Fred Hersch

Jazz pianist Fred Hersch will grace the festival with a one-off solo concert, and we have every reason to get excited. Hersch, a member of the jazz piano pantheon, is considered a follower of Bill Evans. He belongs to a small group of musicians who have left their mark and transformed the jazz scene and the next generation of great pianists, such as Brad Mehldau, Ethan Iverson and Dan Tepfer, who see him as a guide and whose influence is evident in their music. He has been captivating audiences for four decades as a brilliant pianist with the soul of a poet, a gifted and versatile composer, an original interpreter, a sensitive and attentive partner and the leader of a jazz ensemble that has defined an era. With 15 Grammy nominations, Hersch is in a category of his own in the world of jazz. “When it comes to solo piano in jazz, there are two categories of performers: Fred Hersch and everyone else,” All About Jazz magazine decreed. The New York Times contented itself with the title: “Living Legend.”

He started his career alongside Art Farmer. In the 1980s he joined the New York jazz scene and played with giants like Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, Toots Thielemans, Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell and Enrico Rava. Hersch has recorded dozens of albums as an accompanist, band leader and lead pianist and has collaborated with a glorious list of various musicians from Julian Lage, Miguel Zenón, Avishai Cohen and Anat Cohen to Joshua Bell, Christopher O’Riley, Renée Fleming, Kurt Elling and Janis Siegel.

With Alone at the Vanguard, a Grammy-winning solo album from a performance at the world’s oldest jazz club, Hersch made history as the first musician to play a piano recital at the famous venue for a week straight.

Hersch, the first jazz musician to come out publicly and to also reveal his battle with AIDS, is active and committed to the issue. Hersh has produced and performed many recordings and fundraisers the proceeds from which were dedicated to AIDS research and awareness raising. In 2008, following complications related to his illness, he was in a coma for two months. After an ongoing rehabilitation process, he returned to performing. Coming out of the closet, coping with the condition and the coma, were a creative engine that led to a multimedia show – My Coma Dreams (2011) a visionary stage show written and directed by Herschel Garfein; an intimate and revealing solo album – Open Book (2018), which garnered him two Grammy nominations; and the memoir Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life in and out of Jazz, which entered the New York Times and Washington Post’s list of the five best autobiographies for 2018 and was crowned Jazz Book of the Year.

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