A lost 1988 duo recording by Fred Hersch and Mick Goodrick surfaces as an ECM album

A recording session Fred Hersch made with guitarist Mick Goodrick back in 1988 has surfaced as a new album, Feebles, Fables and Ferns, on ECM, JazzTimes reported on August 7. Hersch said the pairing was almost accidental: "I just asked him if he wanted to record some duo stuff. It was that simple."

Hersch was four albums into his career as a bandleader in 1988, running his own small studio in Manhattan and shuttling between New York and Boston to teach at the New England Conservatory. He had grown fond of the duo format there: "Whenever I had time and I was in the practice room, if I spied someone going by, I'd always invite them in to play," he said. "I just love the format. So when I ran into Mick, the price was right, as was the timing."

Goodrick was known to generations of guitar students as "the Guitar Whisperer" and as the author of the 1987 book The Advancing Guitarist, whose readers include Julian Lage, Mike Stern and Bill Frisell. By 1988 he had already played with Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, Jack DeJohnette and Gary Burton, and released his own ECM debut, In Pas(s)ing, in 1979.

Hersch described Goodrick as modest and quiet, with a wry sense of humor and a gift for texture that shaped how loosely the pair worked. "A lot of what we did was not delineated as piano solo or guitar solo. It just happened," Hersch said, tracing a line from that session to his own 2013 duo record with Lage, Free Flying, and calling the pairing of piano and guitar "one big instrument."

The album pairs Goodrick's title track, drawn from In Pas(s)ing, with Hersch's "Heartsong," a short suite of spontaneous pieces called "Five Excursions," and readings of Steve Swallow's "Falling Grace," Mal Waldron's "Soul Eyes" and the standard "Out of Nowhere." "The way that you hear it all on the album is how we played everything, in that order," Hersch said, calling the session an afternoon of deep listening and reacting.

Goodrick died in 2022 from complications of Parkinson's disease and Covid. Hersch said people in the guitarist's camp contacted him about the 1988 tape after Goodrick's death, prompting him to listen back for the first time in decades before deciding to release it. It's the latest addition to the release calendar and our jazz coverage.