Fred Hersch: Songs From Home

As Fred Hersch is sometimes wont to do, this album is built around a story, some of which is intended, and some of which may be embedded in the pianist's unconscious and manifested in his imagination and the way that he plays. The conscious part is simple, and basically stated in the liner notes. Hersch leaves the pandemic conditions around his loft in Manhattan and is in semi-isolation in his country home in northeastern Pennsylvania. He and his partner built the home around a familiar but imperfect Steinway piano whose sound is more intimate than grand, so to speak. With a history of a home studio which he used to create some of his own and others' recordings, he thinks of using his laptop to make an album. Why not? Having come a long way from his family home in Ohio, he dwells nostalgically on the musical influences from his life then. He'll make an album of "Songs from Home," a couple of jazz standards, and some that aren't necessarily "jazz" but float around in his (and our collective) memory.

Sitting at the piano, the feeling he creates is of "a home somewhere, far away from the cold night air," words from the Lerner and Lowe song from My Fair Lady, "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" That nostalgic plaint comes out surprisingly as something resembling a church hymn. The album becomes a kind of a personal reverie where he takes a song and goes where he wants with it, sometimes even altering the form, as when