Credit: Thomas J. Krebs
World-renowned jazz pianist and composer Fred Hersch will perform at The Stissing Center on May 6 at 6 p.m. The concert will be a benefit for the Pine Plains Local Journalism Project, which publishes the New Pine Plains Herald.
Hailed as “one of the small handful of brilliant musicians of his generation” by DownBeat magazine and “a living legend” by The New Yorker, Hersch has been a powerful influence on the American jazz scene for over three decades.
Hersch began playing piano at the age of 4, was composing at age 8 and winning national piano competitions from age 10. As a student at Grinnell College, he began to focus on jazz and while on winter break back in his hometown of Cincinnati, he “stumbled into a jazz club and it kind of changed my life,” Hersch told the Herald.
He dropped out of college and embarked on an odyssey as a jazz pianist, “learning on the bandstand.” Moving to New York City in 1977, he apprenticed with jazz legends like trumpeter Art Farmer and saxophonist Joe Henderson. “What got me about jazz,” Hersch mused, “is that it’s music that’s invented with people and in front of people.”
Invention is very much a hallmark of Hersch’s style and his ability to find new levels of meaning in familiar tunes through his expressive and nuanced playing. This skill is on full display in a duo album, Live at the Village Vanguard, with bassist and vocalist esperanza spalding (whose preference is not to use capital letters) released this January, as well as on his 11th solo album, Songs From Home, which came out in 2020.
His stature in the music world has grown year after year, buoyed by 15 Grammy award nominations for both his playing and composing. He was also honored as the 2016 Doris Duke Artist, and was three times named Jazz Pianist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association.
He was rated the second-best Jazz Musician of the Year in the 2021 DownBeat critics poll.
The Guardian wrote, “Fred Hersch is one of the most formidably complete piano improvisors playing today.” Another publication, All About Jazz, wrote that “when it comes to the art of solo piano in jazz, there are two classes of performers: Fred Hersch and everybody else.”
Hersch is also the subject of a feature documentary, The Ballad of Fred Hersch, and the author of an autobiography, Good Things Happen Slowly, which details his creative evolution as well as his journey as an openly gay, HIV-positive artist in the insular world of jazz music. The book was named by the Washington Post and The New York Times as one of the five best memoirs of 2017.
Hersch said his concert in Pine Plains will be unscripted, guided by how the piano sounds and how the room feels. He expects to include his own original compositions, as well as stylings of American popular songs, jazz improvisations and some Brazilian music, for which he has a passion.
The benefit concert has a two-tiered ticket price. The concert alone is $50; for $100, audience members can join a post-performance reception with Hersch and the staff of the New Pine Plains Herald.
Tickets for the benefit concert can be purchased online through Eventbrite.