Interview: Fred Hersch

A Life Of Meditation At The Piano

Fred Hersch has spent nearly seven decades mediating at the piano.

In his candid memoir, Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life In And Out Of Jazz (Fred Hersch and David Hadju, Crown Publishing, 2017), Hersch described how he creates music. He wrote:

I sit down, settle onto the piano stool, and see what kind of mood I’m in. Sometimes when playing with my trio I will ask them what they feel like starting with — a nice surprise for me, as I tend to play better if I don’t overthink things.

If I’m playing with the group, I get a thousand cues from the bassist and the drummer, and I send my own cues back to them. The music is like a rhythmic and harmonic river rushing along, and each of us jumps into it in our own way as it flows by.

Hersch has created a remarkable body of recorded work. He is now recording for ECM and has released three albums since 2022: a duo with trumpeter Enrico Rava (The Song Is You, ECM 2022), a solo recording (Silent, Listening, ECM 2024), and a trio (The Surrounding Green