Ivo Perelman: Armageddon Flower

Pianist Matthew Shipp serves as the fulcrum of Armageddon Flower, a riveting quartet date that unites two longstanding units: the duo with tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman, and his String Trio with violist Mat Maneri and bassist William Parker. However, no-one is confined by past roles. Each of these four players has collaborated in multiple configurations over the last three decades. So four known quantities perhaps, but the familiarity here breeds neither complacency nor predictability. What emerges is a daring, combustible session in which trust becomes the catalyst for volatility and deep listening.

The album's four extended tracks unfold with a spaciousness that invites structural elasticity. Tempos shift, densities rise and fall, and the band explores terrain that veers from martial to meditative to playful, often within a single piece. The quartet alternates between the brittle intimacy of chamber music and the energetic push-pull of free jazz and even, on occasion, a full-blown rhythmic stomp, which is at its most overt on the seesawing title cut.

Perelman has created his own language, especially in duet with Shipp, but his slightly curdled incantations meet their match in the violist's sorrow-infused asymmetric lines. The passion inherent in their beseeching cries results in a sound world in which anguish and decay are only partly offset by an austere beauty.

On "Tree of Life," their introductory duo passage is especially arresting: sliding between pitches, wrapping around each other in a somber, a cappella invocation. Perelman deploys an astringent, not cloying, melodicism, but employs his characteristic falsetto register sparingly, ensuring all the more impact when he does. Maneri's mournful phrasing, spiked with shards of bow noise, further amplifies the emotional ambiguity.

Shipp, for his part, acts less as a soloist than as a gravitational center, buttressing rather than blazing. His underlying punctuation—sometimes thunderous, often restrained—shapes the ensemble's energy and steers its dynamic arcs. Parker fulfills a complementary role: anchoring the group with an understated authority, yet capable of sudden, barbed counter-lines that refocus the narrative. His bow work throughout introduces a jagged lyricism, especially on the closer, "Restoration," a ballad form riven by dissonance and shaken by intermittent depth charges, before Shipp's concluding coda, stately and unadorned, offers a hard-won sense of repose.

The integration of the two outfits stands among the most fully realized by any of the participants. Perelman's raw immediacy gifts the String Trio a clarity and directness often absent from its more abstract outings, while the trio's interwoven density deepens and refracts the saxophonist's linear intensity. As such, the project represents a testament to the evolving power of long-term partnerships, and to the art of improvisation not as chaos, but as communion.

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