The newly launched box set, The Fred Hersch Trio: 10 Years/6 Discs, on Palmetto Records, captures this landmark ensemble in the studio, on the road, and at its spiritual home, the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. Two of the albums’ six discs were session gigs and the remaining four recorded live. Curiously, Hersch assigned impressionistic titles to the studio dates—Whirl (PM 2143) and Floating (PM 2171)—while the live dates received more pragmatic treatment: Alive at the Village Vanguard, Discs 1 and 2 (PM 2159); Sunday Night at the Vanguard (PM 2183); and Live in Europe (PM 2192).
Ordering info: www.palmetto-records.com
There might be something behind this. During his live performances, when he’s creating music instinctively, Hersch commands the room—quietly, but assuredly. He’s so sure of himself and his trio—with bassist John Hébert and drummer Eric McPherson (the top-ranked jazz group in Downbeat’s Jazz Critics poll this year)—that they hardly ever need to rehearse. But despite Hersch’s onstage composure, when he plays, there’s always something intensely personal stirring just below the surface.
Hersch released Whirl, the trio’s debut album, in 2010, just a year after forming the group and two years after surviving a near-fatal health crisis. The title cut, a Hersch original, spins dynamically around an ominous melodic riff, providing contrast with his other compositions on the album, like the lilting waltz of “Snow Is Falling” or the jaunty mixed-meter badinage of “Skipping.” For his originals, Hersch finds source material in those he admires: he dedicated this cut to prima ballerina Suzanne Farrell, whose pirouettes inspired its motion.
Two years into their musical relationship, in 2012, the Fred Hersch Trio recorded Alive at the Vanguard, a twin-disc set and the second and third installments in the collection. They approached the tunes on this record—an even mix of standards and originals--with familiarity and ease; each note seems to spring wholly new from the trio’s fingers. On this recording Hersch acknowledges the trio’s growing penchant for Monk tunes, one of which usually closes their sets. Here, it’s a slow, shimmering “Played Twice” in medley with “The Song Is You.” Gorgeous.
Hersch was nominated for a Grammy for best improvised solo on “You and the Night and the Music,” from the trio’s 2014 release Floating, the fourth disc. The solo—the first track—starts without preamble and gambols in a syncopated fever toward a smooth outro. It’s the ideal set-up for the second tune, the title track, a dreamy, open exchange among the three players. “ ‘Floating’ is the magic sound-place where the trio spends a lot of time, trusting each other so much that we can leave space,” Hersch wrote in the liner notes.
By the time the trio released Sunday Night at the Vanguard in 2016, the fifth disc, they’d been playing together steadily for seven years and had attained an unusual synergism. They’d found a preferred curation for their sets: the retrofitted Broadway standard (“A Cockeyed Optimist”) first, followed by a handful of originals (like Hersch’s eerie “Serpentine”), and the requisite Monk tune (the powerful “We See”). Hersch’s solo on the latter would earn him another Grammy nomination for Best Improvised Jazz Solo; the trio received its first, for Best Jazz Instrumental Album.
The trio’s 2018 Live in Europe came as a surprise. They discovered that tape had been rolling during the penultimate concert of a 2017 European tour—it was too good to waste. On this disc, the sixth, they reprised “Skipping” and “We See”—and again snagged Grammy nominations, in the same catagories as in 2016. But on this record Hébert and McPherson figure more prominently than on others, sending up impeccable improvisations on tunes like “Snape Maltings” and “Scuttlers” while Hersch lays out a bit. In these moments especially, the group bond, unspoken and personal, is palpable.
(Reprinted from the January 2020 issue of Downbeat magazine.)