The Ballad of Fred Hersch

FILM: The Ballad of Fred Hersch

This sensitive portrait of one of today’s foremost jazz pianists reveals an artist who, after trials that would defeat most of us, continues to be “astonishingly creative, profound and enthralling” (Downbeat). With more than thirty albums and eight Grammy nominations under his belt, Hersch is internationally revered in jazz circles as a master improviser. He is a maverick in music and in life: The first jazz musician to come out as gay and HIV-positive in the early 1990s, he miraculously survived a two-month AIDS-related coma in 2008. Both exacting and full of love, the filmmakers’ unfettered cameras capture Hersch’s creative process as he does double duty as a workaday jazzman and first-time theater producer—turning life’s tragedies into transcendent art.

Q&A fellow composer/pianist Mike Holober with a live solo piano performance by Fred Hersch