New Hersch Album Inspired by Meditation

This coming Friday Palmetto Records will release the first album to be recorded by Fred Hersch in a studio setting since the onset of pandemic conditions. The title of the album is Breath by Breath, which reflects the fact that most of the album is devoted to an eight-movement suite inspired by Hersch’s meditation practice. There is also a ninth track, entitled “Pastorale,” which Hersch composed as an homage to Robert Schumann. As is the usual practice, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders.

The title of the suite is The Sati Suite. This reflects Hersch’s approach to meditation, since sati is the Pali word for “mindfulness” or “awareness.” The scoring brings a jazz piano trio together with a string quartet. The trio that Hersch leads consists of Drew Gress on bass and Jochen Rueckert on drums. The strings are the members of the Crosby Street String Quartet: violinists Joyce Hammann and Laura Seaton, violist Lois Martin, and cellist Jody Redhage Ferber. For the sixth movement of the suite, “Mara,” the ensemble is joined by percussionist Rogerio Boccato. “Mara” is the name of the god that tempted the Buddha with wine, women, and wealth.

Some readers may recall that, at the end of October of 2020, I wrote an article entitled “Bland is Not a Remedy for Pandemic Blues,” which established a theme that I would subsequently invoke when encountering albums that seemed more interested in soothing the mind, rather than stimulating it. Hersch’s musical reflections on meditation are anything but bland. If anything, they reflect on how Hersch has described his own approach to meditation:

Meditation is not about not emptying your mind; it's about observation. The phrase I like to use is, “relax, allow and observe.” When I meditate it’s about recognizing sensations or thoughts as they come in and out, observing them and realizing that they're just phenomena. The brain thinks, and there's nothing wrong with that.

In many respects that pairing of “allow” and “observe” is as relevant to making music as it is to meditation.

Events in a symphony orchestra, under the constraints of score pages, sections leaders, and a conductor, require every individual musician to cultivate his/her/their own practices of allowing and observing, bringing the actions taken by the one into conjunction with those of the many. On Breath by Breath one can appreciate those practices when the string quartet is playing on its own, presumably working with through-composed parts that Hersch created (possibly in consultation with the four players). For that matter, over the course of the entire suite, one begins to appreciate the extent to which a dialog between the quartet and Hersch’s trio is evolving. Finally, if allowing and observing guide the interplay of musicians listening and performing, they also provide a “strategy” for those listening to this album. That being the case, then perhaps the concluding “Pastorale” is a result of Hersch’s own allowing and listening to Schumann’s piano music, resulting in an evocation of the Schumann repertoire, rather than an exploration of specific thematic content.