This is a matrix in the original sense of "source". It is a "small-world" network, meaning that the nodes (people) inside it are — mirroring human society — within a few steps of everybody else inside it. The matrix was built to allow regional Brazilian musicians to be discoverable steps away from everybody else in the arts world, and by logical necessity this m.o. requires not only that the great Brazilians be matrixed, but so far as possible, all working artists in our time. Ergo:
THIS MATRIX, THOUGH BRAZIL-BORN, IS UNIVERSAL
This Fred Hersch matrix node is steps away from the entire planet by the well-known small-world ("6 degrees") phenomenon dictating that in human society you yourself are within several degrees of Fred Hersch.
1 DEGREE FORWARD: Fred Hersch (node) ROUTES TO THESE ARTIST NODES
Are these Fred Hersch's personal recommendations?
CURATION STATUS
- → Routes by The Matrix
Who & Where
- Name: Fred Hersch
- City/Place: New York City
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Cincinnati, Ohio
Life & Work
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Bio:
A select member of jazz’s piano pantheon, Fred Hersch is a pervasively influential creative force who has shaped the music’s course over more than three decades as an improviser, composer, educator, bandleader, collaborator and recording artist. He has been proclaimed “the most arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade” by Vanity Fair, “an elegant force of musical invention” by The L.A. Times, and “a living legend” byThe New Yorker.
A fifteen-time Grammy nominee, Hersch has regularly garnered jazz’s most prestigious awards, including recent distinctions as a 2016 Doris Duke Artist, 2016 and 2018 Jazz Pianist of the Year from the Jazz Journalists Association, and the 2017 Prix Honorem de Jazz from L’Acádemie Charles Cros for the totality of his career.
If good things happen slowly, as the title of Hersch’s 2017 memoir attests, such good fortune has nonetheless accrued to the point where the pianist can enjoy the accolades and adulation of peers, critics and audiences alike. He has long set the standard for expressive interpretation and inventive creativity in a stunning variety of settings, whether through his exquisite solo performances, as the leader of one of jazz’s era-defining trios, or in eloquent dialogue with his deeply attuned duo partners.
With more than three-dozen albums to his credit as a leader or co-leader, Hersch consistently receives lavish critical praise and numerous international awards for each highly anticipated new release. His latest album with his long-standing trio, 2018’s Live In Europe(Palmetto), documents one remarkable evening in Brussels and has been hailed as its best to date – considerable praise for an ensemble that consistently plays at such a staggeringly high level.
The trio, in which Hersch has been joined by bassist John Hébert and drummer Eric McPherson for the last decade, was voted the #2 Jazz Group in the 2018 DownBeat Critics Poll, recognizing its unique ability to traverse a wide range of styles and approaches while maintaining profound depths of emotion and the exhilarating spark of invention. Its previous two Palmetto releases, 2016’s Sunday Night at the Vanguardand 2014’s Floating, were both nominated for Grammy Awards in the categories of Best Jazz Solo and Best Jazz Album.
Also in 2014, Hersch garnered his sixth Grammy nomination for his solo on “Duet” from Free Flying, a duo album with guitarist Julian Lage that received a rare 5-star rating from DownBeat. An exceptionally responsive and intuitive collaborator, Hersch has engaged in duo partnerships with a number of spirited artists, including Anat Cohen, Bill Frisell, Esperanza Spalding, Julian Lage and Miguel Zenon; and vocalists Kurt Elling, Kate McGarry and Renée Fleming.
As versatile and exploratory as his trio and duo excursions can be, nowhere is the boundless range and emotional diversity of Hersch’s artistry as evident as in his breathtaking solo performances. JazzTimes has hailed his unaccompanied playing as “a complete, self-sufficient, uniquely pure art form,” while All About Jazzhas remarked that “when it comes to the art of solo piano in jazz, there are two classes of performers: Fred Hersch and everybody else.”
In 2006, Hersch became the first artist in the 75-year history of New York’s legendary Village Vanguard to play a weeklong engagement as a solo pianist. His second solo run there was documented on the Grammy-nominated Alone at the Vanguard, one of five recordings he’s made at the iconic New York City club. His 2017 Palmetto album Open Book was, as the title implies, his most revealing and intimate solo outing, and was nominated for two 2018 Grammy Awards.
The album’s release coincided with the publication of his acclaimed memoir, Good Things Happen Slowly(Crown Archetype Books/Random House). The book compellingly reveals the story of his life in music along with a frank recounting of his struggles and triumphs as the first openly gay, HIV-positive jazz musician. It was featured in the Sunday New York Timesand on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” named one of 2017’s Five Best Memoirs by the Washington Postand The New York Times, and acclaimed as 2018’s Book on Jazz of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association. His story has also been told via the feature documentary The Ballad of Fred Hersch, which premiered to a sold-out house at the prestigious Full Frame Film Festival in March 2016 and is now streaming on Vimeo.
While widely renowned for his playing, Hersch has earned similar distinction with his writing, garnering a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition among other awards. The same year he created Leaves of Grass, a large-scale setting of Walt Whitman’s poetry for two voices (Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry) and an instrumental octet. Leaves of Grasswas selected to open the 2017 Jazz at Lincoln Center season at the Appel Room.
Hersch’s visionary 2010 theatrical project, My Coma Dreams,prompted the New York Times Sunday Magazine to describe the composer as “singular among the trailblazers of their art, a largely unsung innovator of this borderless, individualistic jazz—a jazz for the 21st century.” Based on visions Hersch experienced during a two-month coma in 2008, the evening-length multimedia collaboration with writer/director Herschel Garfein for 11 instrumentalists and an actor/singer was captured on video at Columbia University and released by Palmetto on a 2014 DVD.
For two decades Hersch has been a passionate spokesman and fund-raiser for AIDS services and education agencies. He has produced and performed on four benefit recordings and in numerous concerts for charities including Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. To date, his efforts have raised more than $300,000. He has also been a keynote speaker and performer at international medical conferences in the U.S. and Europe.
A committed educator, Hersch has taught at New England Conservatory, The Juilliard School, The New School and The Manhattan School of Music. He is currently a Visiting Artist at Rutgers University. He holds honorary doctorate degrees from Grinnell College and Northern Kentucky University. Hersch’s influence has been widely felt on a new generation of jazz pianists, from former students Brad Mehldau and Ethan Iverson to his colleague Jason Moran, who has said, “Fred at the piano is like LeBron James on the basketball court. He’s perfection.”
Contact Information
- Email: info@fredhersch.com
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Management/Booking:
For bookings worldwide except Europe:
Epstein and Co.
email: booking@epsteinco.com
phone: 256-344-SHOW
www.epsteinco.com
For bookings in Europe:
Rob Leurentop
mobile: +32 477 890 056
email: leurentop@icloud.com
For Publishing Information:
Angela Riddles
email: ar@heightsmusicinternational.com
Publicity Inquiries:
Ann Braithwaite
Braithwaite & Katz Communications
781-259-9600
email: ann@bkmusicpr.com
Record Label:
Palmetto Records
www.palmetto-records.com
Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://fredhersch.com/discography/
- ▶ Book Purchases: http://fredhersch.com/books/good-things-happen-slowly/
- ▶ Twitter: fredherschmusic
- ▶ Instagram: fredherschmusic
- ▶ Website: http://fredhersch.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn7Uh2qpex0fczcTeJVMhgA
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCqGUM2i-Gg80VY5Ezt2vnBA
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/1xf8Ny57YgeCJxNKm2oVDd
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/5eeSHIlJkI0bcgn2DdOnZa
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/5hydRdnOK8shwMuksd0yMQ
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/04MDIVbs4OXk2qwW328ahS
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/1SQwrLQmmwb9sDt8W8fhpM
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/3oUTSZR19WHXHPdxwyFkXk
- ▶ Articles: http://fredhersch.com/press/articles/
My Writing
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Publications:
Good Things Happen Slowly
Five Best Memoirs of 2017
- The Washington Post
- The New York Times
Best Book on Jazz 2017
- Jazz Journalists Association
“Raw honesty and immediacy is probably why so many of us find his music co compelling. By the same token, that’s why this book earns a place as one of the great contemporary jazz memoirs.”
- Ted Gioia, The Wall Street Journal
Jazz could not contain Fred Hersch. His meteoric rise as a in-demand sideman–one who played with the giants of the 20th century in the autumn of their careers, including Art Farmer, Joe Henderson, and more– blossomed further in the nineties and beyond into a compositional genius that defied the boundaries of bop, sweeping in elements of pop, classical, and folk to create a wholly new music.
Good Things Happen Slowly is a memoir, but it is also more than that. It’s the story of the first openly gay, HIV-positive jazz player, and a deep look into the cloistered, largely African-American jazz culture that made such a status both transgressive and groundbreaking. It is a remarkable, at times lyrical evocation of New York in the twilight days of post-Stonewall hedonism, and a powerfully brave narrative of the illness that led to Hersch’s two-month-long medically induced coma in 2007, from which he would emerge to create some of the finest, most direct and emotionally compelling music of his career.
Clips (more may be added)
THE MATRIX WAS BUILT HERE, inspired in (the kabbalah-inspired fiction of) Borges' El Aleph, that in the pillar in Cairo's Mosque of Amr, where the universe in its entirety throughout all time is perceivable as an infinite hum from deep within the stone... The Brazilian "aleph" doesn't hum...it sings!
Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes
Stoked and steamed and sensual in the widest sense of the word
Limned in prosody and cadenced song
brəˈzɪl / from "brasa" / Latin for "ember"
w/ David Dye for U.S. National Public Radio
Given the immense untapped power of the small-world phenomenon, from Brazilians the matrix was expanded to include nodes per jazz artists, given jazz's common roots with Brazilian music (nodes based in publicly available information; some artists we informed — Bob Mintzer, Kamasi Washington, David "Fuse" Fiuczynski, Vijay Iyer, Greg Osby — and got thumbs up, others we'll get to), and moved on from there. Artists/academics/"creative people" are welcome to create their own nodes and curate (connect to other artist nodes, so that others may follow). BTW, our logo is a cortador de cana, cane cutter. It was designed by Walter Mariano, professor of design at the Federal University of Bahia to reflect the origins of the music the shop specializes in.
MUCH MORE on all of this in the window below (which, if you are logged in, will instead contain instructions on recommending), and in the window within that window (which includes a "radio" called by The Guardian one of "10 of the best music radio stations around the world"):
