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Silent, Listening is both a highly individual musical offering and an important contribution to ECM’s line of innovative solo piano recordings.

It finds US pianist Fred Hersch, one of jazz’s most outstanding soloists, putting a poetic emphasis on alert, open improvisation while also embracing original compositions and a scattering of standard tunes in his album’s graceful creative arc.

Interspersing songs and spontaneously composed pieces, Hersch shapes and sustains a musical atmosphere that he describes as “nocturnal,” an atmosphere of heightened sensitivity to sound.

“I still believe in the idea of an album as a complete musical statement from beginning to end,” he says, adding that this is a perspective being lost in an impatient age. “To me, an album has to tell a story.” Silent, Listening builds upon Hersch’s alliance with Manfred Eicher, established with The Song Is You, Fred’s duo album with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava.

“The things that I’ve been happiest with in my life as a musician in jazz,” Fred says, “have been those things that have happened most organically. And in that recording with Enrico, which was made very spontaneously, I recognized that something special was going on. I said afterwards that I’d really like to make a solo album with Manfred as producer, in the same hall – where the acoustics, to my ear, are pretty-near perfect – and on the same piano.”

1. Star-Crossed Lovers
2. Night Tide Light
3. Akrasia
4. Silent, Listening
5. Starlight
6. Aeon
7. Little Song
8. The Wind
9. Volon
10. Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise
11. Winter of my Discontent

This magnificently honed and vibrantly sculpted new recording opens on the ________________ of Star-Crossed Lovers and the __________ of Night Tide Light, and then we get brought forth the _________ of Akrasia, the _______________ of the titular Silent, Listening and the ________________________ of Starlight.

Along next is the ___________________ of Aeon and the __________ of Little Song and they are in turn backed seamlessly by the ____ of The Wind, the _______ of Volon, the album rounding out on the _________ of Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise, closing on the ______ of Winter of my Discontent.