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Matthew Shipp: Sonic Fiction
by Don Phipps
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 ...
Continue ReadingShipp / Lowe / Baker / Ray at Le Poisson Rouge
by Karl Ackermann
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 ...
Continue ReadingMatthew Shipp: Symbol Systems
by C. Michael Bailey
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, ...
Continue ReadingMatthew Shipp: Invisible Touch At Taktlos Zurich
by John Sharpe
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 ...
Continue ReadingMatthew Shipp: Zero
by Mark Corroto
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. ...
Continue ReadingMatthew Shipp: Zero
by Karl Ackermann
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 ...
Continue ReadingMatthew Shipp Quartet: Sonic Fiction
by Karl Ackermann
The ESP-Disk label simultaneously has released two distinctly different leader dates from Matthew Shipp. Zero is an excellent solo piano album, and here, we have Shipp's namesake quartet on the ten-track Sonic Fiction. The shared deference and camaraderie in this free-spirited outing allows for an appreciation of even the slightest details and distinctions--elements that can easily be lost in such an open setting. The quartet is made up of familiar Shipp colleagues but not previously heard in this ...
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