Stereophile: Hersch & Moran

A quick, final word on Fred Hersch�s week of piano duets at the Jazz Standard. His early set last night with Jason Moran was one of the most enthralling concerts I�ve seen in a long time. At its peak moments (and there were several of them), the two settled into such a head-spinning groove, they sounded like one pianist playing magically with four hands. Moran, as I�ve noted in an earlier entry, may be the jazz pianist of our times, the supreme post-modernist who appropriates everything around him�musical traditions from Schumann and Jelly Roll Morton to Afrika Bambaata and Jaki Byard, as well as random sounds from movies, streets, and Chinese stock-market reports. Hersch matched his intervals, leap for leap. It�s been well over a decade since Hersch could be tagged a merely �lyrical� pianist in, say, the vein of Bill Evans, but even so, it was a jolt to see him tackle a frantic tune like Mingus� �Jump Monk� (a natural Moran pick) with such finely disciplined abandon. It was an equal delight to watch Moran delve into the rhythmic crevices of an old-hat standard like �If I Had You� with such swaying jigsaw strokes.

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Posted Sun Sep 9, 2007, 7:11 PM — By Steve

Thanks for the Moran recommendation (and the blog). "Modernistic" is as good as you said.

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