“A sought-after and elegant two-player game collected in the new album by Enrico Rava and Fred Hersch”. This is how the online magazine Giornale della Musica summarizes “The Song Is You”, the album of standards released on ECM last year and followed by a tour. “The Song Is You” won Record of the Year in the 2022 Top Jazz Poll conducted by the Italian jazz magazine Musica Jazz.
The one between Rava and 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 is a very evocative and elegant trumpet/piano duo.
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.
An eighteen-time Grammy Award nominee (fifteen as a pianist, composer, and leader, and three for 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 deservedly. Fred Hersch seems indifferent to genres. His music is not inspired by any particular pianist who preceded him. In contrast, his influence has been felt on many others, such as Brad Mehldau and Ethan Iverson, his former students. He’s an authentic maverick who has traced his path and walks it 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.
