Alive at the Village Vanguard (Palmetto Records)
Fred Hersch & Esperanza Spalding
Released January 6, 2023
DownBeat Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2023
JAZZ.FM91 Best Jazz Albums of 2023
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kzjiNbDpkBVMaKCszPZVkfggpAzCb3Wdk
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/intl-pt/album/0ZtyPgjVZsMzwxeDYYgllf?si=-fgoWEZFQcaxWJYTVebvmw
About:
Pianist/composer Fred Hersch and vocalist/bassist/songwriter esperanza spalding can both be counted among the most acclaimed and inventive artists in modern jazz. The Village Vanguard is the music’s most revered venue, having played host to countless legendary musicians and beloved live recordings. The duo and the club converge for a magical performance on Alive at the Village Vanguard, a rare opportunity for listeners to enjoy the singular and thrilling collaboration between two marquee jazz artists at the top of their game.
Alive at the Village Vanguard showcases the astonishing chemistry shared by these two master musicians, who bring out distinctive aspects in each other’s playing. Hersch and spalding have convened for only a handful of New York City performances since their first meeting in 2013 during the pianist’s annual duo series at the Jazz Standard. In that limited time the pair has developed a wholly personal approach, not only in the annals of piano-voice duets but in their own already highly individual practices. Taking the stage with no set arrangements and only a vague sense of the repertoire they’ll explore, the dauntless pair delights in playing without a safety net.
“This recording sounds like you’re in the best seat in the Vanguard for a very live experience,” says Hersch. “You can really feel the vitality of the room, of the audience, and of our interplay. We decided on the word Alive for the album title as you can really feel the intimacy and energy of the performances.”
Alive at the Village Vanguard marks Hersch’s sixth recording from the storied club, where he’s been invited to headline three weeks annually for many years. The album also vividly spotlights Hersch’s stunning sensitivity and engagement as a duo partner; in recent years he’s worked in a similar setting with such incredible musicians as guitarists Julian Lage and Bill Frisell, clarinetist/saxophonist Anat Cohen, saxophonist Miguel Zenón, and trumpet maestro Enrico Rava.
Track Listing:
1. But Not For Me (George Gershwin / Ira Gershwin) 9:32
Grammy Nominee for Best Jazz Performance 2024
2. Dream of Monk (Fred Hersch) 7:36
3. Little Suede Shoes (Charlie Parker) 9:03
4. Girl Talk (Bobby Troup / Neal Hefti) 12:03
5. Evidence (Thelonious Monk) 6:35
6. Some Other Time (Jule Styne / Sammy Cahn) 8:29
7. Loro (Egberto Gismonti) 9:37
8. A Wish (Fred Hersch, Norma Winstone) 4:35
Personnel:
Fred Hersch: piano
esperanza spalding: voices
Recorded live October 19-21, 2018, at Village Vanguard, NYC
Produced by Fred Hersch and esperanza spalding
Executive Producer: Missi Callazzo
Recorded by James Farber
Assisted by Tyler McDairmid and Geoff Countryman
Mixed by Tyler McDairmid
Mastered by Nate Wood
Photography by Erika Kapin
Design by Douglas Heusser
Review:
Is it
possible that we underestimate Esperanza Spalding? That would be quite a
trick for an artist who has hardly been out of the spotlight since leapfrogging
a couple of nobodies named Drake and Justin Bieber to take the Grammy
award for Best New Artist in 2011. With a recent resume that includes a
high-profile teaching position at Harvard (now ended), a collaboration with
preeminent jazz composer Wayne Shorter on the opera
“Iphigenia” and a fifth Grammy for 2022’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab
(Concord), spalding, who renders her name in lowercase letters, is an artist
whom the spotlight invariably finds.
Yet even a musician as curious, comprehensive and supremely competent as
spalding can find new ways to leave us in wonder, asking, How did she do that?
Welcome to Alive at the Village Vanguard, a collaboration with pianist
Fred Hersch that makes an exalted level of mastery seem like child’s play.
And while we’re at it, isn’t it time we gave Fred Hersch his flowers? Like
spalding, Hersch is a composer, author and teacher of singular gifts. As a
player, he is solidly in the jazz tradition but has extended at its frontiers
with such visionary recorded projects as Leaves of Grass (Palmetto
Records, 2005), a setting of Walt Whitman poems for vocalists and ensemble,
and Breath By Breath (Palmetto Records, 2022), a meditation on the
Buddhist concept of refuge for jazz trio and string quartet. Hersch’s
innovation at the piano and the composer’s table is settled law, but his
greatest talent—and spalding’s too—might be as a collaborator.
Alive at the Village Vanguard offers proof from the first notes of
“But Not For Me,” a song so thoroughly dissected by jazz singers and
instrumentalists that it should have little left to reveal. By choosing this
chestnut, and by animating it with their soaring, dancing musical conversation,
Hersch and Spalding set a challenge for themselves and vault over it. With imaginative
accompaniment from Hersch, spalding delivers it without sentimentality. But how
to put across Ira Gershwin’s now-doubly archaic lyrical archaisms
(“Heigh-ho, alas and also lack-a-day”) with a straight face? Her
answer: by not keeping a straight face. Rather, spalding pokes gentle,
self-deprecating fun at them in the first of many humorous anecdotes, riffs and
asides. Having dispensed with that, she goes on to deliver a dazzling
improvisation on the well-worn material before passing the baton to Hersch.
That’s the way it goes for eight cuts and 68 minutes: stunning vocals followed
by a mesmerizing piano solo with the two coming together to take it out. It’s a
familiar formula, but Hersch and spalding fill it with a jewel box of
revelations.
Take the simple little clavé that Hersch taps out on a choked B-flat to begin
“Little Suede Shoes” or spalding’s racing Brazilian scat
on Egberto Gi
smonti’s
“Loro,” tossed off with dazzling speed and accuracy. Catching her
breath between phrases, she tells the audience, “That’s how birds
talk,” and then she becomes a bird, leaping, pirouetting and diving in an
airborne chase with Hersch that the two sustain for nine-and-a-half minutes.
These virtuoso turns are neck-snapping, but Hersch is a poet at heart and he finds
the album’s center of gravity in two ballads.
“Some Other Time,” is not the familiar Bernstein composition, but
a Frank Sinatra vehicle by Cahn and Styne from a forgotten 1944
movie. Hersch loves the tune (he recorded it on his 2003 Palmetto debut Live at
the Village Vanguard) and he lays out a velvet drape of rhapsodic poetry for
spalding to wrap herself in. She swells the Tin Pan Alley lyrics with
lovestruck tenderness, nailing the intervallic leaps in the bridge and somehow
ends Sinatra’s moony reverie with a gentle but firm assertion of female sexual
agency: “Not some other time, but right. Now.”
And then there’s Hersch’s poignant torch song “A Wish” with lyrics
by Norma Winstone sung with heartbreaking restraint and dignity. It’s
the kind of benediction that more artists are choosing to close their
recordings, and it’s pure magic.
That kind of magic is all over Alive at the Village Vanguard, which was
recorded by James Farber with a presence and atmosphere, both intimate and
electrifying that is a summary description of the album itself.
Every year, Fred Hersch releases an understatedly beautiful record in January
that somehow gets lost when the year end polls are tallied. That’s not likely
to happen with Alive at the Village Vanguard. This is a recording that
puts a marker down for jazz at the summit, and there’s no underestimating it.
John Chacona (All About Jazz)
