Fred Kaplan

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.