PALMETTO 10 Years (6CD)

Six-disc set includes five critically acclaimed Palmetto Records releases featuring Hersch, bassist John Hébert and drummer Eric McPherson - a band named Best Jazz Group in the 2019 DownBeat Critics Poll. One of the most influential improvising musicians currently performing - a "living legend," per the New Yorker - the pianist and composer Fred Hersch has made groundbreaking contributions in a staggering range of creative formats. DownBeat called his unprecedented cross-disciplinary theatre piece My Coma Dreams "a brave work of art that deserves to be seen and heard." In the New York Times, the critic Nate Chinen wrote that "solo piano playing is one of the things that Mr. Hersch does best," before explaining how he "combines the rigors of classical training with the disciplined freedom of improvisation and explores a richly varied repertory." Hersch has also ranked among jazz's most renowned accompanists of singers, and his latest release, 2019's Begin Again, is an acclaimed collaboration with the WDR Big Band under conductor-arranger Vince Mendoza. Even Hersch's 2017 autobiography, Good Things Happen Slowly (Crown Archetype/Random House), has been uniquely vaunted, garnering rare mainstream praise for a jazz-related book by being named one of the year's best memoirs in both the Washington Post and the New York Times.