Jazz Articles about Matthew Shipp

About Matthew Shipp

Album Review

In the period of 2017-2018, the leading avant-garde and free jazz pianist Matthew Shipp performed and recorded in a variety of small group settings. Often, he was paired with reed players such as Allen Lowe, Mat Walerian, Daniel Carter, Roscoe Mitchell and on an astounding dozen albums with Ivo Perelman. But it is in solo piano and trio settings that Shipp's matchless piano talents shine. In the mix of those two years were the excellent Piano Song (Thirsty Ear, 2017) ...

Album Review

Matthew Shipp: Sonic Fiction

Read "Sonic Fiction" reviewed by Don Phipps

by Don Phipps
October 28, 2018

Prolific composer and pianist Matthew Shipp demonstrates his craft on Sonic Fiction, an album chock full of bluesy, quirky, sonic landscapes that suggest a late-night visit to a Tom Waits' greasy spoon diner or a starless midnight walk along a creaky fisherman's wharf. Shipp gives his talented cohorts, Mat Walerian on clarinet and sax, Michael Bisio on bass, and Whit Dickey on drums, plenty of room to maneuver and paint their own sonic stories. The result is an intriguing exploration ...

Live Review

Shipp / Lowe / Baker / Ray at Le Poisson Rouge

by Karl Ackermann
August 13, 2018

Shipp / Lowe / Baker / Ray Le Poisson Rouge New York, NY August 11, 2018 Bring together Matthew Shipp, Newman Taylor Baker, Allen Lowe and Kevin Ray and you have more than an inspired music event; this is a living history that--by professional extension--covers the study of the earliest American music to the creation of the most modern creative jazz. On August 11, 2018, Le Poisson Rouge in New York's Greenwich ...

Album Review

Matthew Shipp: Symbol Systems

Read "Symbol Systems" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
June 11, 2018

Recorded originally in 1995 and released on No More Records, Matthew Shipp's Symbol Systems finds new life on Hatology in 2018. This was Shipp's first solo-piano recording whose genesis lay in the ideas of producer Alan Schneider. The recording is the result of a day spent in the studio by Shipp effusing what Shipp described to writer Lyn Horton in All About Jazz as thirteen “compact miniatures of ideas imposed on a structure." If Shipp sounds like a brainy mystic, ...

Album Review

Matthew Shipp: Invisible Touch At Taktlos Zurich

Read "Invisible Touch At Taktlos Zurich" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
May 26, 2018

On Invisible Touch At Taktlos Zurich, echoes of the jazz and classical traditions rub shoulders in a bewitching amalgam of insistent phrases, left hand tumult, undulating abstractions and gossamer melody. “No change there then," you might say when considering this installment of Matthew Shipp's solo oeuvre from May 2016. By this stage in his career the pianist was standing as one of the premier instrumentalists in the modern jazz arena, with an utterly distinctive style. That is borne out by ...

Album Review

Matthew Shipp: Zero

by Mark Corroto
April 16, 2018

There has always been a connection between Thelonious Monk and Matthew Shipp, just not in the music they play. Monk, a student of Harlem stride piano, was present at the birth of bebop. Shipp, born in 1960, has always been associated with the avant-garde, free jazz and improvisation. The connection between the two pianists is their creation of a distinctive and personal language. Monk's melodic twists were foreign to many listeners and were put down as being weird and unconventional. ...

Album Review

Matthew Shipp: Zero

by Karl Ackermann
February 6, 2018

In a recent interview with Jazz Trail's Filipe Freitas, pianist/composer Matthew Shipp talked about returning to his long-standing inquiry into how spontaneous free improvisation develops. His thought process involves “the same metaphysical concepts that have always been what I ask -how things come out of nothing?" Shipp's line of questioning is strikingly close in its relationship to the concepts of a physical universe arising from “nothing," the nothing being the energy of empty space. Shipp--like physicists--expresses a fascination with what ...