The uniquely personal, reflective
album is a companion piece to Hersch's long-awaited memoir, Good Things Happen
Slowly
Release also coincides with
September 15 & 16 performances of Hersch's Leaves of Grass at Jazz at
Lincoln Center, celebrating the poetry of Walt Whitman with acclaimed vocalists
Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry and an octet
Fred Hersch has long been acclaimed
as an exploratory artist, an outspoken activist, an influential educator and a
uniquely revelatory and lyrical pianist. As one of the most expressive voices
in modern jazz, Hersch has never been shy about letting listeners glimpse his
most intimate thoughts and emotions. In September, however, Hersch's fans will
be treated to even deeper, more revealing insights into the story of the renowned
pianist when he publishes his much-anticipated memoir, Good Things Happen
Slowly: A Life In and Out of Jazz. As a companion piece, Hersch decided to
present an equally direct and vulnerable glimpse into his private musical
thoughts with his 11th solo release, Open Book.
The seven pieces on Open Book (out
September 8 on Palmetto Records) offer some of the finest, most unguardedly
emotional solo music that Hersch has created in a career unique for its
profound poignancy and passion. Recorded in a South Korean concert hall on a
superb Hamburg Steinway concert grand piano, the album captures the vital
essence of the revelatory adventurousness and intense beauty that have made
Hersch one of the most important solo artists in jazz. With more than 40 albums
to his credit as a leader or co-leader, Hersch remarkably continues to discover
new areas of inspiration and depths of feeling.
"For the last two and a half
decades I've been pretty open about who I am, what I like and what I'm dealing
with at times," Hersch says. "But I've always got to dig deeper, and
I thought this might be a chance to make an album that's a window into the
kinds of things that I play at home or don't play in public all that
much."
The album arrives during a momentous
month for Hersch. On September 12, the esteemed publishers Crown Archetype
(Penguin Random House) will release Good Things Happen Slowly, Hersch's bravely
confessional memoir. The book covers the pianist's meteoric rise in jazz from
his sideman days alongside masters like Art Farmer and Joe Henderson to his
gradual recognition as one of the most individualistic and innovative artists
of his generation, a ten-time Grammy Award nominee and winner of countless
accolades including being named a 2016 Doris Duke Artist as well as the same
year's Jazz Journalists Association Pianist of the Year. But it also frankly
reveals his story as the first openly gay, HIV-positive jazz musician, tracing
his path through hedonistic post-Stonewall New York City to the dramatic
two-month medically induced coma in 2008 from which he emerged to make some of
the most stunning and captivating music of his career.
Later that month Hersch will reprise
his ambitious Leaves of Grass full-evening piece at Jazz at Lincoln Center's
Appel Room, the first time the song cycle has been performed in New York City
since 2005.
Vocalists Kurt Elling and Kate
McGarry will reprise their roles from the original project, which sets the
verse of American bard Walt Whitman. The legendary poet's timeless ode to the
miracle of nature and openhearted love of all beings seems especially vital in
our present socio-political moment.
The centerpiece of Open Book, and
the spark that ignited the album, is the nearly 20-minute improvisation
"Through the Forest." Unique in Hersch's extensive discography, the
stream-of-consciousness gem is a miniature masterpiece of narrative
development, a compelling journey through an abstract, glimmering landscape,
revealing that in his early 60s Hersch continues to take creative risks and
daunting inventive leaps.
The creation of "Through the
Forest" was as unplanned and spontaneous as the music itself. In Seoul for
a pair of solo concerts during a break in a tour of Asia with his esteemed
trio, Hersch overslept during an after-breakfast nap and rushed to take the
stage at JCC Art Center Concert Hall for his afternoon performance. The titular
forest is, in part, a jetlag and coffee-fueled dreamscape through which Hersch
wanders, applying his vivid powers of observation to unusual terrain. "I
was a little groggy, my defenses were down, and rather than fight it I just
gave in to it," Hersch recalls. "I'd never really done anything of
that length in public where I had no agenda and was able to stay in that zone
for such an extended period of time. I realized it was something special,
something different that might be the core of an album."
"Through the Forest"
became the leaping-off point for an album intended to be singularly divulgent
and reflective. A few months later, Hersch returned to the same hall and
recorded the remainder of Open Book alone in the empty venue (with the
exception of Benny Golson's classic "Whisper Not," taken from a
concert during that return engagement).
The album opens with the stark
musings of "The Orb," taken from Hersch's autobiographical
music-theater piece My Coma Dreams. A love letter to Hersch's longtime partner,
AIDS activist Scott Morgan, "The Orb" is the final dream depicted in
the show, and in this solo rendition becomes a nakedly heartfelt outpouring of
raw but tender emotion. The mood then takes a turn for the playful and swinging
on "Whisper Not," a longtime staple of Hersch's repertoire that here
becomes a vibrant, virtuoso marathon of thematic exploration.
The piece also serves as an ideal
mirror to the album's other composition from the pen of a jazz icon, Thelonious
Monk's "Eronel." Hersch has long been recognized as one of the
premier interpreters of the Monk songbook, but despite including one of the
iconic composer's pieces in every one of his sets for most of his career,
Hersch had never tackled this particular tune, co-written by pianist Sadik
Hakim. Monk's original stride-inflected lines come in for a dizzying array of
variations in Hersch's endlessly imaginative take.
The music of Brazil has also been a
constant in Hersch's career, in particular the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim,
the subject of one of the pianist's earlier solo efforts, 2009's Fred Hersch
Plays Jobim. "Picture in Black and White" is a new addition to that
repertoire, majestically transformed from a bossa nova feel to a crystalline
hybrid with Chopin's last nocturne. On the other side of "Through the
Forest" in the album's symmetrical structure comes Hersch's own
classical-flavored "Plainsong," a spare, lyrical piece composed in
the bucolic setting of the MacDowell Colony, the inspirational artists' retreat
in rural New Hampshire.
Open Book ends on a meaningful
ellipsis, Billy Joel's moving "And So It Goes." In title alone it's
an apt conclusion, suggesting an embrace of life as lived and hinting at its
open-ended continuation. The full lyrics, which Hersch has performed in duo
settings with singers including frequent collaborator Kate McGarry, remain
unspoken here but obviously deeply felt in every note. "I connect with the
sentiment of the words," Hersch says, "and it felt like a good
benediction to the whole album."
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