Feebles, Fables and Ferns documents the only recorded meeting between guitarist Mick Goodrick and pianist Fred Hersch, a duo session from August 1988 that stayed unreleased for almost four decades. Goodrick died in November 2022, so ECM issues it as a posthumous release. It is a record of close listening: the two rarely trade solos in the usual way, and their lines wind around each other, often passing the melody back and forth.
Both men were active in Boston at the time, and Hersch invited Goodrick to record some duets in the studio he then ran in New York. The credits give Classic Sound Studio, NYC, with A.T. Michael MacDonald as engineer and Hersch as producer of the original session. Chris Allen remixed the tapes in 2025. Goodrick taught generations of guitarists in Boston, including nearly twenty years at the New England Conservatory, and his students and protégés included Pat Metheny, John Scofield and Bill Frisell. Yet he recorded rarely as a leader. Looking back in 2025, Hersch said that "there was a lot of profound listening going on between the both of us."
The title piece is Goodrick's own, first heard on his ECM album In Pas(s)ing (1979), and here it opens the set with interlocking lines. Away 10 / Amazing sets a Goodrick fragment, introduced by Hersch at the piano alone, against a tune by Steve Swallow, whose Falling Grace also appears. Five Excursions joins five spontaneous improvisations into one nine-minute piece, freer and more abstract than anything else here. Hersch's Heartsong, Johnny Green's Out of Nowhere and Mal Waldron's Soul Eyes complete the programme, with the Waldron ballad as the close.
The release was widely welcomed. Jack Kenny of All About Jazz described "a quiet, arresting masterpiece of jazz dialogue: graceful, understated, and endlessly absorbing." In Jazz Journal (2026), Simon Adams called it "an unexpected treasure", and Presto Music chose it as a Recording of the Week. Several reviewers stressed how unusual it is for ECM to issue an archive tape made outside its own circle of studios, and how naturally the sound sits within the label's catalogue. Hersch, who records for ECM himself, also gave his old partner first billing on the cover.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2876, released on 19 June 2026. The cover photograph is by Jean-Guy Lathuilière.
