There are evenings in a jazz festival when the music seems to become larger than the stage on which it is performed. The ninth and tenth days of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival 2026 belonged to precisely that kind of experience.
First came the Fred Hersch Trio, bringing to the festival an art of extraordinary delicacy, emotional depth and harmonic intelligence. The following evening, Linda May Han Oh and her trio opened another door, one leading toward the restless, questioning and beautifully unpredictable language of contemporary jazz.
Two trios. Two generations. Two very different musical philosophies.
And yet, beneath the differences, there was one essential connection: the art of listening. Fred Hersch: the piano as memory, breath and poetry
Fred Hersch has reached that rare stage in an artist’s life where technique is no longer something that needs to be demonstrated. It has become invisible—absorbed completely into expression.
His playing possesses an extraordinary intimacy. A single chord can feel like a landscape; a melody, seemingly simple, can carry the emotional weight of an entire story. Hersch does not merely play notes. He allows them to breathe.
From the opening moments of the concert, the trio established an atmosphere of attentive concentration. There was no unnecessary theatricality. Instead, the music developed through tiny gestures: the weight given to a chord, the hesitation before a phrase, the barely perceptible change of rhythm, the way a melodic idea was passed from piano to bass and then transformed by the drums.
This is one of Hersch’s greatest gifts—the ability to make silence an active participant in the music.
His improvisations seemed to emerge organically from the compositions, as though the written material were merely the beginning of a conversation. Themes were opened, examined, fragmented and rediscovered. Familiar harmonic territory could suddenly acquire an unexpected emotional colour.
At times the piano sounded almost orchestral, Hersch suggesting entire harmonic worlds with astonishing economy. At others, his playing became almost conversational, intimate enough to resemble a voice speaking directly to a single listener.
There was also a profound connection between jazz tradition and classical sensibility. Hersch’s harmonic vocabulary can move effortlessly between the blues, bebop, post-bop, the Great American Songbook and the refined architecture of European classical music. Yet the result never feels academic.
It feels human. That humanity is perhaps the central quality of Hersch’s art. The trio: three musicians, one breathing organism. The greatness of a piano trio is often measured by what happens between the notes written on the page.
Here, the bass was not simply a harmonic foundation. It became a second melodic voice, capable of answering the piano, challenging it and extending its ideas. The drums, meanwhile, operated as colour, architecture and motion rather than merely keeping time.
The three musicians appeared to understand that the strongest ensemble playing is not about occupying every available space. It is about knowing when to enter—and, perhaps more importantly, when not to.
The result was music of extraordinary equilibrium
The trio could move from fragile intimacy to rhythmic intensity without breaking the underlying emotional thread. A quiet passage could gradually accumulate energy until it became almost overwhelming, while a technically sophisticated improvisation could suddenly dissolve into a single beautifully placed note.
The audience was therefore not simply watching a performance. It was being invited into a musical act of discovery. From Hersch’s introspection to Linda May Han Oh’s horizon The following evening changed the atmosphere completely.
If Fred Hersch’s music often feels like an inward journey, Linda May Han Oh’s music suggests movement across a much wider landscape.
Oh is one of the most compelling bassist-composers of her generation, and her trio represents an especially fascinating aspect of contemporary jazz: music in which composition and improvisation are not separate activities but two sides of the same creative process.
Her bass is simultaneously foundation, melody, rhythm and commentary
There is remarkable physicality in her playing, but it is never merely muscular. Her instrument can produce immense low-frequency power, yet she is equally comfortable with fragile, almost transparent textures. She can make the bass speak in long lyrical phrases and then transform it into a rhythmic engine capable of pushing the entire trio forward.
The trio’s music possessed an unmistakably modern architecture
Rather than relying on conventional song structures alone, compositions seemed to unfold as evolving environments. Rhythmic figures appeared and disappeared. Harmonies shifted unexpectedly. Melodic fragments became points of departure for improvisation. The musicians seemed constantly to be asking one another questions.
And sometimes the most exciting answers were the ones that could not have been predicted. The beauty of uncertainty. This is where Linda May Han Oh’s artistic language becomes especially powerful. Her music does not seek to eliminate uncertainty.
It embraces it
The trio moves through spaces where rhythm can suddenly become unstable, where a melodic line can lead somewhere unexpected, where the boundaries between composed material and spontaneous invention become almost impossible to distinguish.
Yet underneath this freedom is exceptional discipline. Nothing sounds accidental. The complexity is carefully controlled, but it never feels constrained. That balance—between structure and freedom—is one of the defining characteristics of the best contemporary jazz.
Oh’s bass often functioned as the gravitational centre of the ensemble, while the other musicians moved around it in constantly changing relationships. At one moment the bass might provide a deep rhythmic foundation; in the next, it could rise into the melodic foreground while the drums and accompanying voice of the trio reshaped the harmonic space around it. The result was music that demanded—and rewarded—close listening.
Two trios, one festival philosophy
Placed beside one another, these two evenings revealed something essential about the artistic identity of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival 2026.
Fred Hersch represented the extraordinary possibilities of musical refinement: the beauty of the mature improviser, the emotional power of understatement, the ability to transform harmony into intimate human expression.
Linda May Han Oh represented musical expansion: the contemporary composer’s desire to question structures, reshape rhythm and discover new relationships between composition and improvisation.
One looked inward. The other looked outward. One made silence speak. The other made uncertainty sing. But both understood that jazz ultimately depends upon communication.
This is what made their consecutive appearances so meaningful. Rather than presenting two unrelated concerts, the festival created an artistic dialogue between different generations and approaches to the music.
Olivia Peevas and the art of building a festival
Behind such a dialogue stands the indispensable artistic vision of Olivia Peevas, Director and Artistic Director of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival.
A festival of this scale is not created simply by assembling famous names. Its identity is created through the relationships between those names. Programming is an act of musical storytelling.
And Peevas has demonstrated a remarkable understanding of that principle
The progression of the festival—from blues, rhythm and swing through contemporary jazz, from internationally established legends to younger voices and from deeply rooted traditions to adventurous new forms—creates the impression of a musical journey rather than a sequence of isolated events.
The choice to place Fred Hersch and Linda May Han Oh on consecutive evenings is particularly revealing.
It says something important about what the festival believes jazz can be. Jazz can be intimate. Jazz can be intellectual. Jazz can be emotional. Jazz can be rooted in history while simultaneously imagining the future.
And jazz can belong to everyone who is willing to listen
Olivia Peevas’ contribution is therefore not merely administrative or organisational. Her role is fundamentally artistic. She provides the framework in which musicians from different backgrounds can meet audiences in meaningful circumstances, while giving the festival a recognizable identity and a strong international cultural presence.
Her curatorial vision allows the EU Jazz & Blues Festival to function as more than an annual collection of concerts. It becomes a living conversation between cultures, generations and musical traditions.
Two nights that remained in the air
When the final notes of Linda May Han Oh’s performance faded, the memory of these two evenings did not disappear with them.
Fred Hersch had left behind the impression of music as intimate reflection—a piano speaking quietly about beauty, memory, longing and time.
Linda May Han Oh had left another kind of impression: music as discovery, movement and possibility.
Between them, the ninth and tenth days of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival 2026 revealed the extraordinary elasticity of jazz. It can whisper. It can challenge. It can remember. It can reinvent itself. And, most importantly, it can continue to create a space in which musicians and audiences meet without barriers.
Under the artistic direction of Olivia Peevas, the festival once again demonstrated that the greatest jazz festivals are not simply places where music is performed. They are places where music is allowed to mean something. And on these two evenings, Fred Hersch and Linda May Han Oh gave that meaning two beautifully different voices.
By Lauren Wulff
