Fred Hersch Trio at Smoke

Fred Hersch Trio
Smoke Jazz Club
New York, NY
March 13, 2026

Pianist Fred Hersch is making a welcome return to trio work after years in which he all but put aside one of his most favored formats. After recording a half-dozen trio albums in the 2010s, Hersch took a break until The Surrounding Green (ECM Records, 2025), his first new trio recording in seven years, which featured Drew Gress and Joey Baron—both long-time partners of the pianist.

Hersch's upcoming calendar features a host of trio appearances, including last week's run at Smoke Jazz Club, his first time at the club with a piano, bass and drums format. And he is working with a new rhythm section. At Smoke—and for other trio dates soon—his band comprises bassist Felix Moseholm and drummer Kush Abadey.

These new collaborators are around half of Hersch's age and looked it, not least in their garb—wearing baseball and trucker's hats, respectively, in the plush supper-club setting of Smoke. Their musical alignment with Hersch was seamless, though, in their ability to listen closely to their leader and play in sync with his sensitivity and deep musicality. If you do not know Moseholm and Abedey already from their work with the likes of Brad Mehldau and Joel Ross, both musicians are players to watch in 2026 and beyond.

The program began assertively, with spritely runs through pieces by now-departed figures Hersch long admired: the lyrical Canadian/British trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and a former employer, tenorist Joe Henderson. Then came the standard, "Embraceable You." Using the same arrangement as Hersch employed on "The Surrounding Green," if paced a little slower, the piece was inventively inverted, with burbling solos from Hersch preceding the familiar melody, which emerged only in the closing minute or so.

Typically for Hersch, at the heart of the program were his own pieces. "Serpentine," early in the set, began with an extended swirl of cymbals and tom tom accents from Abadey before Hersch joined with a low rumble, Mosehelm soloed, and the trio eventually settled into a rolling, near-pulseless excursion. "Callagram," too, was among the set's more "outside" numbers, yet Moseholm and Abadey floated confidently through the music, neither losing their way nor taking the piece's rhythmic ambiguity as an excuse to overplay. The composition then segued into the propulsive "Forward Motion," with the trio effortlessly navigating its twists and turns, including the rhythmic hiccup in the piece's theme.

Overall, the set was surprisingly up-tempo, especially for the last of the night. It was nearly an hour in before Hersch played a complete ballad, "Some Other Time." The Sammy Cahn-Jule Styne standard exemplified Hersch's use of economy to create emotion. His soloing was quiet, spacious and beautifully unhurried. The encore, an especially tender take on Stephen Sondheim's "Somewhere"—which Hersch introduced as "one of the most hopeful songs I know"—was more economic still, and heart-tugging. Less than three minutes long, it included no improvisation from Hersch, with Moseholm playing little more than the roots of the chords and Abadey stirring his brushes on the snare.

In a chat with this reviewer after the set, Hersch praised his new partners but insisted this was not necessarily his new long-term trio, but merely the one he is working with now. (His 2026 calendar includes dates with bassist Gress, a long-time partner, and drummer Peter Erskine).

Indeed, It hardly seems to matter who Hersch chooses to accompany him, so careful are his choices and how strong his stamp on the music. Among the pianist's many gifts is a generous ability to allow his musical partners ample opportunity for personal expression while never losing the thoughtful and elegant aesthetic that marks his art.