“A sought-after and elegant two-player game”. This is how the online magazine Giornale della Musica summarizes “The Song Is You”, the album of standards released on ECM in September 2022.
The one between Enrico Rava and Fred Hersch is a rare, suggestive and must-see encounter: two artists with different background stories but united by a strict and emotional vision of music. This chamber-like elegant flugelhorn/piano duo remained among the musicians’ projects.
There is no need to emphasize how much Rava influenced the development of Italian and European jazz. The free jazz period in the early years of his career with Steve Lacy and Gato Barbieri, his New York experience with Cecil Taylor, Carla Bley, and the JCO (Bley’s monumental work, “Escalator Over The Hill”), the hybridizations with the European avant-garde, the discovery of the opera in a jazz key, the collaborations with some of the most important artists of the contemporary scene: these are chapters of the history of European jazz, rather than a single biography.
A twenty-time Grammy Award nominee (seventeen as a pianist, composer, and leader, and three with the trio), Fred Hersch won Jazz Pianist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association in 2016 and 2018.
There are few equally charismatic jazz musicians, not only in the jazz world. And with good reason. Fred Hersch seems indifferent to genres. His music is not inspired by any particular pianist who preceded him. In contrast, many musicians have been influenced by his art. He’s an authentic maverick who has traced and walked his path without compromising on successful trends. He favors music’s emotive and emotional aspects and does not care about virtuosity. He doesn’t try to build a character to sell with good communication. Instead, he completely entrusts the music he plays: music speaks for him. His music combines tradition and innovation, lyricism and energy, jazz language and classical culture.
