Jazz at the Spring Fest

“When it comes to the art of solo piano in jazz, there are two classes of performers: Fred Hersch and everybody else,” wrote the website allaboutjazz.com, referring to another of the artists making their debut at the Prague Spring in 2026. Jazz pianist Fred Hersch has been an influential creative force on the international jazz scene for more than three decades. The American monthly Vanity Fair described him as “the most arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade”, while The New Yorker saluted him as a “living legend”. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Hersch has received an incredible seventeen Grammy nominations. He has also earned other prestigious distinctions: the Doris Duke Artist Award 2016, the title Pianist of the Year in 2011, 2016 and 2018, conferred on him by the Jazz Journalists Association, and International Jazz Artist of the Year for 2021, awarded by the French Jazz Magazine, among many other honours. The Fred Hersch Trio, who will be performing at the Prague Spring, was voted the number one jazz group in a critics’ poll conducted by the American jazz magazine DownBeat in 2019.

A fixture of the legendary New York club Village Vanguard, Fred Hersch appears in clubs and concert venues all over the world, the Elbphilharmonie among them. He has worked with guitarist Bill Frisell, saxophonists Chris Potter and Joe Lovano and singers Esperanza Spalding, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Renée Fleming. He regularly takes his trio to major jazz festivals in Europe and the USA. He is also a sought-after composer and has been commissioned to write numerous works, for instance, for his great admirer, the pianist Igor Levit, for the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, or for the famous Lucerne Festival. He has recorded more than sixty albums, of which twelve are solo releases. The two most recent albums – The Surrounding Green, which he recorded with his trio, and the solo Silent, Listening – were collaborations with producer Manfred Eicher for the cult ECM label. In demand as a teacher, he has worked at various prominent music schools, including the Juilliard School in New York and the New England Conservatory in Boston. His performances have influenced a whole generation of jazz pianists, among whom we could name renowned pianists and Hersch’s former students Brad Mehldau and Sullivan Fortner, or his friend and colleague Jason Moran.

Fred Hersch, who celebrated his 70th birthday in 2025, has also been campaigning for years for greater awareness of AIDS. In his memoir Good Things Happen Slowly he reveals the story of his life in music, along with a frank account of both his artistic triumphs and his health struggles as the first openly gay, HIV-positive jazz musician.