The Fred Hersch Trio 10 Years / 6 Discs includes five
critically acclaimed Palmetto Records releases featuring Hersch, bassist John
Hébert and drummer Eric McPherson—a band named Best Jazz Group in the 2019
DownBeat Critics Poll
One of the most influential improvising musicians currently
performing—a “living legend,” per the New Yorker—the pianist and composer Fred
Hersch has made groundbreaking contributions in a staggering range of creative
formats. DownBeat called his unprecedented cross-disciplinary theatre piece My
Coma Dreams “a brave work of art that deserves to be seen and heard.” In the
New York Times, the critic Nate Chinen wrote that “solo piano playing is one of
the things that Mr. Hersch does best,” before explaining how he “combines the
rigors of classical training with the disciplined freedom of improvisation and
explores a richly varied repertory.”
Hersch has ranked among jazz’s most renowned accompanists of
singers, offering selfless, intimate support, and he’s a maestro in duo
settings. His artistry also impresses on an orchestral scale: The pianist’s
latest release, 2019’s Begin Again, is an acclaimed collaboration with the WDR
Big Band under conductor-arranger Vince Mendoza. Even Hersch’s 2017
autobiography, Good Things Happen Slowly (Crown Archetype/Random House), has
been uniquely vaunted, garnering rare mainstream praise for a jazz-related book
by being named one of the year’s best memoirs in both the Washington Post and
the New York Times.
But it’s his playing in jazz’s best-loved configuration, the
piano trio, alongside two of his most trusted musical confidants, the bassist John
Hébert and drummer Eric McPherson, that has earned Hersch his most fervent
accolades. As DownBeat once wrote, “The piano/bass/drum combo demands full
awareness of internal and external processes. … Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and
Jack DeJohnette have been commended for bringing this trio setting to an
apotheosis. Fred Hersch, John Hébert and Eric McPherson merit this same level
of praise. Improvisation doesn’t engage the listener any more playfully than
this.”
To say it more directly, as the critic and vocal-jazz
authority Will Friedwald did in the Wall Street Journal, Hersch, Hébert and
McPherson comprise “one of the major ensembles of our time.”
Now, to celebrate this extraordinary group’s 10-year
anniversary, the complete Palmetto label recordings of this enduring edition of
the Fred Hersch Trio will be available in one generous package. Spreading five
lauded releases over six discs, with liner notes by Hersch and the
award-winning music historian Ted Gioia, it’s a stunning testament to a telepathically
interactive group the New Yorker has extolled for its meld of “high lyricism
and high danger.” The set, simply titled "The Fred Hersch Trio 10 Years /
6 Discs," includes three consecutive Hersch Trio
albums—"Floating," "Sunday Night at the Vanguard," and
"Live in Europe"—that were each nominated for Grammy® Awards in the
categories of Best Jazz Instrumental Album and Best Improvised Jazz Solo. In
total, the box features:
"Whirl" (2010): On this, the trio’s first release,
one can already hear the organic rapport that would later inspire the Chicago
Tribune’s Howard Reich to call it “one of the most sensitive and nimble trios
in jazz.” But in 2009, when the band coalesced, triumph wasn’t a certainty.
Hersch had plenty of experience collaborating with stellar musicians in a trio
setting, but he was also still recovering following the life-threatening
AIDS-related illness that would inspire My Coma Dreams. The new band became
crucial to Hersch’s reignition, the commencement of his historic second act.
"Alive at the Vanguard" (2012): Hersch’s third
recording at jazz’s most hallowed venue, the Village Vanguard, Alive features
expectedly delightful trio chemistry and a brilliantly versatile program: from
Ornette, Sonny and Monk to songbook gems and, of course, plenty of Hersch’s
aerodynamic original writing.
"Floating" (2014): This release boasts both the
crystalline audio quality of a studio session—recorded and mixed by the great
James Farber—and the engaging pacing and programming of one of the trio’s live
sets. Along with two choice standards and an homage to Hersch’s hero Monk, it
features a set of gripping Hersch originals with special dedications—to his
mother and grandmother, the late pianist Shimrit Shoshan, Esperanza Spalding,
Kevin Hays and other special people and places.
"Sunday Night at the Vanguard" (2016): Hersch’s
fourth recording at the most important jazz venue in the world, Sunday Night is
in many ways a tribute to Hersch’s history with that acoustically magical
wedge-shaped basement club on 7th Ave S. The album, wrote Nate Chinen in the New
York Times, “confirms that he’s still one of the most insightfully lyrical
searchers in his field. It also underscores how his bond with the bassist John
Hébert and the drummer Eric McPherson, while never less than strong, reaches a
rarefied plane in this particular room.”
"Live in Europe" (2018): The pianist considers
this concert document one of his “found object” releases—meaning that he and
the trio didn’t know they were being recorded until after the fact. But the
circumstances made for a gorgeous performance: As Hersch recalls in his liners,
“It was the second-to-last concert of the trio’s three-week European tour in
November of 2017. The band was in terrific playing form, the acoustics were
perfect, the piano was outstanding and the recording was first-class.”
Since emerging on the cutthroat New York scene of the late
’70s, when he made auspicious appearances on sessions led by the likes of Art
Farmer and Billy Harper, Fred Hersch has developed into an outright master of
the jazz language with a boundless creative vision. Called “the most
arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade” by Vanity Fair and
“an elegant force of musical invention” by the Los Angeles Times, he’s also
been profoundly influential, with acolytes including Brad Mehldau, Ethan
Iverson and other generation-defining musicians.
He has been nominated for Grammy® Awards 14 times, and is
the recipient of a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, Jazz Journalists Association
Awards for Jazz Pianist of the Year in 2016 and ’18, and the 2017 Prix Honorem
de Jazz from L’Acádemie Charles Cros, a lifetime-achievement honor.
Born and raised in New Orleans, the powerfully lyrical,
sonorously toned bassist and composer John Hébert has been an invaluable
presence on the improvised-music scene of New York since the mid-1990s. In
addition to his collaborations with Hersch, Hébert has anchored ensembles led
by giants like Andrew Hill, Lee Konitz, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, John
Abercrombie, Kenny Wheeler, Tomasz Stanko, Joe Maneri, Toots Thielemans and
Maria Schneider, among others. The recipient of many DownBeat poll honors, he’s
also recorded fruitfully as a bandleader for labels including Sunnyside, Clean
Feed and Firehouse 12. Reviewing Hébert’s 2015 Sunnyside release, Rambling
Confessions, JazzTimes wrote, “the group’s powerful moments of interaction
reward close listening.”
The drummer Eric McPherson was quite literally born into the
jazz life. His godfather, the bass great Richard Davis, was there at his birth
and encouraged his mother, a dancer-choreographer with many famous jazz
friends, to name him after the avant-jazz icon Eric Dolphy. After training with
the master drummer-educator Michael Carvin, he studied with saxophonist Jackie
McLean at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School on a full scholarship. He
has since become one of the most respected drummers in jazz today, and an
invaluable element of groups led by McLean, with whom he worked extensively,
Andrew Hill, Pharoah Sanders, Avishai Cohen, Greg Osby, Jason Moran and, of
course, Fred Hersch.
