To close out the year I’m posting videos from the top 12 interviews from 2024. These were a mix of my personal favorites, some of your favorites and a few that may have slipped under the radar. We’re down to the top two. I continue with #2: FRED HERSCH.
Perhaps the interview I was most looking forward to all year was with jazz pianist/composer Fred Hersch. I’ve long been a fan of his work and with each new album that gets released, I feel like I learn something new. Not just about Hersch or his music, but about myself. His deeply personal work requires that you rely on your skill set to be still. To be undistracted. To simply listen.
Which was, not surprisingly, the title of his album released last spring, Silent, Listening on ECM Records. As he explained about the title, Silent is not modifying Listening.
“Without silence you can’t have music or much of anything else. This is maybe my 12th or 13th solo album. I think there’s a lot of patience on this record; playing something and seeing how it lands. Play the next thing. As an improvising musician, that’s how you always want to be. You want to play the phrase and then see where it lands, and then the next thing comes. And if you have a goal or an expectation, then often you’ll be disappointed.
Just like life. I like to be in that zone where I’m really minutely paying attention to each detail, which leads to the next thing. There’s a lot of what I call spontaneous composition on the record, open improvisation, whatever you want to call it. Just paying attention to the sonority, not the chord, just the actual sound. So sound was a factor and the beautiful silence that you get playing in a room like that.”
Here is my interview with Fred Hersch:
If you’re a fan of jazz music, you might want to also check out my interviews with Christian Sands, Terence Blanchard and Kamasi Washington.
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