{"id":1978,"date":"2016-08-13T22:41:07","date_gmt":"2016-08-13T20:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/?p=1978"},"modified":"2019-09-14T22:33:23","modified_gmt":"2019-09-14T20:33:23","slug":"listen-to-fred-hersch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/?p=1978","title":{"rendered":"Listen to Fred Hersch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You have to watch this youtube video:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Fred Hersch - Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell)\" width=\"625\" height=\"352\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fOQ39JBHii8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>To me Fred Hersch&#8217;s version of &#8220;Both Sides Now&#8221; is profoundly beautiful and touching. It clearly stands out compared to the millions of stimuli that I get on a day to day basis. When I say stimuli I mean everything ranging from music, photography, writing, management presentations, engineering solutions, mathematical equations to coffee table discussions. In my quest to understanding &#8220;Life, the Universe &amp; Everything&#8221; I can&#8217;t resist to ask: &#8220;Why?&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>To tell you the truth, I don&#8217;t think I have a way to test my answers (hypotheses) in a &#8220;true-or-false&#8221; manner. However my intuition at the moment tells me this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Technique. You have to be in control of your fingers to be one of the top piano players in the world. Interestingly I don&#8217;t think you have to be in total control, as in all points in the four dimensional &#8220;what finger, what key, what intensity, what time&#8221; space. You just have to cover a big-enough, interesting-enough subspace, which is a challenge already.<\/li>\n<li>References. &#8220;Both Sides Now&#8221; by Joni Mitchell is considered a master piece in its own right. Not only has it proven to capture people&#8217;s minds, but for those who know it already, it will most likely trigger positive emotions instantaneously. Similarly Fred Hersch&#8217;s interpretation is firmly rooted in the tradition of Jazz, which provides another huge set of references.<\/li>\n<li>Story Telling. From the first note to the last Fred Hersch takes you on a journey that is logical from one note\/one phrase to the next and that is holistically consistent in a way that it captures your imagination throughout the piece.<\/li>\n<li>Personality. Both what he plays and how he plays it screams &#8220;Fred Hersch&#8221;. Even if you would transcribe his music and have it played by some random, classically trained pianist, it would probably lack some important characteristics.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For lack of scientific methods, I can&#8217;t be sure that this list is correct or exhaustive. But what I can say is that I find all of these qualities in Fred Hersch&#8217;s &#8220;Both Sides Now&#8221; and that I should certainly make sure they are in the random coffee table discussion to make it just as beautiful and touching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You have to watch this youtube video: To me Fred Hersch&#8217;s version of &#8220;Both Sides Now&#8221; is profoundly beautiful and touching. It clearly stands out compared to the millions of stimuli that I get on a day to day basis. When I say stimuli I mean everything ranging from music, photography, writing, management presentations, engineering [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[24,12,29],"class_list":["post-1978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life_and_stuff","tag-engineering","tag-music","tag-reflection"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p15PpI-vU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1978"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1983,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions\/1983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chschmid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}