It's a jazz pianist's survey of 20th century popular music and the band has to be agile and dexterous to pull off what Hersch is after in the music's performance.
The 58-year-old Hersch was born and raised in Cincinnati where began studying piano as a child and found jazz as a teenager.
"It really came by stumbling into jazz clubs in Cincinnati and happening to listen to certain things and being around certain people," Hersch said. "I'd been improvising my whole life. When I was kid it sounded like classical music. The way I came up learning was on the bandstand and playing with jazz blues singers.
It's not that Hersch is a conservative jazz historian or an anti-modern contrarian; he just appreciates the legacy of jazz while expecting the art form to continue developing. But he feels that some of the life and vitality of jazz that he initially loved is being lost.
Hersch should have a sense of the younger generation since he is helping form it through teaching appointments at The New School and the Manhattan School of Music. He's also on the Jazz Studies faculty of the New England Conservatory. Some of his former students include Brad Mehldau, and Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus.
While Hersch has created projects that include setting Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" to music with vocalists, as well as a multimedia theater piece called "My Coma Dreams" – which featured an actor/singer, 11 musicians and computer-generated images – he also continues a career-long fascination with Thelonious Monk's music.