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Matthew Shipp trio at Ai Confini tra Sardegna Jazz 2019

By Danilo Codazzi

A Focus on Matthew Shipp

By Bob Osborne

This time around a focus on master pianist and composer Matthew Shipp with a selection of material from across his career. In between new music from post-EST super-group Rymden and more selections from the highly talented William Tatge. Playlist Matthew Shipp Trio “Signature" from Signature (ESP Disc) 00:00 William Tatge Trio “Hidden Agenda" from General Cargo (Brooklyn Jazz Underground) 07:32 Rymden “Reflections" from Reflections and Odysseys (Jazzland) 15:27 Matthew Shipp “Gamma Ray" from Invisible Touch at Taktlos Zurich ...

Matthew Shipp Announces Presidential Campaign

By Mark Corroto

I like to think about Matthew Shipp's music in the same light as that of Eric Dolphy and Charlie Parker. If both artists, Bird and Dolphy, had the level of support from critics and listeners that they currently command while they were still alive, the pair would have been wealthy. Okay, that plus honest record companies executives that didn't rip them off and steal their publishing rights. What I'm getting at here is there are giants that live amongst us. ...

Kris Davis/Matt Mitchell/Aruán Ortiz/Matthew Shipp: New American Songbooks, Volume 2

By Karl Ackermann

Nate Wooley--as a Producer--equals his composer, improviser, and trumpeter alter ego. The editor-in-chief of the journal Sound American and distributor of music through the label of the same name, has issued a second edition of his forward thinking New American Songbook series. New American Songbooks, Volume 1, (Pleasure of the Text, 2017) was a cooperative trio of drummer Greg Saunier, guitarist Mary Halvorson and Ron Miles on cornet. Unlike any number of familiar “Great American Songbook" collections, this one featured ...

Matthew Shipp Trio: Signature

By Karl Ackermann

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) ...

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 ...

Shipp / 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 ...

Matthew 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, ...

Matthew 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 ...

Matthew 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. ...

Matthew 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 ...

Matthew 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 ...