Open Book (Palmetto Records)
Fred Hersch
Released September 8, 2017
Grammy Nominee for Best Jazz Instrumental Album 2018
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kQb4l4mWSLmw8AumzxUDNdMqdQaD5KblI
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/3oUTSZR19WHXHPdxwyFkXk?si=NbklhNP2QWicwDHiJzxvVQ&dl_branch=1
About:
I have been playing jazz for more than forty years. Today, I find that the best state of mind to be in when I sit down at the piano is “let’s see what happens”. I have discovered that jazz is not nearly as much about playing what you know, but musically going to those places you have never been before. When I first started out, it was scary to think this way – but with experience, I have become very comfortable with the freedom that comes from simply playing from phrase to phrase.
Through The Forest is an example of improvising with no safety net or preconceived ideas – I just went wherever it took me until it felt right to arrive at a musical and emotional destination. The other selections on this album have structures: melody, harmonic progression and forms. But I delight in obscuring those structures so that each performance becomes a continuous musical expression from variation to variation – musical freedom within limits, with a song that I love as my subject. Thank you for listening with open ears.
Fred Hersch
Track Listing:
1. The Orb (Fred Hersch) 6:25
2. Whisper Not (Benny Golson) 6:27
(Fred Hersch, Grammy Nominee for Best Improvised Jazz Solo 2018)
3. Zingaro (Antônio Carlos Jobim) 7:58
4. Through the Forest (Fred Hersch) 19:35
5. Plainsong (Fred Hersch) 4:41
6. Eronel (Sadik Hakim / Thelonious Monk) 5:39
7. And So It Goes (Billy Joel) 5:57
Personnel:
Fred Hersch: piano
Recorded April 1 – 3, 2017 and live November 1, 2016 (track 4), at JCC Art Center Concert Hall, Seoul, South Korea, by Yonkseok Choi
Piano Technician: Won Chui Hwang
Mixed by Rick Kwan
Mastered by Mark Wilder
Producer: Fred Hersch
Associate Producer: Matt Pierson
Executive-Producers: Missi Callazzo and Robert John
Art Direction and Design: Douglas Heusser
Review:
In the aftermath of his coma and very possible
demise back in 2008, pianist Fred Hersch blossomed from a status as a first rate jazz
pianist into the rarified air of one of the handful of top practitioners of
that art form. A series of post-illness albums, from Whirl (2010),
to Alone At The Vanguard (2011) to Floating (2014), Solo (2015)
and Sunday Night At the Vanguard (2016), all on Palmetto
Records, are all solo and trio outings that reveal a heightened artistic
clarity and unabashed vulnerability, alongside a deeper emotive approach, this
in comparison to his uniformly excellent, but perhaps more cerebral output
before his struggle with serious health problems.
Now we have Open Book, Hersch’s
eleventh solo piano outing.
Intimacy is a hallmark of Hersch’s music, and
“The Orb,” the set’s opener, taken from Hersch’s autobiographical
music/theater piece, My Coma Dreams, is the tenderest, loveliest of
love songs, a look at a paramour through, with justification it seems,
rose-colored glasses. “Whisper Not,” Benny Golson’s classic tune,
takes things into a turn of the playful, via crisp, prancing piano notes
singing over a serious and assertive left hand. Hersch visits an old friend,
Antonio Carlo Jobim, with “Zingaro,” a sublime reverie.
The centerpiece, “Through The Forest,”
is something unheard of on record by Hersch. It’s a nineteen minutes-plus,
stream-of-consciousness, improvised in-the-moment masterpiece. An ebb and flow
dreamscape of sorts—the most fragile of delicacies and the most sacred and
quiet moments slipped in beside emphatic percussive energy—music as enchanting
as anything the pianist has ever created.
Then in walks Monk. Hersch includes a Thelonious
Monk tune in most every set, most every recording. “Eronel” is a
spritely interpretation by Hersch, who immerses himself the challenging music
deeper than most anybody, peppering the stride-side with sparkling,
water-splashing-off-the-rocks sounds, rolling into jagged eddies, leading into
the closer, Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes,” solemn, simple, honest,
beautiful.
Honesty—another hallmark of Hersch’s art.
This is a recording that makes it seem as though
Fred Hersch is the finest jazz pianist in the world. That’s an impossible
assertion, of course. There are a dozen, maybe more pianists who have achieved
this level artistry. But for now, with Open Book, he can wear
that title.
Dan McClenaghan (All About Jazz)
