Alone at the Vanguard

Pianist Fred Hersch has made quite a few brilliant jazz albums over the course of his career, and several of them have been solo piano recordings, but this one is something special. Alone at the Vanguard is exactly what you'd expect it to be: a solo album recorded over the course of a week of engagements at The Village Vanguard, perhaps the most venerated jazz performance space in New York (and, therefore, probably in the world). In the fall of 2005, Hersch played 12 sets over the course of six nights and recorded all of them with the intention of culling them down to a single disc; in the end, Hersch decided simply to release the final set in its entirety. It's difficult to convey the brilliance of these performances: his interpretations of standards like