Night & The Music is the follow-up CD to 2003’s highly acclaimed, Fred Hersch Trio: Live at the Village Vanguard and is the Fred Hersch Trio's first studio album in almost 15 years. With the stellar rhythm section of Drew Gress and Nasheet Waits, it features music by Berlin, Dietz & Schwartz, Porter, Gress, Monk and Hersch.

“Hersch may be the most complete pianist of his generation, even as he looms over the majority of the prodigiously talented crop of younger pianists dotting the jazz landscape.”
The Washington Post

"A master who plays it his way.”
The New York Times

“Hersch’s work has developed an intensity of intelligence and emotional directness unparalleled among his peers.”
The New Yorker

“...specializes in high lyricism and high danger."
The New Yorker

Pianist and composer Fred Hersch has earned his place among the foremost jazz artists and creative musicians in the world today. He is widely recognized for his ability to steadfastly create a unique body of original works while reinventing the standard jazz repertoire - investing time-tested classics with keen insight, fresh ideas and extraordinary technique. Hersch's many accomplishments include two Grammy® nominations for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance and a 2003 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for composition. He is currently nominated for a 2006 Grammy® Award for Best Instrumental Composition.

Hersch is considered to be the most prolific and widely-praised solo jazz pianist of his generation. In 2006, Palmetto Records released the solo disc Fred Hersch in Amsterdam: Live at the Bimhuis; its release led to Hersch becoming the first pianist in the 70-year history of New York's legendary Village Vanguard to play an entire week as a solo pianist shortly after the disc's release. In addition, he leads a trio, a quintet and has ongoing special collaborations with jazz and classical instrumentalists and vocalists around the world. His next trio release, Night and the Music, will be released by Palmetto May 1st, 2007.

His career as a performer has been greatly enhanced by his composing activities, a vital part of nearly all of his live concerts and recordings. Hersch recently created Leaves of Grass (Palmetto Records), a large-scale setting of Walt Whitman's poetry for two voices (Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry) and an instrumental octet; the work was presented in March 2005 in a sold-out performance at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall as part of a six-city US tour. Hersch has toured with concert pianist Christopher O'Riley ("Heard Fresh: Music for Two Pianos") and he has also collaborated sopranos Renée Fleming, Audra McDonald and Dawn Upshaw; violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg; and pianist Jeffrey Kahane. He has received commissions from The Gilmore Keyboard Festival, The Doris Duke Foundation, The Miller Theatre at Columbia University, The Gramercy Trio and The Brooklyn Youth Chorus. His solo piano compositions and chamber music are published by Edition Peters.

Hersch has acted as a passionate spokesman and fund-raiser for AIDS services and education agencies since 1993. He has produced and performed on four benefit recordings and at numerous concerts for the charities Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS that have raised over $250,000 to date.

After graduating from The New England Conservatory in 1977, Hersch relocated to New York City and quickly became one of the most in-demand pianists in town. As a sideman, he appeared with such jazz masters as saxophonists Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, and Jane Ira Bloom; flugelhornist Art Farmer; harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans; vibraphonist Gary Burton; and bassists Sam Jones and Charlie Haden.

Hersch has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning with Dr. Billy Taylor and on a wide variety of National Public Radio programs including Fresh Air, Jazz Set, Studio 360 and Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. Hersch has also been awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, grants from The National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer, and six composition residencies at The MacDowell Colony. A committed educator, Hersch was a faculty member at the New England Conservatory for ten years, and has taught at The New School and Manhattan School of Music; he is currently a visiting professor at Western Michigan University.