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Francisco Mela featuring Matthew Shipp and William Parker: Music Frees Our Souls Vol. 1
by John Sharpe
Music Frees Our Souls furthers Cuban drummer Francisco Mela's ongoing ventures in freely improvised surroundings. Already well-established with heavyweight leaders such as McCoy Tyner, Joe Lovano and Esperanza Spalding, as well as a series of dates under his own name, Mela has now enlisted pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker, two of the best in this particular business, in his quest for spontaneous magic. When joining such a long-lasting partnership, (Parker and Shipp first hooked up ...
Continue ReadingOther Minds 25, Day 2
by John Chacona
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 Taube Atrium Theater Other Minds Festival San Francisco, CA October 15, 2021 There are festivals for which centering the social aspect of music is the point of the exercise. Conceived, as founder Charles Amirkhanian put it in Thursday's pre-concert talk, a vehicle “to support artists who don't... have commercial potential," San Francisco's Other Minds is not Bonnaroo. Yet each of the ...
Continue ReadingWhit Dickey / William Parker / Matthew Shipp: Village Mothership
by Mark Corroto
If drummer Whit Dickey, bassist William Parker, and pianist Matthew Shipp were a rock band, we might expect them to cover their classic album Circular Temple (Quinton Records, 1992) an LP, later re-released on the Infinite Zero label in 1994. Of course they are not a rock band, but If they were, we probably would demand they perform the music on Circular Temple in the exact same manner as it sounded three decades earlier. But that's just not the way ...
Continue ReadingMatthew Shipp / William Parker: Re-Union
by John Sharpe
Some thirty years after they first recorded together as part of saxophonist David S. Ware's celebrated Quartet, pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker convened once more in a Paris studio for Re-Union. And though their signature styles have become familiar in the interim thanks to sizeable discographies and frequent collaborations, the pair's ultra-refined chemistry remains as potent as ever. Their intimate dialogue both entices and enthralls on the four snatched-from-the-air inventions here, engendering a smile of recognition and a ...
Continue ReadingWilliam Parker - Matthew Shipp: Re-Union
by Karl Ackermann
Matthew Shipp and William Parker are in a space which they arrived at more or less together. The pair first recorded together with the quartet on David S. Ware's Great Bliss, Vol. 1 (Silkheart, 1991). Not long afterwards, in 1994, they released Zo, the first of their duo projects, on the now-defunct Rise label; it was reissued on Thirsty Ear in 2016 during Shipp's tenure as the label's artistic director. In a compact setting, that early effort allowed listeners a ...
Continue ReadingWilliam Parker: Mayan Space Station & Painters Winter
by Eric Gudas
"Ungentrified funk": that's how William Parker characterized the music of his Mayan Space Station ensemble after a Zoom-transmitted performance—plus Q&A session— in the summer of 2020. Like Duke Ellington and Cecil Taylor—the latter whose group he played with in the 1980s—the protean Parker has become a genre unto himself. Parker's brand of funk has deep musical and cultural roots in the 1970s loft jazz scene, which thrived in the (then) as-yet-ungentrified neighborhoods of Soho and the Lower East Side. For ...
Continue ReadingTwo William Parker Trios
by Jerome Wilson
The prolific bassist and composer William Parker has been making music with groups of all sizes and configurations for decades, Here are two new releases featuring him in wildly divergent trios. William Parker Painters Winter AUM Fidelity 2021 On this CD Parker teams up with two long-time associates, multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter and drummer Hamid Drake. Parker has been working with Carter since the '80s in the group Other Dimensions in Music ...
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