Photo by Peter Carni

Winner of a 2003 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for composition, performer, arranger, composer, and educator Fred Hersch began playing piano as a four-year-old in Cincinnati. His lifelong interest in popular song dates back to his family’s collections of Broadway original cast albums and his grandmother's sheet music. Despite his formal training in classical repertoire, at an early age he was already experimenting with improvisation and received his first training in jazz on the bandstands of Cincinnati. At the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Hersch studied with Jaki Byard among others, then moved to New York where he quickly became a first-call player. As a sideman, he appeared with saxophonists Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, and Jane Ira Bloom; flugelhornist Art Farmer; harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans; vibraphonist Gary Burton; and bassists Sam Jones and Charlie Haden.

Over the past twenty years, Fred Hersch’s numerous recordings have included his work with in solo, duo, and trio formats; in tributes to Monk, Strayhorn, Evans and other muses; and in both small and larger ensembles exploring free improvisation. His classical roots have not been overlooked—recently he has toured with concert pianist Christopher O'Reilly in a program entitled "Heard Fresh: Music for Two Pianos," and has combined talents with pianist Jeffrey Kahane and violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, as well as sopranos Renée Fleming and Dawn Upshaw; he also has appeared as a soloist with orchestras across the U.S. and Europe. Honors in addition to his Guggenheim Fellowship have included grants from The National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer, four composition residencies at the prestigious MacDowell Colony, and the Gay and Lesbian American Music Award (GLAMA)—four times. Teaching has always been a priority for Fred Hersch. A faculty member at the New England Conservatory for ten years, he has taught at The New School and Manhattan School of Music and is currently a visiting professor at Western Michigan University. Among his students are many who have become star performers themselves, including Brad Mehldau and Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus.

In addition to acclaimed trio releases on Palmetto, Hersch recently completed his Leaves of Grass project, a large-scale work setting Walt Whitman's poetry to music for two voices (Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry) and instrumental octet; the 2005 recoding (Palmetto) appeared on numerous “best of the year” lists. He also appeared on a duo recording with opera star Renee Fleming in summer 2005 (Haunted Heart, Decca), and this winter released a highly acclaimed solo recording, Amsterdam: Live at the Bimhuis (Palmetto). Earlier in 2006, he became the first pianist to have a solo week at the Village Vanguard.

Over the past two years, Fred Hersch has found a home for duo performance at Jazz Standard. He is a vastly versatile artist with a highly inventive approach to time and harmony, always infused with a melodic lyricism that can belie the complexity of his constructions and interpretations. His eclecticism has been described by Jazz Times’ Nate Chinen as fusing the diverse influences of “Ornette Coleman and Cole Porter, Bach and Bill Evans, Johnny Mathis and Ahmad Jamal.” To that list I would quickly add Monk and Jarrett. Noted Terry Teachout in the New York Times, he “improvises with the sharp conceptual clarity of a classical composer; instead of merely skimming atop the familiar chord changes of standard songs, he forges them into rigorously structured, highly personal re-creations.”

Of vocalist Nancy King, Concord artist Karrin Allyson said, “She is, I think, one of the best singers that ever walked the planet.” Similarly labeled “the greatest living jazz singer” by Herb Ellis, King is noted for “a supple voice, a flawless ear and the instincts of a true jazz improviser"(The Oregonian). Arriving in San Francisco from Springfield, OR in the 1960s, she met future husband Sonny King at the Jazz Workshop and joined his band. In addition to performing for the next two years at the Workshop, she worked with Vince Guaraldi, John Handy, Sonny Donaldson, and Flip Nunez in San Francisco, and studied with Jon Hendricks. After moving to Las Vegas and then back to Oregon to raise her sons, King recorded her first album and made some appearances in New York before starting a collaboration with pianist/composer Steve Christofferson, with whom she has performed on the west coast since the 1980s . During the mid-90’s she was on the faculties of the Stanford University Jazz Workshop, Bud Shank’s Centrum Jazz Workshop and Jazz Camp West, and performed at festivals in France, the U.S., Israel and Canada. She released Straight Into Your Heart (Mons, 1997) with Christopherson and the Dutch Metropole Orchestra and appeared with Ray Brown on his Some Of My Best Friends Are Singers (Telarc, 1998), touring with Brown and his trio during the next year.

Recent collaborations include performances with Karrin Allyson and Elvis Costello, as well as continued recordings with Steve Christofferson. In 2001, King was inducted into the Oregon Jazz Society’s Hall of Fame. Notes vocalist Mark Murphy, “Her singing flies between our ears with a certainty of inevitable rightness that is at least... simply thrilling.”

“Simply thrilling” should be an apt description for the duo appearance of Fred Hersch and Nancy King at Jazz Standard, May 9-11. Don’t miss this celebration of the CD that is sure to be one of the top releases of 2006.