Music Evaluation: Jazz pianist Fred Hersch creates subdued, beautiful colours on ‘Silent, Listening’
Jazz pianist Fred Hersch totally embraces the liberty that comes with improvisation on his solo album “Silent, Listening,” spontaneously composing and performing tunes which might be usually with out melody, meter or type.
Listening to them will be difficult and rewarding. The various-time Grammy nominee ’s impressionistic method creates colours which might be subdued and beautiful. It’s chamber jazz — nearer to classical music than the blues — that will likely be acquainted to followers of ECM Data founder Manfred Eicher, who produced. The album will likely be launched Friday.
Hersch returns to the Swiss studio the place he recorded his first ECM album, “The Track Is You,” a 2022 set with trumpeter Enrico Rava. The sound is pristine and ethereal, in basic style for the label, and Hersch makes full use of his instrument.
He explores the very best and lowest octaves, and strums contained in the piano. With a lightweight contact and disdain for something showy, he performs single notes in meticulous prolonged sequences. There are additionally clusters that splash, splay and sashay, and an occasional forte chord for startling distinction. Typically a tune emerges, resembling close to the tip of the contemplative “The Wind,” and amid the unsteady however seductive pulse of “Starlight.”
Hersch’s palms converse with one another, the components they play by turns contrasting or complementary. Rumbling bass is answered by treble toggles and trills. The animated “Little Track” swings with bouncy good cheer, however the temper on Hersch’s different authentic compositions tends towards the wistful, ethereal or — as he describes it — nocturnal.
The amorphous, atonal music contrasts together with his lyrical type on covers. The Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn tune “Star-Crossed Lovers” turns into a mild wee-hours examination of melancholy melody. Hersch interprets “Softly, as In a Morning Dawn” as a hummable, jaunty toe-tapper, and he saves for final his bluest efficiency, “Winter of My Discontent,” which achieves a glow that lingers.
___
AP music critiques: https://apnews.com/hub/music-reviews
