artist info

This year Fred Hersch celebrated his 6th Grammy Award nomination, this time for Best Instrumental Improvised Jazz Solo for his solo on “Song Without Words #4,” a duet from his CD Free Flying (2013) with guitarist Julian Lage. The CD is a live duo collaboration with the brilliant young guitarist featuring seven Hersch compositions and music by Rivers and Monk. Proclaimed by Vanity Fair magazine, “the most arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade or so,” Hersch balances his internationally recognized instrumental skills with significant achievements as a composer, bandleader, and theatrical conceptualist, as well as remaining an in-demand collaborator with other noted bandleaders and vocalists. Hersch has fully lived up to the approbation of the New York Times who, in a featured Sunday Magazine article, praised him as “singular among the trailblazers of their art, a largely unsung innovator of this borderless, individualistic jazz – a jazz for the 21st century.” He was nominated for two 2011 Grammy Awards for Alone at the Vanguard (2011), for Best Jazz Album and Best Improvised Jazz Solo. It also has been awarded the 2012 Grand Prix du Disque by the Académie Charles Cros in France and it was named one of the Best CDs of 2012 by Downbeat Magazine.

Hersch’s career as a performer has been greatly enhanced by his composing activities, a vital part of nearly all of his live concerts and recordings. In 2003, Hersch created Leaves of Grass (Palmetto Records), a large-scale setting of Walt Whitman's poetry for two voices (Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry) and an instrumental octet; the work was presented in March 2005 in a sold-out performance at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall as part of a six-city US tour. More than 70 of his jazz compositions have been recorded by Hersch and by numerous other artists. His 2010 multi-media theatrical project My Coma Dreams is a full-evening work for actor/singer, 11 instrumentalists and animation/computer-generated imagery; it was based on dreams he retained after emerging from a 2-month coma in the summer of 2008. It has been performed in New York (Columbia University), New Jersey, San Francisco and Berlin. Hersch has collaborated with an astonishing range of instrumentalists and vocalists throughout worlds of jazz (Joe Henderson, Charlie Haden, Art Farmer, Stan Getz and Bill Frisell); classical (Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Christopher O'Riley); and Broadway (Audra McDonald). Long admired for his sympathetic work with singers, Hersch has joined with such notable jazz vocalists as Nancy King, Norma Winstone and Kurt Elling.