Fred Hersch was born October 21, 1955, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Jewish parents. He began piano lessons at four with teacher Jeanne Kirstein, was composing his own music by eight, and was winning national piano competitions by ten — a prodigy's résumé years before he ever thought of himself as a jazz musician. He cut his teeth on Cincinnati's local jazz scene as a teenager before enrolling at Grinnell College in Iowa, where his interest in jazz first took hold. He left Grinnell without finishing and, in 1975, enrolled at the New England Conservatory in Boston to study under pianist and composer Jaki Byard. Hersch graduated with honors in 1977 and moved straight to New York City, where he spent his early twenties paying dues as a sideman, playing nightly wherever the work was. He didn't stay away from NEC for long: in 1980 he returned to take over the jazz piano teaching post Byard had vacated, beginning a teaching career that would eventually run in parallel with his performing life for more than four decades.

Hersch's recording career as a leader opened in the mid-1980s with a run of strikingly assured records: Horizons (1985, Concord Jazz), a trio date with Marc Johnson and Joey Baron; As One (1985, JMT), a duo album with soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom; and Sarabande (1987, Sunnyside), a trio session with the estimable rhythm section of Charlie Haden and Joey Baron. Across the following decade he built two parallel discographies at once — a series of trio records for labels including Chesky, Sunnyside, and Nonesuch, and a series of solo-piano recital records exploring a single composer or songbook at a time: I Never Told You: Fred Hersch Plays Johnny Mandel (1996), Passion Flower: Fred Hersch Plays Billy Strayhorn (1996), and Thelonious: Fred Hersch Plays Monk (1998) among the most acclaimed. That solo-recital format became one of the signatures of his career, eventually growing into a personal catalog of twelve dedicated solo-piano albums stretched across three decades, from 1994's At Maybeck to 2024's Silent, Listening.

In 1993, Hersch became one of the first prominent instrumentalists in jazz to publicly disclose that he was both gay and HIV-positive, having been in treatment for the virus since 1984. He wrote candidly, later in his 2017 memoir Good Things Happen Slowly, about weighing that disclosure against the fear of being reduced in a still-macho jazz world to "that gay jazz pianist with AIDS" — and about choosing to live and work openly anyway. In February 2006 he became the first pianist in the Village Vanguard's history to headline a full solo week at the club, an achievement he would repeat and eventually document on record with 2011's Alone at the Vanguard.

Two years after that first solo week, in 2008, Hersch nearly didn't survive to make it. HIV-related dementia and a bout of pneumonia progressed into sepsis and septic shock, and doctors placed him in a medically induced coma that lasted roughly two months. He emerged unable to walk, unable to speak above a whisper — his vocal cords had been paralyzed — and unable to use his hands well enough to play a note of piano. He spent nearly a year in the hospital rebuilding, by increments, the physical vocabulary of a working pianist. He not only recovered his playing but turned the experience directly into art: in 2011 he premiered My Coma Dreams, a jazz-theater piece built from the hallucinatory dreams he'd had while unconscious, with actor/singer Michael Winther performing alongside Hersch's ensemble; a filmed performance was released on DVD by Palmetto Records in 2014.

The years since have been, by any measure, some of the most productive and honored of his career. His working trio — for long stretches anchored by bassist John Hébert and drummer Eric McPherson, and in earlier configurations by Drew Gress alongside Tom Rainey or Nasheet Waits — was voted the number one jazz group in DownBeat's 2019 Critics Poll. Sunday Night at the Vanguard (2016) and Open Book (2017) extended his trio and solo lines respectively; 2022's Breath by Breath, built around an eight-movement Sati Suite inspired by his insight-meditation practice and scored for trio plus the Crosby Street String Quartet, pushed his writing into chamber-jazz territory more fully than any record before it. In January 2023 he released Alive at the Village Vanguard, an intimate duo recording with singer/bassist Esperanza Spalding that earned a Grammy nomination. His most recent chapter has unfolded on ECM: 2022's duo record with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava, The Song Is You; 2024's solo album Silent, Listening, produced by ECM founder Manfred Eicher; and 2025's The Surrounding Green, a trio date with longtime collaborators Drew Gress and Joey Baron, again produced by Eicher. In 2026, ECM released Feebles, Fables and Ferns, an intimate guitar-piano duo session Hersch recorded with Mick Goodrick in his New York studio in August 1988 and shelved for decades — released only after Goodrick's death in 2022, as a tribute to a friend and fellow Boston-scene veteran.

Alongside all of it, Hersch has remained one of jazz's most consequential teachers, holding posts at the New England Conservatory, the Juilliard School, the New School, Rutgers University, and the Manhattan School of Music. Pianists Brad Mehldau and Ethan Iverson (of the Bad Plus) both passed through his studio early in their careers, as did Sullivan Fortner and Dan Tepfer more recently. His NEC classroom also produced pianist and composer Devin Roth, who studied jazz composition under Hersch (alongside bassists Dave Holland and Cecil McBee) on the way to a career that runs jazz writing and Hollywood film scoring in parallel — Roth's own JazzProfiles.com profile covers that path in full.

A seventeen-time Grammy nominee, Hersch has received the Doris Duke Artist Award (2016), Jazz Pianist of the Year honors from the Jazz Journalists Association (2011, 2016, 2018), the Jazz Magazine (France) International Artist of the Year award (2021), a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for composition (2003), and honorary doctorates from Northern Kentucky University (2015) and his alma mater Grinnell College (2016). His own site puts his recorded output at more than sixty albums as a leader or co-leader — an output that, four decades on, shows no sign of slowing.

Hersch's playing is built on a classically informed touch and a harmonic sophistication he traces to Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson, filtered through an impressionist sensibility — voicings and pedaling that owe as much to Debussy and Ravel as to any jazz pianist — that made him one of the defining solo pianists of his generation. That range shows in how differently he works depending on the setting: the spare, patient unaccompanied recitals of At Maybeck or Open Book; the interplay-driven trio language of Sunday Night at the Vanguard, built on decades with the same handful of bassists and drummers; the intimate, conversational duo format he returns to again and again, whether with a saxophonist (Jane Ira Bloom), a guitarist (Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, Mick Goodrick), a trumpeter (Ralph Alessi, Enrico Rava), or a singer (Esperanza Spalding, Norma Winstone); and, on Breath by Breath, a chamber-jazz voice built around a string quartet and drawn directly from his meditation practice. Running underneath all of it is a composer's instinct for songbook repertoire — Monk, Strayhorn, Mandel, Jobim, and Rodgers & Hammerstein have each anchored a full Hersch recital — and a willingness, unusual even among his peers, to put his own life directly into the music, nowhere more explicitly than in My Coma Dreams, the jazz-theater piece he built from his own near-death experience.