Famous Pianist Fred Hersch at the 5th Backstage Live Pula Festival

One of the world’s best jazz pianists, Fred Hersch, will perform on July 12 at INK Pula during the 5th Backstage Live Pula Festival.

Fred Hersch has shaped the course of music for over three decades as an improviser, composer, educator, bandleader, collaborator, and musical artist. Vanity Fair named him ‘the most interesting innovative pianist in jazz in the last decade’, The L.A. Times called him ‘an elegant force of musical invention’, and The New Yorker referred to him as ‘a living legend’.

In addition to specializing in solo performances, Fred Hersch has released twelve solo albums. Nominated for a Grammy Award fifteen times, Hersch has regularly won other prestigious jazz awards, including recent honors: Doris Duke Artist (2016), and the Jazz Journalists Association named him jazz pianist of the year (2016 and 2018).

The L’ Acádemie Charles Cros awarded him the Prix Honorem de Jazz in 2017 for his entire career. Recently, he was ranked second in the jazz musician of the year and named the third jazz pianist in the DownBeat Critics poll for 2021. The magazine Jazz (France) named him International Jazz Artist of the Year 2021. He is also a recipient of honorary doctorates from Grinnell College and Northern Kentucky University.

Throughout his career, Hersch has collaborated with jazz giants such as: Art Farmer, Toots Thielemans, Lee Konitz, Paquito D’Rivera, Phil Woods, Gary Burton, Stan Getz, Charlie Haden, Anat Cohen, Bill Frisell, Kurt Elling, Esperanza Spalding, Cecile McLorin Salvant, and others, but he has also achieved an exceptional career as a bandleader. On more than sixty albums, which he recorded as a (co)leader of ensembles, he has demonstrated great versatility. For these releases, he recorded his own compositions as well as jazz standards, arrangements of works by well-known jazz musicians with different interpretations of music, such as Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, and Wayne Shorter, classics, tangos, Jobim’s bossa nova, works by contemporary Brazilian authors, etc.

He also published the acclaimed memoir Good Things Happen Slowly, a book that compellingly reveals the story of his life in music, along with a candid confession about his health issues. He is the first declared homosexual, HIV-positive jazz musician. The Washington Post and New York Times named it one of the five best memoirs in 2017, and the Jazz Journalists Association declared it the best book on jazz in 2018. His story is also told through the feature documentary The Ballad of Fred Hersch, directed by acclaimed filmmakers Carrie Lozano and Charlotte Lagarde, which premiered in a sold-out hall at the prestigious Full Frame Film Festival in 2016 and is still being screened.

For two decades, Hersch has been a passionate spokesperson who, through his work and personal engagement, raises funds for services that help those affected by AIDS and educational agencies. He has produced and performed on four charity albums and at numerous charity concerts, and to date, his efforts have raised over $300,000. He has also been a keynote speaker and performer at international medical conferences in the U.S. and Europe.

Tickets for the concert can be purchased at the INK box office and online, with 50 percent of the proceeds from sales being donated to life insurance policies for children placed in the Ruža Petrović Children’s Home.