Articles
Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.
Listener's Choice
We've been looking at various critic's and website's “best jazz of the 2010's" lists, but now the listeners get to weigh in. Their wide-ranging suggestions encompass a couple of fairly accessible albums and a couple more challenging discs, all featuring artists who have yet to appear as headliners on our show. This will conclude our sequence on the best of the decade, but don't worry—things won't get back to normal yet. Holiday and eighth anniversary episodes are in the chamber.
read moreMatthew Shipp: The Unidentifiable
We can talk about a Bud Powell school of the piano trio, or a Bill Evans school of the piano trio, but maybe it is time to start talking about Mathew Shipp's trio school, with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker. Shipp has been around the jazz scene for three decades. He has developed a distinctive voice. He sounds like no-one else. If you can't start your own school under those circumstances, then when can you?
read moreMatthew Shipp String Trio: Symbolic Reality
Pianist Matthew Shipp's String Trio reunites three familiar collaborators whose paths cross in multiple settings. Bassist William Parker and violist Mat Maneri complete a line-up unchanged since the triumvirate's debut By The Law Of Music (Hatology, 1997). In the twenty-plus years since that point, they have further cemented their standing in the jazz world as leading stylists on their instruments. In this chamber setting they function as interlocking parts in a mysterious jigsaw which depicts an abstract realm ...
read moreMatthew Shipp: Poetic Connection
It is difficult to describe the impact of pianist and composer Matthew Shipp without descending into hyperbole. A core figure in the now-legendary David S. Ware Quartet, a bandleader with a staggering recording output, a groundbreaking curator for the influential Blues Series of Thirsty Ear Records, Matthew Shipp has also more recently broken new ground at the helm of the extraordinary Matthew Shipp Trio, featuring bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker. Preparing to celebrate his 60th ...
read moreMatthew Shipp: The Piano Equation
Let the celebration of pianist Matthew Shipp's 60th birthday year 2020 commence with The Piano Equation. Having released a dozen or so prior solo sessions, this also is a recording sans nostalgia. Shipp, like Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, or Thelonious Monk before him, does not pine for the past, but ceaselessly forges a path onward. And outward. As with the esteemed masters listed above, Shipp has created his own piano language, best described as a percussive decoding of ...
read moreMatthew Shipp: The Piano Equation
Matthew Shipp is like an engineer from another dimension. In three decades of making music, he maintains an inquisitiveness for expanding new dialects and an aptitude for blending composition and exploration. Marking his sixtieth birthday, The Piano Equation reveals the pianist contemplating past experiments if only as a platform for the future; a foundation for yet another new conception. Seeing words like “equation," “vortex," or “cosmic" in Shipp's titles points to a theoretical approach that the composer's loyal audiences are ...
read moreMatthew Shipp: The Piano Equation
A sixtieth birthday might be greeted as a time of reflection, a looking back on a life well-lived. Or it might serve as a call to action, as it did for pianist Satoko Fujii as she celebrated her sixtieth trip around the sun by releasing twelve albums in 2018. Matthew Shipp also answers the call to action at hitting that six decade mark, though he probably won't take things as far as Fujii did. But who knows? He is a ...
read more
Contest Giveaway
Weekly newsletter
Get more of a good thing
Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories and includes your local jazz events calendar.
