DESCRIPTION:
(Music begins at 2:30.) Fred Hersch (piano) performed with John Hebert (bass) and Eric McPherson (drums) at the Iowa City Jazz Festival on July 7, 2013. Audio engineered by Dan Towey.

Songs performed included...
0:02:30 "Whirl"
0:10:45 "Sad Poet"
0:20:50 "Dream of Monk"
0:27:55 "Lonely Woman" / "Nardis"
0:42:29 "At the Close of the Day"
0:49:57 "Skipping"
0:55:42 "The Wind" / "Moon and Sand"
1:11:24 "The Song is You" / (something by T. Monk)

Proclaimed by Vanity Fair magazine as "the most arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade or so," Fred Hersch balances his internationally recognized instrumental skills with significant achievements as a composer, band leader, and theatrical conceptualist, as well as remaining an in-demand collaborator with other noted bandleaders and vocalists.

As a solo pianist (he was the first artist in the 75-year history of New York's legendary Village Vanguard to play week-long engagements as a solo pianist -- his second featured run is documented on the 2011 release, "Alone at the Vanguard"), as leader of a widely praised trio whose "Whirl" found its way onto numerous 2010 best-recordings-of-the-year lists and, as the impetus behind ambitious 2011 production, "My Coma Dreams" (a full-evening work for 11 instruments, actor/singer and animation/multimedia), Hersch has fully lived up to the approbation of the New York Times which, in a featured Sunday Magazine article, praised him as "singular among trailblazers of their art, a largely unsung innovator of this borderless, individualistic jazz -- a jazz for the 21st century."

His 2011 release "Alone at the Vanguard" earned him two GRAMMY Award nominations -- his fourth and fifth -- for Best Jazz Album and Best Improvised Jazz Solo, was awarded the 2012 Grand Prix du Disque by the Academie Charles Cros in France, and made the Best Jazz CDs of 2012 lists in Slate and Downbeat Magazine.