Pianist Fred Hersch is revered for his compositional, improvisational and technical talents, a jazz musician’s jazz musician. Singer/bassist/songwriter esperanza spalding has used her massive talent to bridge the worlds of jazz and, well, everything else. Both are usually expected to make a Major Statement every time they step in the studio or on stage. Alive at the Village Vanguard, recorded during Hersch’s annual three week stand at the famed New York jazz club, goes a long way to subverting that expectation.
Not that the duo don’t bring their A-game – of course they do, and there’s plenty of sterling musicianship on display, from Hersch’s melodic soloing to spalding’s post-Fitzgerald scatting. But the pair, who’ve played together off and on for a decade, have the kind of chemistry that means they do shows that don’t need to be attempts to change the face of jazz. They’re just a way for two exceptionally talented pals to have a party, to which the audience is invited. Spalding scats as if she’s channeling a new language, unafraid to get silly with her syllables without ever descending into overt comedy (cf. Egberto Gismonti’s “Loro”). Hersch’s playing throughout should be in the dictionary under the word “jaunty,” and that’s meant as the highest compliment. The singer is happy to make up new lyrics to old standards on the fly, as on George & Ira Gershwin’s “But Not For Me,” and the pair take the old school (read: chauvinistic) ditty “Girl Talk” into new lyrical and conceptual realms.
Spalding and Hersch also play it absolutely straight when appropriate, as on Hersch’s run through “Evidence,” from the catalog of his hero Thelonious Monk, or the lovely closing ballad “A Wish,” which Hersch co-wrote with British singer Norma Winstone. But neither of those diminish the sense of two friends jovially indulging themselves on Alive in their own love of what they do.
