Jazz Articles about Fred Hersch

Let Yourself Go: The Lives of Jazz Pianist Fred Hersch

by Chris Kompanek
January 17, 2010

Fred Hersch Let Yourself Go: The Lives of Fred Hersch AHA! DVD 2008Katja Duregger's intimate documentary about virtuoso pianist Fred Hersch has the personal touch of a home movie. Broken down into four sections that are viewed individually on the DVD, the film covers all aspects of his life from his work as a musician and composer to his teaching and his longtime struggle with AIDS. There are essentially ...

Fred Hersch: No Limits

by Maxwell Chandler
September 28, 2009

From the start of his career as a sideman in the 1970s for such jazz luminaries as Joe Henderson, Art Farmer and Stan Getz to his own ensembles and solo projects, there has always been a great diversity and intensity to Fred Hersch's art. Having won a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for composition (2003) and having been the first pianist in The Village Vanguard's 70 year history to do a week's solo residency, Hersch has managed to be both a musician's ...

Fred Hersch: Plays Jobim

by Victor L. Schermer
August 12, 2009

It is a pleasure to follow pianist Fred Hersch's recorded output as he delivers creative and deeply felt solo and small group jazz, seeking to express ideas that sometimes approach the mysterious and ineffable, yet remain rooted in the best of musical expression. In this excellent release, Hersch offers nine solo piano versions of the work of the late great and beloved co-inventor and master of Brazilian bossa nova, Antonio Carlos “Tom" Jobim, many of whose songs, initially brought to ...

Fred Hersch: Plays Jobim

by Raul d'Gama Rose
August 5, 2009

Since his passing in 1994, there have been countless tributes to Antonio Carlos Jobim. Many of these have been come from musicians who played with Tom, as he was called by those who knew him, including Mario and Maucha Adnet, Jacques Morelenbaum, Oscar Castro Neves, Ana Caram and Eliane Elias. Interestingly, these productions have almost all featured small and large ensembles and a multiplicity of instruments--strings (bowed and plucked), voices, pianos and an array of percussion, or at least a ...

Fred Hersch: Plays Jobim

by Glenn Astarita
July 12, 2009

Pianist Fred Hersch's influence and prominence in modern jazz speaks proverbial volumes, whether performing as an ensemble leader or as a solo performer, evidenced here on his renditions of Antonio Carlos Jobim's songbook. As might be anticipated, Hersch approaches the material from a deeply personalized perspective. He refrains from dishing out note-for-note readings by morphing variable rhythmic patterns and gobs of depth amid stately classical structures and other factors.

The pianist's imaginative interpretations yield bountiful fruit throughout these ...

Fred Hersch Pocket Orchestra: Live at the Jazz Standard

by Raul d'Gama Rose
May 25, 2009

Fred Hersch has been known to push the envelope on many occasions--writing and performing music that has, time and again, crossed a myriad of boundaries of categories. And the pianist has done it again with Live at the Jazz Standard a record that happened thanks to the fact that the music of this concert was being archived. This album sweeps across a soundscape and works on the premise of a kind of 360-degree piano. Hersch utilizes the instrument as a ...

Fred Hersch Pocket Orchestra: Live at the Jazz Standard

by Victor L. Schermer
May 24, 2009

This unique album stands in a class all by itself: an artful and artsy set of original compositions by pianist Fred Hersch evoking musical images of an America gone by, perhaps from the early 1900s to the 1950s, when life was more innocent than it is today. Distinctly jazz, it incorporates classical and other musical structures and allusions. Recorded live at the Jazz Standard, all the pieces are Hersch originals, manifesting his ongoing references to the full spectrum of American ...