Easily one of the most acclaimed pianists of the last thirty-plus years, Fred Hersch began working with ECM with 2021’s The Song is You, a duo album with trumpet wizard Enrico Rava. For Silent, Listening, he goes it alone, planting his own entry in ECM’s long line of classic solo piano records. Presenting a mix of standards, originals, and completely improvised pieces, Hersch interprets each tune with a classical player’s touch and a jazz musician’s vibe. He nearly always leans into the melody, letting it take center stage at least at the beginning and end of the pieces, and that’s probably his greatest strength. But he’s a more than capable improviser, finding new ways to rearrange a tune on the fly in ways that sound like the song was written that way. Check the lovely “The Wind,” an almost impossibly pretty tune that gets gently shaken up by filigrees flying around the root like swallows in, well, the wind. “Aeon” ups the tempo and the whimsy, with Hersch dancing across his keyboard and pushing the notes to soar. For the Alec Wilder/Ben Berenberg composition, he conjures up a melancholy, twilight feel perfectly in keeping with the song’s title. Recorded in Lugano, Switzerland in the same studio and with the same piano as The Song is You, Silent, Listening’s pristine sound perfectly compliments the master’s touch.
