AN DIE MUSIK LIVE 409 N.Charles St Baltimore MD 21201
410 385 2638 www.andiemusiklive.com
FRED HERSCH - solo piano
SATURDAY 18 MARCH @ 8PM & 9.30PM
tickets $20/$18 seniors and students w.ID
**tickets selling fast - advance booking advised!**
Pianist and composer FRED HERSCH has earned a place among the foremost jazz artists in the world today. He is widely recognized for his ability to reinvent the standard jazz repertoire - investing time-tested classics with keen insight, fresh ideas and extraordinary technique - while steadfastly creating his own unique body of works. Described by The New Yorker as "a poet of a pianist" and The New York Times as "a master who plays it his way," Hersch's many accomplishments include a 2003 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for composition, a Rockefeller Fellowship for a composition residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy and two Grammy nominations for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance. He has recorded more than two dozen albums as a solo artist or bandleader, co-led another twenty sessions and appeared as a sideman or featured soloist on some eighty further recordings.
Although Hersch thrives on the musical dialogue created with his band-mates, he also revels in the demands of solo performance. Hersch's incredible focus translates to spacious soundscapes, from the lushly orchestral to those with breathtaking simplicity. Solo piano is an unusual specialty in jazz, and Hersch may well have more unaccompanied recordings to his credit than any other jazz pianist of his generation. His latest recording
Fred Hersch in Amsterdam: Live at the Bimhuis (Palmetto Records), is a solo CD that features an eclectic program of Hersch at his pianistic peak. Its release has led to Hersch becoming the first pianist in over 40 years to play an entire week at New York's legendary Village Vanguard as a solo pianist shortly after the disc's release. The New York Times' Ben Ratliff acknowledges that, "Hersch has honed a solo piano concept second to none in jazz." Ed Hazell, writing in Jazziz, stated that "few jazz pianists have ever struck as beguiling a balance between technique, feeling, insight and imagination...Hersch’s engagement with each of these songs is so complete that he evokes the sort of secret meanings words cannot." And the Los Angeles Times said: "There isn't a false note--technically or emotionally...a tribute to Hersch's unerring ability to play music that is as intelligent as it is touching, as virtuosic as it is swinging." Six previous solo piano recordings include Let Yourself Go, an eclectic recital recorded live at Boston's famed Jordan Hall, and Thelonious: Fred Hersch Plays Monk, which the Washington Post declared "a landmark album."
He has acted as a passionate spokesman and fund-raiser for AIDS services and education agencies, a cause to which he is especially devoted given his own 18-year struggle with HIV. Hersch has produced and performed on four recordings for the charities Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. The most recent, Two Hands/Ten Voices (Broadway Cares 2003), pairs Hersch with ten outstanding jazz, cabaret, and Broadway vocalists including Ann Hampton Callaway, Luciana Souza, Jane Monheit, and his longtime associate Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer. Acclaimed pianists including Marian McPartland, George Shearing, and Kenny Barron donated solo performances for The Richard Rodgers Centennial Jazz Piano Album. Twelve jazz greats including Diana Krall, Joe Lovano, Jim Hall and Tommy Flanagan joined him for Fred Hersch & Friends: The Duo Album. The very first of these recordings, Last Night When We Were Young: The Ballad Album, has raised over $150,000 for AIDS services and education to date.
Hersch has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning with Dr. Billy Taylor and National Public Radio programs such as Morning Edition, Fresh Air, Studio 360, Creators at Carnegie, Prairie Home Companion, Jazz From Lincoln Center, Jazz Set, and Marian McPartland's popular Piano Jazz. In addition to his Guggenheim Fellowship, Hersch has been awarded grants from The National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer, as well as four composition residencies at the prestigious MacDowell Colony. He is a four-time winner of a Gay and Lesbian American Music Award (GLAMA). A respected educator, Hersch was a faculty member at the New England Conservatory for ten years, and has taught at The New School Jazz Program and at The Manhattan School of Music. He has been a visiting lecturer at the Institutes for Advanced Studies at both Princeton University and Indiana University; and he is currently a visiting professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. Recent CD releases include Fred's composition Leaves of Grass (Palmetto Records, February 2005) featuring vocalists Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry and an instrumental octet; and Haunted Heart with soprano Renee Fleming (Decca Records, May 2005). His latest release is a solo: Fred Hersch in Amsterdam: Live at the Bimhuis (Palmetto), of which All About Jazz's Dr. Judith Schlesinger submits to calling Hersch a "genius," boasting an "inspired originality that's way beyond talent."
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