicians on local bandstands. After honing his
chops for 18 months he enrolled at New England Conservatory to work with jazz
piano legend Jaki Byard, and made the move to New York City in 1977 after
earning a BM with Honors (he started teaching at NEC in 1980 and retired last
year after 35 years on faculty).
Hersch quickly gained recognition as a superlative
band-mate, performing and recording with masters such as Stan Getz, Joe
Henderson, Billy Harper, Lee Konitz, Art Farmer, Gary Burton, Toots Thielemans,
and many others. Since releasing his first album under his own name he's
recorded in an array of settings, including a series of captivating solo
recitals, duos with vocalists Janis Siegel and Norma Winstone, and ambitious
extended compositional projects including a widely-praised setting of Walt
Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." As an educator, he has shepherded some
of the finest young pianists in jazz through his teaching at NEC, Juilliard,
Rutgers and the New School. A leading force in galvanizing the jazz community
in the fights against HIV/AIDS, he produced 1994's all-star benefit project
Last Night When We Were Young: The Ballad Album.
He's gained the most widespread visibility as the leader of
a series of remarkable trios. From his first session with Marc Johnson and Joey
Baron, he's pushed at the limits of lyricism and temporal fluidity with
similarly searching improvisers. He has consistently drawn deeply from the
music's most refined players while forging his own approach. He considers his
current trio, with John Hébert and Eric McPherson, as his best to date. "I
always say that as a player there are three main threads that come to
prominence at different times," Hersch says. "There's the trio, which
is a constant. I've been doing duo encounters steadily going way back to Jane
Ira Bloom in the early 1980s. But I think solo feels equal to the trio in terms
of being the hub of my musical wheel. My solo playing feeds my trio and vice
versa."
A feature length film, The Ballad of Fred Hersch, recently
premiered to rapturous reviews at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and
Hersch is busy at work on a memoir (working title: Good Things Happen Slowly)
for Crown/Random House due in stores Spring 2017.
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