ECM indicate that in the spring they will release the latest from piano master Fred Hersch.

Silent, Listening is the title of the album, a solo piano studio creation, recorded in the Swiss city of Lugano in May 2023 at Italian-Swiss Radio/TV company RSI's Auditorio Stelio Molo.

Hersch says that the title piece ''has written material at the beginning and the end, and I improvise on its motives and feel.”

Spontaneous compositions among the set in the titling riff on Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) work - 'Volon', the name also for instance of a 1971 cardboard artwork of the world famous visual artist; and 'Aeon' sees a Rauschenberg reference in the assembling of a work called the Aeon machine, an element of the set design for dance choreographer Merce Cunningham's work Aeon.

Of the standards Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington’s 'Star-Crossed Lovers' also known as 'Pretty Girl' is among the material - the line in the S-CL titling is from Romeo and Juliet, “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,/ a pair of star crossed lovers take their life” (Prologue 5-6) and appeared on 1957's again Bard-citing Ellington classic album Such Sweet Thunder (this time the play that the line in the album title came from was from the comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream) and has been interpreted notably in recent years by saxophonist Charles Lloyd and pianist Jason Moran on Hagar's Song reviewed in these pages in 2013.

Yet another Shakespearean reference is hinted at in the titling on Silent, Listening of the Alec Wilder piece 'The Winter of My Discontent' (Richard III - not quite verbatim given the use of a ''my'' rather than an ''our'') is a tune that Hersch began playing after meeting Wilder in 1978. Hersch has interpreted the piece before as an instrumental duo with the acclaimed soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom on their As One album released in 1985.

At the end of 2022 we last experienced the Hersch sound on a recording most recently and very much enjoyed his and Esperanza Spalding's duo album Alive at the Village Vanguard (Palmetto) particularly the joy expressed in Hersch's playing on Charlie Parker's '[My] Little Suede Shoes' and the crisp bite of Spalding's scat.

Hersch and Spalding were nominated for a Grammy in the best jazz performance category for that album's treatment of the Gershwins' 'But Not For Me'. Fred Hersch, photo: Roberto Cifarelli/ECM. The Silent, Listening release date is 19 April.

Updated - adding 'Akrasia' and 'Little Song' - on 30 March