SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2018
VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO
GERI ALLEN
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
TOMEKA REID
(January 27--February 2)
FARUQ Z. BEY
(February 3--9)
HANK JONES
(February 10--16)
STANLEY COWELL
(February 17–23)
GEORGE RUSSELL
(February 24—March 2)
ALICE COLTRANE
(March 3–9)
DON CHERRY
(March 10–16)
MAL WALDRON
(March 17–23)
JON HENDRICKS
(March 24–30)
MATTHEW SHIPP
(March 31–April 6)
PHAROAH SANDERS
(April 7–13)
WALT DICKERSON
(April 14–20)https://www.allmusic.com/artist/matthew-shipp-mn0000864547/biography
MATTHEW SHIPP
(b. December 7, 1960)
Artist Biography by Joslyn Layne
With his unique and recognizable style, pianist Matthew Shipp
worked and recorded vigorously from the late '80s onward, creating
music in which free jazz and modern classical intertwined. He first
became well known in the early '90s as the pianist in the David S. Ware Quartet, and soon began leading his own dates -- most often including Ware bandmate and leading bassist William Parker -- and recording a number of duets with a variety of musicians, from the legendary Roscoe Mitchell to violinist Mat Maneri,
the latter another musician who began making a name for himself in the
'90s. Through his range of live and recorded performances and unswerving
individual development, Shipp has come to be regarded as a prolific and respected voice in creative music into the new millennium.
Born in 1960 and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, Shipp
grew up around '50s jazz recordings. He began playing piano at the
young age of five, and decided to focus on jazz by the time he was 12.
He played on a Fender Rhodes in rock bands while privately devouring
recordings by a variety of jazz players. His first mentor was a man in
his hometown named Sunyata, who was enthusiastic about a variety of
subjects in addition to music. Shipp later studied music theory and improvisation under Clifford Brown's
teacher Robert "Boisey" Lawrey, as well as classical piano and bass
clarinet for the school band. After one year at the University of
Delaware, Shipp left and took lessons with Dennis Sandole for a short time, after which he attended the New England Conservatory of Music for two years.
Shipp moved to N.Y.C. in 1984 and soon met bassist William Parker, among others. Both were playing with tenor saxophonist Ware by 1989. Meanwhile, Shipp had debuted as a recording artist in a duo with alto player Rob Brown on Sonic Explorations, recorded in November 1987 and February 1988. Shipp married singer Delia Scaife around 1990. He then went on to lead his own trio with Parker and drummers Whit Dickey and Susie Ibarra. Shipp
has led dates for a number of labels, including FMP, No More, Eremite,
Thirsty Ear, and Silkheart. In 2000, he began acting as curator for
Thirsty Ear's Blue Series. This excellent series hosted a number of Shipp's own recordings, as well as the recordings of William Parker, Tim Berne, Roy Campbell, Craig Taborn, Spring Heel Jack, and Mat Maneri. The following year saw the release of Nu Bop, an exploration into traditional jazz, followed closely by its 2003 counterpart, Equilibrium. In 2004, Shipp released Harmony and Abyss, a meditation on repetitive melodic and harmonic structures. One arrived in January 2006 and Piano Vortex followed a year later.
4D, featuring Shipp
on solo piano, was released by Thirsty Ear early in 2010. It was one of
several recordings from the pianist in the initial years of the 21st
century, which included a two-disc solo piano recital entitled Creation Out of Nothing: Live in Moscow on the SoLyd Records imprint and the stellar trio set Night Logic, with Joe Morris and former Sun Ra saxophonist Marshall Allen, on the Rogue Art label. Shipp kept up the pace in 2011, kicking off the year with the double-CD offering Art of the Improviser, which showcased him in two different live settings: one solo and one in a trio with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Whit Dickey. In the spring he released a duet recording with alto saxophonist Darius Jones entitled Cosmic Lieder on the AUM Fidelity label. In 2012, he re-formed the trio with Bisio and Dickey for Elastic Aspects. Shipp entered into a prolific collaboration with saxophonist Ivo Perelman
for a slew of projects that year, and 2013 included a duet, trios, and
quartets with various personnel, all issued by Leo Records. Titles
included The Gift, The Clairvoyant, The Foreign Legion, A Violent Dose of Anything, Enigma, The Art of the Duet, Vol. 1, The Edge, and Serendipity. In the fall of 2013, Shipp released the solo piano offering Piano Sutras for Thirsty Ear, as well as a retrospective for the label entitled Greatest Hits and a duet offering with saxophonist John Butcher, Fataka 2.
Shipp maintained a prolific release and touring pace in 2014. First to appear was the trio date The Roots of Things in February with Dickey and Bisio, followed by two more sets in various ensembles with Perelman. The first, entitled The Other Edge,
was issued in March and featured the pianist's quartet backing the
saxophonist, while the second, released the same month, was Book of Sound, a collaborative recording between Perelman, Shipp, and Parker. Symbol Systems, a solo piano outing, appeared in May from Lithuania's No Business label, while The Darkseid Recital, a second chapter in Jones' and Shipp's "Cosmic Lieder," was released in August by AUM Fidelity, followed by the solo piano offering I've Been to Many Places on Thirsty Ear in September. That year, the French Rogue Art label issued no less than four Shipp-led dates compiled from several years of performances. They included the solo Piano (2008); a duet album with Evan Parker entitled Rex, Wrecks & XXX (2013); Right Hemisphere with Brown, Dickey and Morris (2008), and Declared Enemy: Salute to the 100001 Stars: A Tribute to Jean Genet with Parker, Gerald Cleaver, Sabir Mateen, and Denis Lavant (2006).
The following year saw two more releases from the label. Our Lady of the Flowers was a Genet tribute follow-up a decade on (sans Lavant), and the controversial but still widely celebrated trio recording To Duke. Shipp also issued a pair of duet recordings: Live at Okuden: The Uppercut with Polish reed and woodwind master Mat Walerian on ESP-Disk, and Callas with Perelman for Leo.
Associations with both men produced more 13 more recordings in 2016 and 2017. Complementary Colors and Corpo were duo dates with Perelman (the pair released 13 albums together before 2017 was out), while Butterfly Whispers added Dickey to make it a trio. Live at Okuden: Jungle with Walerian and Hamid Drake, capturing a performance from 2012, was released by ESP-Disk. The pianist issued a trio date titled Piano Song in early 2017, with Michael Bisio on bass and drummer Newman Taylor Baker. Produced by Peter Gordon, it marked Shipp's
swan song as a recording artist for Thirsty Ear, though he remained
curator of its Blue Series imprint. An ESP-Disk trio date with Walerian and Parker was released as Toxic: This Is Beautiful Because We Are Beautiful People during the late spring. In early 2018, Shipp had no less than three albums released. In January, Accelerated Projection, a duo date with Roscoe Mitchell was issued by France's Rogue Art label. A month later, Shipp issued two dates through ESP-Disk simultaneously: Sonic Fiction, a quartet date with Walerian, Bisio, and Dickey and a solo piano offering entitled Zero in February.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/matthewshipp
Matthew Shipp was born December 7, 1960 in Wilmington, Delaware. He started piano at 5 years old with the regular piano lessons most kids have experienced. He fell in love with jazz at 12 years old. After moving to New York in 1984 he quickly became one of the leading lights in the New York jazz scene. He was a sideman in the David S. Ware quartet and also for Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory before making the decision to concentrate on his own music.
Mr Shipp has reached the holy grail of jazz in that he possesses a unique style on his instrument that is all of his own- and he's one of the few in jazz that can say so.
Mr. Shipp has recorded a lot of albums with many labels but his two most enduring relationships have been with two labels. In the 1990s he recorded a number of chamber jazz albums with Hatology, a group of recordings that charted a new course for jazz that, to this day, the jazz world has not realized. In the 2000s Mr Shipp has been curator and director of the label Thirsty Ear's “Blue Series” and has also recorded for them. In this collection of recordings he has generated a whole body of work that is visionary, far reaching and many faceted.
Matthew Shipp is truly one of the leading lights of a new generation of jazz giants.
http://downbeat.com/news/detail/qa-with-matthew-shipp-on-home-turf
February 17, 2017
I grew up with Shipp in Wilmington, Delaware, and, like him, spent much of my youth listening to the Jackson 5 and studying classical music in high school, so I know there is more to Shipp than the L’Enfant Terrible persona that often overshadows his music.
I sat down with Shipp for an interview in his father’s quiet home in suburban Wilmington. What emerged was an informative history of his evolution as an artist, and an explanation as to why he stopped recording after the release of his new album, Piano Song (Thirsty Ear), arguably his most integrative and ingenious work to date.
How did growing in Wilmington influence you as a musician?
Wilmington has its own extremely rich history, and is geographically close to Philly. There’s a continuum within the whole East Coast, from Boston to New York, Philly, and some parts of the South, with many tributaries. And I have taken from all of them to constitute my own unique synthesis.
What got you hooked on jazz?
There were two PBS specials featuring Ahmad Jamal and Nina Simone. They both flipped me out [laughs]. Ahmad Jamal was playing this spare blues, but his language was so cool, just the confidence he had. I didn’t know somebody could get to that. With Nina Simone, her language was so deep. It scared me [laughs]. I was playing classical music, and I was interested in improvisation. She had a classical background, but there was something about how she related the piano to a very black idiom. I really like artists who are in their own genre. Like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles. That’s what I’ve been trying to do since I was 12 years old.
You studied with Robert “Boysie” Lowery, a Wilmington educator who taught generations of local musicians, from Clifford Brown and Ernie Watts, with his methodology called The Lessons.
The Lessons were a very thought-out way of going through chord changes: a way to get you to think very slowly, and structure your solo, where you’re not just blowing through chord changes.
Another mentor was a janitor and a computer expert named Sunyata, who used to live in Newark, [Delaware]. He was a mathematical philosopher. He saw that I had possibilities in what he called the Iconoclastic Mystery School. He encouraged me to follow my own music.
Where you listening to the avant-garde during this period?
I was into Coltrane, Andrew Hill and Sun Ra. And a lot of my introduction to the music was through WRTI-FM at Temple University in Philly. I remember hearing “Salt Peanuts” with Dizzy and Bird. And that was more out to me than Coltrane. I never thought that about A Love Supreme. I also heard Malachi Favors, Sunny Murray … . WRTI really changed my life around.
You also read J.C. Thomas’ Chasing the Trane.
I read it around [when I was] 13 or 14 years old, cover to cover, 20 or 30 times. Trane’s cosmic quest comes through in the book. And Trane’s teacher, Dennis Sandole, is talked about in the book.
Sandole was a Philadelphia-based guitarist who taught advanced theory and composition. You met him through a mutual friend. What did you learn from him?
What I learned from Dennis was the mind’s capacity of constructing a language: A group of chord changes, or anything that improvisers decide to extrapolate on, is an infinite platform. And it’s up to you to work on your materials over and over again until [your music] creates its own language.
Did you better understand Trane’s music because of your studies with Sandole?
I think I understood Trane’s methodology more. I think I had an intuitive understanding of what he was aiming for, from the first time I ever saw the cover of A Love Supreme in Wilmington Dry Goods as a 12- or 13-year-old [laughs].
You moved to New York City in 1984, from Boston, where you studied at the New England Conservatory. Who were your pianistic influences then?
In the ’70s, Keith Jarrett and Cecil Taylor were doing solo concerts. That whole idea of solo-piano-as-extemporary-composition was really in the air because of those two practitioners. So if I’m going to go that way, how am I going to do it? I don’t want to be Cecil Taylor … and I definitely don’t want to be Keith Jarrett, because I don’t like him. But that kind of structural element of how to present yourself as a musical personality was really geared in my head.
But because you are black and playing piano in a dissonant way, everybody compared you to Cecil.
Back in the day, if you played anything with dissonance that was the easy way out. And I invited the comparison more, because when I joined the David S. Ware Quartet, I was the pianist in a band of all Cecil Taylor alumni [laughs]. Now, I was very militant … and I got across the idea that I had my own thing.
In the ’90s and the early part of the 21st century, you started calling out a host of critics, musicians and jazz institutions. Why?
I felt that at that I was being ignored. I targeted two things in that period. The first thing was Jazz at Lincoln Center. In the ’90s, certain people in that organization were outspoken in their close-minded views on certain things … I felt I had to be a counter-balancing voice. But it’s funny: Nowadays, I actually have a really great relationship with Jazz at Lincoln Center.
How did that happen?
I got to know those people over the years. They came down to the Knitting Factory. I thought there was a gospel way to be up there: You had to follow the program, or else “goodbye.” But pretty much everybody I met was pretty knowledgeable about the whole spectrum of the music. So I performed at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, and I did some educational [talks] there.
What was your other major criticism?
The pantheon of pianists who played with Miles Davis: Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett. They occupied such a central place in the whole pianistic zeitgeist from the ’70s—especially in schools.
Now, to be honest, my actual criticism was more about the jazz business, than with them. I do listen to Herbie Hancock, because he embodied a certain type of blackness in the ’70s that was cool. But that doesn’t stop me from being critical of a certain cynicism I felt in everything he’s done since ”Rockit.”
I already talked about Keith Jarrett as a spontaneous improviser, not his language, actually did play a part in my development. But language-wise, I came out of Bud Powell, Monk and Ellington without going through them in the ’70s.
Also, there was actually a degree of calculation involved [in my outbursts]. I believed the things I said. But while I knew I would turn some people off, I also knew that a whole lot of people would admire the balls I had to say those things.
You recorded for musician/actor Henry Rollins’ 2.13.61 Records, and with the Hat Art label. But since 1999, your longest association has been with Peter Gordon’s Thirsty Ear imprint, where you’ve recorded a slew of recordings: from solo and strings to electronica and hip-hop, including Harmony And Abyss, The Art Of The Improviser, and The Conduct Of Jazz. You also served as curator/producer for the label’s Blues Series.
Peter Gordon knows a lot about jazz. For me, it really helps knowing that somebody actually believes in your vision. Even if they know it’s going to take a awhile for the public to catch up with you.
Your new release for that label is Piano Song, a 12-track opus with your latest trio with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Baker Taylor.
Michael Bisio and I have been playing for six or seven years. The drummer, Newman Taylor Baker, just came into the trio a couple of years ago. He’s played with Ahmad Jamal, Billy Harper and McCoy Tyner. He’s right in the middle of the language. And the funny thing is, he lived in Philadelphia and Wilmington, and played in Philly with Monette Sudler. I use to follow him around in Wilmington. So, it’s so bizarre that he lives on Third Street in my neighborhood in New York and he’s in my trio. He’s a natural for where we’re at.
So, with a supportive record label and a devoted legion of fans, why are you putting a moratorium on recording?
I really don’t see where I can go with it any further. I have a deep, deep catalog. Every time I sit at the [piano], I still feel the fire. But as far as me trying to generate a head space and a structure around putting out a recording … I’m probably losing the fire for that. DB
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/the-conduct-of-jazz-matthew-shipp-thirsty-ear-recordings-review-by-glenn-astarita__12819.php
Track review of "Stream of Light"
Thien V via Flickr
AUDIO: <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/112931672/145159603" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"></iframe>
Critics and fans have used a host of words to describe the
compositions of this week's guest, composer/pianist Matthew Shipp. The
Wilmington, Del., native's music has been called inventive, free,
challenging, rich, tapestry-like and playful. But the most common
descriptor is "unique" — a great word to describe this session of Piano Jazz.
At the beginning of the session he tells Marian McPartland, "I like to be felt. If I'm successful ... it hits people on many different levels."
There are many different emotional strands in Shipp's music, and one can hear his roots quite clearly, ranging from his interest in the organ music played at the Episcopal Church of his youth, to the classical lessons he began at age five, the diverse jazz recordings his parents collected (which Shipp started devouring when he was 12) and his studies at the New England Conservatory of Music.
The session features three of Shipp's compositions. He solos on "Module," as well as "Patmos," a tune that paints a very clear scene for McPartland: "I actually get a picture of some people in a forest, walking through the trees." Their duet on "Gamma Ray" is something of a departure from Shipp's often dramatic style, with its playfulness and Thelonius Monk-like angularity.
When Shipp plays the standards he offers startling revelations. "Angel Eyes" expands with thick chords and rumbling arpeggios, creating dramatic tension and release. He inspires McPartland to take a page from his notebook when she plays Duke Ellington's "Warm Valley," her solid left hand often providing counterpoint to the melodic inventions she hangs on what Shipp calls Ellington's "rock-solid backbone."
McPartland's "Portrait of Matthew" also incorporates some of Shipp's style, painting a complex and thoughtful portrait of him. Afterwards, she tells him, "It's inspiring to hear someone like you play, because it does make me sort of think differently."
McPartland and Shipp play three other duets, including the Gershwin classic "Summertime," which transforms into a classically-inspired fantasia, as well as John Coltrane's "Naima." They close with an inspired "C-Jam Blues," an almost baroque, bluesy fugue that alternately walks, skips, strolls and struts.
Originally recorded March 7, 2006.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/feb/19/jazz-pianist-matthew-shipp-freethinker
Life was in a rut and New York City was calling. The Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn – its bookshops, cafes and general civility – was an antidote to drab, unhappy Norwood Junction in depressing south-east London where, ten years ago, I existed day-to-day. Everything in my life had become geared towards securing my next fix, and the music that kept drawing me back. Nothing at home could match the improvisational majesty and ecstatic grooves of saxophonist David S Ware, bassist William Parker and pianist Matthew Shipp.
And nothing could have prepared me for my first in-the-flesh encounter in a New York jazz club with the David S Ware Quartet - drummer Guillermo E. Brown, Ware, Parker and Shipp. What was this music called? I couldn't find a convincing label - a fact I liked. Was this free jazz? Ware, who died in 2012, embodied the exploratory musical instincts and spirit of 1960s free jazz pioneers John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. The inspiration of his other great saxophone hero Sonny Rollins resounded inside every melodic turn and overarching phrase, and yet his music understood something very fundamental: merely retracing the dislocating rhythmic ricochet and melodic cry points characteristic of the 1960s mother music was no freedom at all.
The title of Ware's 1997 album, Wisdom of Uncertainty, was as much a statement of intent. Chewy, inchoate slabs of composed beginnings were a call to improvised action, or a Ware Quartet performance might equally generate itself as the musicians zoned inside each other's emerging patterns: a toe in the water triggering a torrent of sound. A Ware gig might leave you punchdrunk from the brutalist beauty of his music's relentlessly scattering lines and forms; or with your emotions buoyed by floating on a slipstream of euphoric grooves for longer than is usually considered decent.
One thing was for sure: this music felt thrillingly at odds with idea of jazz that was then being peddled by the major record labels desperately trying to make jazz economics add up. The once-treasured Blue Note label was reduced to marketing their star saxophonist Joe Lovano's theme-park jazz – Celebrating Sinatra and Viva Caruso, while Wynton Marsalis' mantra that jazz was "America's classical music", and therefore a smiley repertory music safely frozen in time, dimmed the ambitions of anyone gullible enough to listen. Ware, Parker, Shipp and their colleagues begged to differ: jazz for them was very much now, a music that roamed free in the realm of speculation.
Into this ideological minefield I stepped, an innocent abroad. I'd heard a few CDs, and about Shipp's infamous punch-up with jazz writer Stanley Crouch, the Peter Mandelson scowl behind Marsalis' Tony Blair grin. I circled the scene surrounding Ware trying to find a point of entry both as a jazz-lover and as a music writer, and a few things quickly became obvious. David Ware didn't do small talk, but Matthew Shipp was happy to shoot the breeze and spoke with devastating candour about his own vision of music. I was genuinely taken aback when a few minutes into our first interview he said: "I love Coltrane, I love Ornette, I love Monk – but fuck them all, fuck the tradition and certainly fuck Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. I'm weary of being thought of as a free jazz pianist. I want to find new ways of messing with people's minds." And as I disappeared into the New York night – every night – to sometimes obscure little jazz clubs around Brooklyn, Queens and downtown Manhattan for a nightly dose of jazz, those words stayed with me.
For a while, Shipp junked the whole jazz format and such albums as Equilbrium and Antipop Consortium vs Matthew Shipp unpicked the processes of DJ Culture and funk from the vantage point of his steely improviser's gaze. Since then Shipp has reintegrated the lessons of those records into his work as a solo and group improviser, his elastic rhythms and coat of many melodic colours re-energised by thinking beyond the acoustic box. Typically, when Shipp begins his three-day residency at Caf̩ Oto tonight, he'll be playing with British free improviser John Butcher and German synth improviser Thomas Lehn Рmusicians for whom jazz represents a marginal creative interest.
Ware has gone, handing responsibility to the likes of William Parker and Shipp to continue renewing the quest for freedom by keeping basic jazz beliefs under scrutiny. I was fortunate to have wound up in New York when it felt jazz was in serious flux, and witnessing these musicians confront the music as they were playing it was ear-opening and intellectually liberating. The formats of my own life came under question, and after three years of shuttling backwards and forwards between London and New York, I relocated not to New York, but at least to a different part of London, away from depressing Norwood Junction, happy never to return there.
• Matthew Shipp is at Cafe Oto, Dalston, London, 19-21 February, 2014.
If this decade isn't looked back upon as the Roaring Nineties, it won't be Matthew Shipp's fault. For all the heart-stopping architectonics of Shipp's music, however, its solid melodic foundation guarantees that the pianist's impact will be felt long after the 20th century is history.
The past decade has seen Shipp sculpt a body of work that includes his continuing and highly rewarding contributions to the David S. Ware Quartet, a stint with Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory, and over thirty albums in an impressive variety of solo, duo, trio and quartet formats, with such collaborators as guitarist Joe Morris, saxophonists Roy Campbell and Rob Brown, trumpeter Roy Campbell, bassist William Parker, violinist Matt Maneri, and drummers Whit Dickey and Susie Ibarra.
His latest album, DNA (on Thirsty Ear), is Shipp's fifteenth album as a leader. A duo recording with William Parker, DNA is full of introspective and abstract soundscapes with roots in Monk and Powell, and branches reaching out to American traditional music and spirituals, as in an impassioned version of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" and the eloquent, straightforward reading of "Amazing Grace" that brings the album to a close.
We had a chance to talk to Matt just as he was getting ready for the Ware Quartet's first performance with new drummer Guillermo Brown, opening for Sonic Youth at New York City's Roseland.
PSF: I don't know where to start, so why not start with the here and now? You're not recording for a while.
Yeah, I'm doing this duo album with William on Thirsty Ear, then I'm going on a sabbatical from recording, the recording process. But I do have some imports that have already been recorded, that'll be straggling into the country over the next couple years on hatArt. But I have a lot of albums out and it's time to take a rest.
PSF: Do you know how long that's going to last? Is it just going to be when you feel like it?
Right. You know, actually, to be quite honest, DNA, which is the duo album we have on Thirsty Ear, is number fifteen of my own albums --
PSF: As a leader.
Right, and that's in a very short period of time, in a seven-year period. And to me it's kind of capping off the primary body of work. So I'm not really feeling the urge to record at (laughs) to be honest.
PSF: The line between your work as a leader and a sideman kind of blurs sometimes. I think you're somebody who probably, consciously, doesn't stay off to the side too much.
Well, pretty much everything I do, except for Roscoe Mitchell, I kind of cross the line into a collaborator. My own things I'm definitely the leader. With David Ware I'm co-orchestrator (laughs). I've developed a role for myself in that group. I mean, he's the leader but I'm definitely organically a huge part of the whole concept of the quartet. So I think I kind of cross the line. I'm not strictly a sideman; I'm a co -- (shrugs) You could choose to see it many ways.
PSF: Well, it shows. I was listening to Go See the World [David S. Ware Quartet] today and I was thinking that it's hard to imagine the Quartet with a different piano player.
Yeah, I think I've a developed a role for my particular style in that group. We think of it as a piece. There's nobody else who would fit in that role exactly. And that's a bit of an organic marriage between his style as a composer and my actual style as a pianist, accompanist, musical thinker, musical landscape developer, there's a natural organic marriage between David and myself. And then if you look at the rhythm section, there's an organic marriage between William Parker and myself. Therefore that group has grown over the years to be like an organic totality that all our personalities contribute to largely.
PSF: You had Whit Dickey for a while, then you had Susie [Ibarra] for a little while and now this new guy, Guillermo . . .
Guillermo Brown.
PSF: He's only been with you, I'm guessing, about a month or so? Two months?
Ah, no -- two days.
PSF: Oh! Well.
(Laughs) We've rehearsed the last two days.
PSF: How's that working out so far?
He's a very good drummer. He's different. He's young; he's 22. Therefore, without a lot of baggage. (Grins) He's definitely going to work.
PSF: What does that do when you have a different player -- player in the sense of a team. What happens when that fourth corner changes?
Well, I would say in that particular group, the sonic landscape, the concept of the rhythm section in that group is one that has been developed over a decade, and it's pretty solid. The actual landscape is generated from myself and William, so the drummer is an added appendage. I mean, a lot of people think of drummers as the foundation of the rhythm section. I would actually say in this group that's not the case. Even though David feeds off a drummer. But the actual sonic landscape is generated by William and myself, so a drummer more or less has to fit into that, because that's already a developed concept. Usually a drummer's style does kind of dictate how we interact with him, but the basic concept of the rhythm section is already established. Elvin Jones could come into the group and he would have to adjust to us.
PSF: Well, number one, you and David and William all have strong personalities as musicians . . .
In and of ourselves.
PSF: Right. And then you put the three of you together, and it's like -- it's one times two times three . . .
Right, it's multiplying, not adding (laughs).
PSF: So you'd have to be a dynamo drummer just to stay afloat. I don't mean just in terms of sheer power; you'd have to be pretty quick mentally and pretty flexible to fit in. And then a little power doesn't hurt, too.
He definitely -- he has it. He brings something different. All the drummers that have been with the Ware group have added something very good to the group, from Mark Edwards to Whit Dickey to Susie Ibarra. He has something different and it should be interesting to see how it grows. I can't predict exactly where it's going to go.
PSF: You're someone whose music is not easy to describe. In terms of nailing it, saying, "Here's what it is," I have more trouble with yours (laughs) than anyone else's. Critics seem to describe your music as being about challenge or about struggle. How do you feel about that?
About what? (Laughs)
PSF: About having people either shrugging, going, "I don't know what it is," or else describing it in terms that are sort of antagonistic. Does that strike you as an insult?
No, because I think somebody's trying to do the best they can to describe it. I like people not being able to be pigeon-holed. I feel I bring a lot to the table as far as what I've been influenced by and what I like. I'm obviously in the jazz avant-garde idiom and one thing that's always struck me about the genius of that idiom is that it can kind of encompass everything, theoretically. If you listen to Albert Ayler, you hear folk songs, you hear elements of traditional jazz on some of his earlier albums, you hear folk melodies, you hear spirituals. If you listen to Coltrane you'll hear Indian music, African music, along with his obvious underpinnings in jazz. If you listen to Cecil Taylor you'll hear some classical things. So the genius of this idiom is that you can bring anything into it. I mean, that's any music, really, when you get down to it. If you listen to Stevie Wonder, he brings elements of Latin music, he performs Bob Dylan songs. But the jazz avant-garde seems like you can incorporate anything into it, like a melting pot, within your own style. I personally have grown up listening to a lot of different things and have been influenced by a lot of different things. I approach the music as music, not as the various genres. So I'm not trying to make a music that's a mixture of this or that, but a lot of this or that is in it.
PSF: It just comes out.
Naturally. So that elements of the different things that are part of me are synthesizing naturally. Therefore, for some people it might be harder to pigeonhole. I mean, when you get down to it, I obviously come out of a certain thing. I definitely come out of the jazz avant-garde tradition and therefore the jazz piano tradition, but there's a lot of things going on that really meant a lot to me, be it Bud Powell or Jimi Hendrix, Anton Webern, Andrew Hill. So there's a lot of people I like and I've just soaked it all in.
PSF: Sometimes you'll play something where maybe more jazz will come out -- well, it's wrong to even say that, but you know what I mean -- some kind of a jazz style comes out more in one piece where maybe in another piece you hear more of a classical influence. You must be sick of being compared to Cecil Taylor.
Oh, yeah.
PSF: And I wouldn't compare the two of you.
I don't think I sound anything like him. But I understand that, because if you mention that idiom, you almost have to mention that.
PSF: Right, just in terms of you being two avant-garde jazz piano players. The average jazz listener who's not too familiar with the avant-garde side of it might hear it that way.
Some people listen very superficially. They get out of it that there's a lot of density and dissonance. If they get that, then they say, you know, you're out of Cecil Taylor.
PSF: Yes, you're coming out of some of the same traditions, but clearly --
A different vector.
PSF: I don't know why I feel I'm on more solid ground when I listen to Cecil.
If you want to describe me as a turn of the century American pianist, I play turn of the century American piano music. (Laughs)
PSF: And I'm not somebody who worries about genre; I just can't think of another person whose music uproots me the way yours does. You know that old quote from Andre Previn, where he says, Stan Kenton makes a big motion, his band plays something, and every arranger in the house nods their head and says, "Yes, that's how it's done." But then Duke Ellington raises a finger, two horns play something, and Previn says, "I don't know what it is."
(Laughs)
PSF: There's all this other stuff where I feel I'm on solid ground, but then with you --
It's a mystery.
PSF: Even with your music with Ware, I feel I'm on more familiar territory than your solo work. Do you feel there's a big leap between your music and the music you play with him?
Oh, it's different worlds.
PSF: Because I feel that way.
No, they're two different worlds altogether. In my relating to him, it's creating a different universe than when I put my own name as a leader on it, definitely. They're two different universes with different logics. Purposely so.
PSF: Though, obviously, it's not something where you sit and you think about, "I'm going to do it this way."
No, but I think a burly horn that is that capacious makes the musical landscape a certain thing. And even within the context of the quartet, when he stops playing and the trio is doing something, what you're doing as a trio has to index what he had done before. So it's different when you start with a whole different premise, without that burly tenor, it's a whole different premise. The way he writes is different. The way I accompany him is different. The way I use a horn or a violin in the context of my own group is completely different -- the aims and the means. But related.
PSF: As the writer or the so-called journalist, it's my job to characterize what the difference is, but I'm going to ask you what you think the difference is.
It's hard for me to precisely define those things, but I would say that his group is music coming out of the tenor tradition. There's that definite post-Sonny Rollins, post-Albert Ayler, post-Coltrane thing. And it's a quartet, coming out of a classic quartet concept. Whereas, I think I'm much more concerned with . . . how can I put this? (Laughs) I'm just coming from a different space. I'm a different generation. I'm trying to think of the exact term to say where I'm coming from, and it's not really . . .
PSF: It's almost like doing psychotherapy on yourself to try to figure it out.
Yeah, but I'm good at that. (Laughs)
PSF: Good. (Laughs)
The term is still not coming to me. I mean, he's from a jazz generation. I'm a jazz musician, but the way I think about putting albums out or the way I think about myself as an artist even is more comparable to David Bowie than Sonny Rollins. Post-modern is not the word; in fact, it's definitely not the word. I can't really think of a term. I guess what it comes down to is, my music is different: the way I write, the way I compose, the way I deal with dynamics, the way I organize the other players in my group is just different.
PSF: There's a different sense of structure, but (laughs) don't ask me to describe it.
Well, I think what that comes down to is in his groups, the basic emphasis is accompaniment for him. It's a quartet in that sense, where even though there's a lot of detail going on in the rhythm section that has its own interest, on another level it is more accompaniment -- on another level -- and he's the leader. And I kind of de-emphasize that in my own groups, unless it's a solo or a duo. I orchestrate differently. And I don't mean this as a put-down, but on my album Strata (hatArt), I really try to do the piano as a coloristic device in an Ellingtonian sense, and in his groups I don't think he would take a back job like that. I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, I'm just saying that one group is organized along the lines of that type of classic jazz quartet and the other is organized along the lines of a portrait or a novel.
PSF: With Strata, you give them [the horns] a lot of space on that.
Right. Which makes the album what it is.
PSF: My initial reaction to that album was that, even though we've been hearing your compositions all along, it gives me a way to hear them more, when I can separate the composition from the player. Do people ask you a lot, when you're done a performance, how much of it was written?
Yeah, there's all kinds of questions and there's all kinds of answers to that.
PSF: Occasionally that question arises, if you haven't heard someone play the same piece a couple times. I'll give you one example, in fact, the first time I can think of when that question occurred to me [with your music] was when I was listening to the album with Joe Morris [Matthew Shipp Duo with Joe Morris, Thesis (hatArt)], the piece called "The Middle Region," where there's this very intricate interplay.
I'm trying to remember which one that is. Is that number eleven?
PSF: Maybe ten?
Is that a very African one, where we're both playing . . .
See Part 2 of 4 of our Matthew Shipp interview
https://www.sfjazz.org/tickets/productions/matthew-shipp-trio/
http://observer.com/2017/02/jazz-pianist-matthew-shipp-interview-piano-song/https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/matthewshipp
Matthew Shipp
Matthew Shipp was born December 7, 1960 in Wilmington, Delaware. He started piano at 5 years old with the regular piano lessons most kids have experienced. He fell in love with jazz at 12 years old. After moving to New York in 1984 he quickly became one of the leading lights in the New York jazz scene. He was a sideman in the David S. Ware quartet and also for Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory before making the decision to concentrate on his own music.
Mr Shipp has reached the holy grail of jazz in that he possesses a unique style on his instrument that is all of his own- and he's one of the few in jazz that can say so.
Mr. Shipp has recorded a lot of albums with many labels but his two most enduring relationships have been with two labels. In the 1990s he recorded a number of chamber jazz albums with Hatology, a group of recordings that charted a new course for jazz that, to this day, the jazz world has not realized. In the 2000s Mr Shipp has been curator and director of the label Thirsty Ear's “Blue Series” and has also recorded for them. In this collection of recordings he has generated a whole body of work that is visionary, far reaching and many faceted.
Matthew Shipp is truly one of the leading lights of a new generation of jazz giants.
http://downbeat.com/news/detail/qa-with-matthew-shipp-on-home-turf
Q&A with Matthew Shipp: On Home Turf
by Eugene Holley Jr.February 17, 2017
Matthew Shipp
(Photo: Courtesy of the artist)
(Photo: Courtesy of the artist)
Ever since bursting onto the New York scene from the New
England Conservatory of Music in 1984, pianist Matthew Shipp has reigned
supreme as one of the most individual and iconoclastic improvisers of
his generation. Grounded in, but not limited to, the avant-garde, Shipp
has recorded more than 50 recordings that have defined and redefined the
stylistic parameters of that idiom. While doing so, he has become
equally known for his caustic outbursts against what he feels is an
aesthetically rigid jazz establishment.
I grew up with Shipp in Wilmington, Delaware, and, like him, spent much of my youth listening to the Jackson 5 and studying classical music in high school, so I know there is more to Shipp than the L’Enfant Terrible persona that often overshadows his music.
I sat down with Shipp for an interview in his father’s quiet home in suburban Wilmington. What emerged was an informative history of his evolution as an artist, and an explanation as to why he stopped recording after the release of his new album, Piano Song (Thirsty Ear), arguably his most integrative and ingenious work to date.
How did growing in Wilmington influence you as a musician?
Wilmington has its own extremely rich history, and is geographically close to Philly. There’s a continuum within the whole East Coast, from Boston to New York, Philly, and some parts of the South, with many tributaries. And I have taken from all of them to constitute my own unique synthesis.
What got you hooked on jazz?
There were two PBS specials featuring Ahmad Jamal and Nina Simone. They both flipped me out [laughs]. Ahmad Jamal was playing this spare blues, but his language was so cool, just the confidence he had. I didn’t know somebody could get to that. With Nina Simone, her language was so deep. It scared me [laughs]. I was playing classical music, and I was interested in improvisation. She had a classical background, but there was something about how she related the piano to a very black idiom. I really like artists who are in their own genre. Like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles. That’s what I’ve been trying to do since I was 12 years old.
You studied with Robert “Boysie” Lowery, a Wilmington educator who taught generations of local musicians, from Clifford Brown and Ernie Watts, with his methodology called The Lessons.
The Lessons were a very thought-out way of going through chord changes: a way to get you to think very slowly, and structure your solo, where you’re not just blowing through chord changes.
Another mentor was a janitor and a computer expert named Sunyata, who used to live in Newark, [Delaware]. He was a mathematical philosopher. He saw that I had possibilities in what he called the Iconoclastic Mystery School. He encouraged me to follow my own music.
Where you listening to the avant-garde during this period?
I was into Coltrane, Andrew Hill and Sun Ra. And a lot of my introduction to the music was through WRTI-FM at Temple University in Philly. I remember hearing “Salt Peanuts” with Dizzy and Bird. And that was more out to me than Coltrane. I never thought that about A Love Supreme. I also heard Malachi Favors, Sunny Murray … . WRTI really changed my life around.
You also read J.C. Thomas’ Chasing the Trane.
I read it around [when I was] 13 or 14 years old, cover to cover, 20 or 30 times. Trane’s cosmic quest comes through in the book. And Trane’s teacher, Dennis Sandole, is talked about in the book.
Sandole was a Philadelphia-based guitarist who taught advanced theory and composition. You met him through a mutual friend. What did you learn from him?
What I learned from Dennis was the mind’s capacity of constructing a language: A group of chord changes, or anything that improvisers decide to extrapolate on, is an infinite platform. And it’s up to you to work on your materials over and over again until [your music] creates its own language.
Did you better understand Trane’s music because of your studies with Sandole?
I think I understood Trane’s methodology more. I think I had an intuitive understanding of what he was aiming for, from the first time I ever saw the cover of A Love Supreme in Wilmington Dry Goods as a 12- or 13-year-old [laughs].
You moved to New York City in 1984, from Boston, where you studied at the New England Conservatory. Who were your pianistic influences then?
In the ’70s, Keith Jarrett and Cecil Taylor were doing solo concerts. That whole idea of solo-piano-as-extemporary-composition was really in the air because of those two practitioners. So if I’m going to go that way, how am I going to do it? I don’t want to be Cecil Taylor … and I definitely don’t want to be Keith Jarrett, because I don’t like him. But that kind of structural element of how to present yourself as a musical personality was really geared in my head.
But because you are black and playing piano in a dissonant way, everybody compared you to Cecil.
Back in the day, if you played anything with dissonance that was the easy way out. And I invited the comparison more, because when I joined the David S. Ware Quartet, I was the pianist in a band of all Cecil Taylor alumni [laughs]. Now, I was very militant … and I got across the idea that I had my own thing.
In the ’90s and the early part of the 21st century, you started calling out a host of critics, musicians and jazz institutions. Why?
I felt that at that I was being ignored. I targeted two things in that period. The first thing was Jazz at Lincoln Center. In the ’90s, certain people in that organization were outspoken in their close-minded views on certain things … I felt I had to be a counter-balancing voice. But it’s funny: Nowadays, I actually have a really great relationship with Jazz at Lincoln Center.
How did that happen?
I got to know those people over the years. They came down to the Knitting Factory. I thought there was a gospel way to be up there: You had to follow the program, or else “goodbye.” But pretty much everybody I met was pretty knowledgeable about the whole spectrum of the music. So I performed at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, and I did some educational [talks] there.
What was your other major criticism?
The pantheon of pianists who played with Miles Davis: Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett. They occupied such a central place in the whole pianistic zeitgeist from the ’70s—especially in schools.
Now, to be honest, my actual criticism was more about the jazz business, than with them. I do listen to Herbie Hancock, because he embodied a certain type of blackness in the ’70s that was cool. But that doesn’t stop me from being critical of a certain cynicism I felt in everything he’s done since ”Rockit.”
I already talked about Keith Jarrett as a spontaneous improviser, not his language, actually did play a part in my development. But language-wise, I came out of Bud Powell, Monk and Ellington without going through them in the ’70s.
Also, there was actually a degree of calculation involved [in my outbursts]. I believed the things I said. But while I knew I would turn some people off, I also knew that a whole lot of people would admire the balls I had to say those things.
You recorded for musician/actor Henry Rollins’ 2.13.61 Records, and with the Hat Art label. But since 1999, your longest association has been with Peter Gordon’s Thirsty Ear imprint, where you’ve recorded a slew of recordings: from solo and strings to electronica and hip-hop, including Harmony And Abyss, The Art Of The Improviser, and The Conduct Of Jazz. You also served as curator/producer for the label’s Blues Series.
Peter Gordon knows a lot about jazz. For me, it really helps knowing that somebody actually believes in your vision. Even if they know it’s going to take a awhile for the public to catch up with you.
Your new release for that label is Piano Song, a 12-track opus with your latest trio with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Baker Taylor.
Michael Bisio and I have been playing for six or seven years. The drummer, Newman Taylor Baker, just came into the trio a couple of years ago. He’s played with Ahmad Jamal, Billy Harper and McCoy Tyner. He’s right in the middle of the language. And the funny thing is, he lived in Philadelphia and Wilmington, and played in Philly with Monette Sudler. I use to follow him around in Wilmington. So, it’s so bizarre that he lives on Third Street in my neighborhood in New York and he’s in my trio. He’s a natural for where we’re at.
So, with a supportive record label and a devoted legion of fans, why are you putting a moratorium on recording?
I really don’t see where I can go with it any further. I have a deep, deep catalog. Every time I sit at the [piano], I still feel the fire. But as far as me trying to generate a head space and a structure around putting out a recording … I’m probably losing the fire for that. DB
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/the-conduct-of-jazz-matthew-shipp-thirsty-ear-recordings-review-by-glenn-astarita__12819.php
Matthew Shipp Trio: The Conduct of Jazz
by
Influential progressive jazz pianist/improviser, Matthew Shipp boasts
an extensive discography as a group leader, soloist and in-demand
session artiste. During the past three decades he's amassed an immense
discography amid his affiliations with like-minded musicians
representing the USA and Euro-jazz circuits. On this piano trio date,
Shipp exemplifies to a very high degree, his uncanny knack for
seamlessly bridging the avant-garde space with modern jazz. Unlike
similar experimental or outside motivations by many of his peers, the
pianist's muse is not largely shaped with tireless rampages across the
eighty-eights. Via his perspicacious insights and penchant for employing
harmonious content into the body of his improvised or non- improvised
body of work and other facets, the pianist tenders a singular persona.
Shipp leads the trio through works designed with rhythmically based overtures, bop, and a few nods to Thelonious Monk as he eloquently transitions into and out of -tuneful hooks. But he takes the solo piano route on "Stream of Light," highlighting his acute improvisational proclivities, commencing with a staggered engineering process, gradually ascending and intertwining the lower-register with sweeping flurries and profound block chords. He incorporates a dab of Bill Evans' like warmth along with free-form musings and a melodramatic undertow while dynamically shifting the tempo throughout. Here, rolling waves coalesce with hammering accents and other factors, steeped in polytonal beauty and a multidimensional outlook. *File The Conduct of Jazz in the —essential listening —category.
Shipp leads the trio through works designed with rhythmically based overtures, bop, and a few nods to Thelonious Monk as he eloquently transitions into and out of -tuneful hooks. But he takes the solo piano route on "Stream of Light," highlighting his acute improvisational proclivities, commencing with a staggered engineering process, gradually ascending and intertwining the lower-register with sweeping flurries and profound block chords. He incorporates a dab of Bill Evans' like warmth along with free-form musings and a melodramatic undertow while dynamically shifting the tempo throughout. Here, rolling waves coalesce with hammering accents and other factors, steeped in polytonal beauty and a multidimensional outlook. *File The Conduct of Jazz in the —essential listening —category.
Personnel: Matthew Shipp: piano; Michael Bisio: bass; Newman Taylor Baker:
drums.
Title: The Conduct of Jazz | Year Released: 2016 | Record Label: Thirsty Ear Recordings
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/greatest-hits-matthew-shipp-thirsty-ear-recordings-review-by-john-sharpe.php
Matthew Shipp is playing piano, and the floor is shaking. Big
cluster chords ring through the modest interior of the Stone, in
Manhattan’s East Village, where the great British improviser Evan Parker
is playing a two-week residency in October 2009. Parker speaks gruffly
on tenor sax, worrying the main motif of Thelonious Monk’s “Shuffle
Boil.” His trio mates are Shipp and bassist William Parker, who react to
the bluesy line but never play anything resembling the tune itself. The
exchanges that follow gain much of their strength from Shipp and
William Parker’s countless hours of shared experience, most notably as a
duo and as one-half of the acclaimed (now disbanded) David S. Ware
Quartet.
To be seated less than 6 feet behind Shipp’s back was to feel that shaking floor, to absorb the physical impact of his repeating fortissimo rhythms, flowing cyclical melodies and sudden ascents into sonic abstraction, coaxed from the piano’s interior. This was turbulent music from a turbulent, perplexing soul, one of the most imaginative and influential figures in free jazz today.
Along with his stature as a pianist, Shipp has gained notoriety as a rhetorical bomb-thrower-venomous toward his critics, dismissive of icons as prominent as Herbie Hancock, grandiloquent in his view of himself. In a review of Shipp’s 2002 album Nu Bop, former JazzTimes editor Christopher Porter made reference to the pianist’s “hand-scrawled notes to music editors proclaiming his own greatness.” Shipp hasn’t lost his flair for such things. In an as-told-to spiel published by Chris Rich on his blog Brilliant Corners in July 2009, Shipp declared: “I hear no one in the world with as developed and distinct voice [sic] as I have on my instrument for this period in the music.” Can he be serious? Put it this way: When he heard the statement read back to him, he began laughing exuberantly before it was even through.
In a word, Shipp likes to wind people up. Part of it may be overcompensation for perceived slights or simply a gambit for attention, but there are deeper issues involved. As he heads toward a milestone-he turns 50 in December 2010-he’s taking stock of his achievements and plowing forward under career conditions that are unvaryingly tough. It’s the lot of any artist whose chief ideal is self-assertion at all costs. Shipp just manifests it more acutely.
To a degree, the Evan Parker gig recalled the drumless chamber jazz that Shipp documented so richly on the Hat Hut label starting in the mid-’90s. But Shipp has expanded his role over the past decade, facilitating new aesthetic models as curator of Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series. By now the series boasts a sprawling catalog of music ranging from pure acoustic to pure electronic and many points between-from trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr. to “mutantrumpeter” Ben Neill, from the microtonal viola of Mat Maneri to the futurist turntable collage of DJ Spooky. Shipp’s earlier encounters with Evan Parker, heard on Spring Heel Jack’s Blue Series efforts Amassed (2002) and Live (2003), involved improvisers and sound designers in a unique and compelling transaction.
It was the Blue Series that landed Shipp on the March 2003 cover of JazzTimes, as the poster child for “jazztronica.” The practice of blurring and melding musical worldviews has only continued to flower and refine itself in the ensuing years. “It was nothing new, jazz musicians doing electronic or electric music,” Shipp observes. “But I guess in my sense I was keeping my ‘avant-garde’ pedigree intact while doing it, which might have been a slightly new angle.”
Shipp’s Blue Series albums have varied widely: acoustic quartets on Pastoral Composure and New Orbit, electro-acoustic hybrids with programmer/engineer FLAM on Nu Bop, Equilibrium and Harmony and Abyss, solo piano on One and the new 4D. “Well, I see everything merging,” Shipp remarks. “I’m not trying to prove any points. I’m just doing whatever needs to be done in the moment. With that in mind, it allows you to integrate everything you’ve ever experienced. I can even do a solo recording like 4D and use things I learned doing electronic stuff.” Examples? “Not that I could overtly say. It’s something very subtle that goes on in my own psyche. Ideas about spacing, resonance.”
Apart from a forthcoming sequel to Antipop Consortium vs. Matthew Shipp (2003), Shipp says he’s more or less done with electronica. His most recent Blue Series discs, Piano Vortex and Harmonic Disorder, showcased his trio with Joe Morris on bass and Whit Dickey on drums, but this unit too has fallen by the wayside. (Shipp has formed another trio with Dickey, featuring Michael Bisio on bass.) Of his decision to return to solo piano, he explains: “I felt that the trio had built to an apotheosis, and coming off of that, I didn’t want to do anything with other people right now. I felt I could depend on myself to get to the next step.”
Another factor pushing Shipp toward independence was life after the David S. Ware Quartet. Shipp takes justifiable pride in the group, to the point of proclaiming its work “infinitely superior” to Wayne Shorter’s current quartet-a remark that stirred much controversy when it appeared in the Village Voice in 2007. (More on that later.) Whatever the case, Ware remains a tremendous saxophone force, still working through the aftermath of a kidney transplant in May 2009. It’s fitting that Live in the World, a three-disc retrospective, arguably the quartet’s definitive document, found a home on the Blue Series imprint. “I wish I could have kept [the quartet] together forever,” Ware comments. “But things are not like that, man. The world is relative.”
“It took me a long time to get out of the band,” says Shipp. “David didn’t want me to leave, and I kept trying to figure out a way. After 16 years, I felt I did whatever I could do in that setting, and there was nowhere else for me to go.”
Poet Steve Dalachinsky, a longtime friend and collaborator of Shipp’s, implies that 16 years was longer than anyone could have expected. “[At first] Matt wasn’t sure about whether he should play with folks like Ware or Roscoe Mitchell,” Dalachinsky recalls. “He always wanted to be a leader, not a follower.” William Parker calls Shipp “a homebody, in the sense that he’s comfortable being at home in his own world. His own world was calling him to spend a little bit more time at home. [Laughs.] He had a few more things to investigate.”
Like Clifford Brown, Shipp hails from Wilmington, Del.-in fact, he was born just four years after the trumpeter’s tragic death. He studied with Dennis Sandole in Philadelphia and acknowledges a certain “regional thing” in his approach to the piano. “Coming from where I do, seeing as Sun Ra lived in Philly, and being that I’m a mystic, there’s a whole kind of post-Sun Ra mystical element to what I do. Which also relates to Coltrane and McCoy Tyner coming out of Philly, and a whole other regional quasi-mystic element that enters my playing from there.”
Shipp categorically denies being influenced by Cecil Taylor, and he’s always distanced himself from the “post-Miles” triumvirate of Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. “It’s not my mentality,” says Shipp. “In some ways I think I’m more old-school, actually. First of all, in my mind I have no influences. But I love Bud Powell-to me he’s the essence of purity, an angel. To a lesser degree I really connect with the figure of Thelonious Monk. I also really relate to Duke Ellington as a pianist. There’s a hardness in Duke’s sound, and a whole extended blues tonality. … Also, the group of pianists who come out of that Ellington branch: Elmo Hope, Hassan Ibn Ali of Philadelphia, Mal Waldron, Randy Weston. Now, with all of that said, I actually still claim to have no influences. I’m a complete, 100-percent original in my own distorted imagination.”
Most of Shipp’s previous solo-piano music-on Symbol Systems, Before the World, One and Un Piano-is exclusively his own. The 2002 solo disc Songs, all standards, is highly atypical. 4D bridges the gap, placing “Autumn Leaves” and “What Is This Thing Called Love?” alongside “Teleportation,” “Primal Harmonic” and other remote abstractions. “The goal was to have a universe that’s tied together,” says Shipp, “where the pieces equal one vast organic whole. I feel like I was able to get to the fourth dimension of the piano, hence the title. I really feel that I’ve grown.”
Recorded at Roulette in downtown New York before a small group of invitees, 4D is neither a studio album nor a live album in the strict sense. Some of the repertoire hints at Shipp’s past: “Frère Jacques” as a swift, disintegrating pedal-point romp, “Prelude to a Kiss” in a calmer melodic vein, both heard back in 2000 on Pastoral Composure. Shipp also revisits the spidery arpeggiated theme of “Equilibrium,” which vibraphonist Khan Jamal endowed with a silken transparency on the 2003 album of the same name. Shipp’s 4D version is more cutting and severe. “I’m trying to draw together my Blue Series recordings,” he remarks, “and convey that where I am now is a culmination, that I’ve grown from all of them.”
Clearly one doesn’t go to Shipp for a definitive reading of “Autumn Leaves.” His approach to standards is so witheringly deconstructionist that it can verge on slapdash. It’s the original music that reveals Shipp’s gift in its fullness, his way of combining harmonic opacity and hypnotic beauty. In such pieces as “Virgin Complex” from Critical Mass (and Harmony and Abyss), “Space Shipp” from Nu Bop, or the “Orbit” leitmotif winding through New Orbit-one of the most ravishing albums of the last 10 years-there is a directness, a thematic coherence, even a riff-oriented catchiness, that one doesn’t always hear in avant-garde jazz. (It’s one clear difference between Shipp and Cecil Taylor.) Shipp himself described the aesthetic rather well with a song title from Equilibrium: “World of Blue Glass.” “We search for forms of light in tones of blue,” Shipp muses in Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue, a book he co-published with Dalachinsky. “We seek the mathematical point where equations of blue pulsating light form a space of pure harmonics.”
“Matthew is a natural-born musician, and he has the ability to make the music his own,” opines Ware. “That’s why I nicknamed him ‘The Doctor,’ man, because he knows how to, so to speak, ‘fix’ a piece of music that you put in front of him. That’s what music is about-music is infinite.”
Joe Morris, in the rare position of having worked with Shipp as both a guitarist and a bassist, comments: “Matt practices all the time and he trusts his instincts, so there’s an organic sense of order that emerges out of a pretty cosmic environment. … He always plays what he intends to play. And it’s always meant to be music that is transcendent. Some people think it’s somehow passé to reach for that. I suspect they haven’t had the kind of experience that Matt reaches for.”
When Shipp refers to 4D as “my last album,” one must recall that he’s been swearing off recording since at least 1999. “If my touring schedule was what I wanted it to be, I would never go into the studio again, ever,” he declares. “I really want to stop recording but I just can’t seem to get out of the cycle. I’m tired of conceptualizing recordings, even though I feel I have a gift for doing that. I just want to perform live. I basically keep going into the studio because I need the cash advances every once in a while.”
Shipp’s blunt assessment of business realities underlies his most polemical statements, including his controversial take on Shorter and Hancock. Thinking back on his anti-Shorter remarks of 2007, he admits: “Look, Wayne has a quartet of young players that are on fire.” Does he dig Shorter’s pianist, Danilo Perez? “Yeah. I think he’s an excellent musician. It’s not even a matter of that. I’ve heard the band a couple of times where Wayne was really questionable. People like him and Herbie Hancock, their careers were made from their early 20s on, and they’ve had all the accoutrements that the jazz industry can give. You can’t give them the benefit of the doubt.
“Writers have often gotten me on a day when I’m in a bad mood over the fact that somebody like Ware or myself has to go out and prove ourselves every time, whereas people like this can go out there and bullshit and get away with it. And whenever they play a festival they’re getting like 90 percent of the money the festival has. At times I feel someone like Herbie Hancock is taking up space. I feel his work doesn’t warrant it. I feel everything he’s done in the last 20 or 30 years is crap. That’s my personal opinion. I have a right to say it.”
The bloggers of Destination: Out mocked Shipp’s comments on Shorter versus Ware as “plain cra-zee.” Pianist Ethan Iverson lamented Shipp’s “truly uninformed assessments” of Shorter, which, he argued, “happily go into the fool’s ring and hang out along with the worst of Wynton, Branford, and Crouch.” Shipp responds: “I don’t hold the jazz tradition in the respect that Ethan does. On one level I do-I mean, it’s the tradition. On another level, fuck all of them. And I mean that-fuck Herbie Hancock, fuck Wayne Shorter. On a certain level, fuck Louis Armstrong. I’ve had really nice conversations with Ethan, but, you know, if he wants to genuflect to these people, fine. I don’t. They were out here doing what they needed to do. They obviously have a place in history and it’s obviously deserved. But I’ve got to do what I do, I’ve got to say what I need to say to market myself the way I need to market myself, and if it means I say something that’s perceived as nasty about an icon, then I’ll do it, and I don’t really give a fuck. [Laughs.] I don’t care about them, and what does Wayne Shorter care?”
That’s a mouthful, and Shipp knows it. “Sometimes when I do interviews I’m sort of playing a character. I mean everything I say, but there’s a slight schizophrenic element. People have to realize that being a jazz musician is very frustrating. On any given day, you end up saying stuff. [And] this historical thing is so heavy in jazz that it’s just distressing sometimes. You just want to relax and be in the moment. To have the whole weight of history being bandied about, all the time-that leads you sometimes to that extreme statement.”
One of Shipp’s prose pieces in Logos and Language, titled “Boxing and Jazz,” puts all the gibes and bravado into further perspective. Noting how both disciplines involve “a refined language of will and transposed aggression,” Shipp draws a parallel that wasn’t lost on Miles Davis when he made A Tribute to Jack Johnson in 1970. “I am the greatest!” roared another boxing legend, and Shipp indeed seems to have borrowed a page from Muhammad Ali, even if it sometimes means being his own worst enemy.
http://www.talkhouse.com/matthew-shipp-talks-keith-jarretts-gary-peacocks-and-jack-dejohnettes-somewhere/
I have struggled long and hard to evaluate the position that Keith Jarrett’s music occupies in the hierarchy of the jazz industry. I have always felt a tremendous amount of pretense surrounding his whole universe. Of course he has some real skill, and sometimes sounds inspired. But I just can’t get past the layers and layers and layers of pretension. I’ve tried. Maybe it’s just me.
In the ’70s, as a teenager I struggled to make sense out of what was, to me, the pseudo jazz/new age meandering that was the completely improvised solo piano concerts that he did. He never seemed to me to have sculpted a specific language system, but instead seemed like someone who had a lot of piano chops and knew a lot of devices from classical music and had some jazz chops and could get a line going when needed. Sometimes the devices sort of sometimes fell together and worked — sometimes — but a lot of times they did not. It seemed to me at the time to never get beyond the devices and matriculate into an actual language. He peddled a rhetoric around his solo work like he was channeling from the void, or translating the music from some platonic realm of pure forms. That is all fine and well. That type of talk has always been around the music, and I have used that mode of philosophy as a way to fuel my art too.
Cecil Taylor, who was also doing solo concerts in the 1970s, used language of that sort to talk about what he did. But on some level Taylor knows that it’s a poetic metaphor — even if it’s true on some level — and he actually has to construct a real language to live up to the mythos. When Jarrett talks this talk one gets the sense that he did not intuit that it is a poetic metaphor — though rooted in truth — it seems to me that Jarrett actually thought he was a god, and anything he played, whether it was vapid, watered-down impressionist devices or insipid vamps, was sacrosanct just because he was Keith Jarrett.
So what does this have to do with this trio record, Somewhere, which was recorded live in Lucerne in 2009? Well, first of all, there is some nice music on the disc. That should be all that matters. I should be able to get past what I perceive as the Jarrett pretense and just enjoy what is here for what it is. I’m having a hard time with that.
Guess my main beef is the tremendous status that is accorded to Jarrett’s trio — with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, they’ve been together for 30 years now — by middle-aged white jazz critics. I just fail to see what makes his trio playing standards any more ”state of the art” or dynamic than any number of African-American pianists I can think of. Just for example, take someone like Joe Sample. He has a holistic sense of the piano, where the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic elements arise out of a unitary matrix. He has impeccable articulation. The melodic tissue of his motifs are exactly that, melodic, and his syntax is completely original. He can do long looping phrases and gather a hypnotic storm, and if he decided to play a vamp Jarrett would have to leave the room.
I guess what I am getting at is I don’t think Jarrett’s work lives up to the hype as a mature artistic statement. Somewhere feels like a dated trio concept. It does not even live up to its predecessors. It has none of the austerity and depth of the early ’60s Bill Evans/Scott LaFaro/Paul Motian trio or of Paul Bley as, say, on the 1963 Sonny Rollins/Coleman Hawkins album Sonny Meets Hawk! — Bley’s playing on that album is the template for a lot of Jarrett’s straight-ahead work.
To be fair, on the uptempo numbers Keith can gather some steam and get a line really going; he can phrase all over the place and approach the changes from some oblique angles, but I personally don’t really buy into his phrasing. What can I say? I worship the phrasing of Bud Powell-Monk-Hampton Hawes and Phineas Newborn, Jr. Even when Jarrett gets a sort of hypnotic line going it does not have the same internal dynamism to me that these other gentleman have. The ballad playing on Jarrett’s album I have nothing to say about — it goes nowhere; likewise with the vamping on the insipid title cut —when it comes to vamping I worship Mal Waldron.
I am not a music writer — just an asshole musician — so I don’t put any weight behind my taste. It’s just that — my taste. There is some nice stuff on Somewhere — although some of it sounds like watered-down Muzak to me — and if you buy into Jarrett’s universe you will most likely like this record, but if you don’t there is nothing here to get you pass the tremendous pretense.
https://www.npr.org/2012/01/13/112931672/matthew-shipp-on-piano-jazz
Title: The Conduct of Jazz | Year Released: 2016 | Record Label: Thirsty Ear Recordings
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/greatest-hits-matthew-shipp-thirsty-ear-recordings-review-by-john-sharpe.php
Matthew Shipp: Greatest Hits
It takes more than a degree of chutzpah for any modern day jazzer to title a collection Greatest Hits,
let alone a doyen of the avant-garde. But pianist Matthew Shipp has
never shied away from controversy—indeed, on occasion has actively
courted it. Slightly apologetically, sleeve note annotator Tad
Hendrickson points out that the selections were those singled out in
reviews, played on radio, or which provoked a notable response when
performed live. So what's on offer here is a dozen cuts chosen from
Shipp's albums on the Thirsty Ear label spanning a 12-year period since
2000.
Loosely in chronological order, the set charts two trends. The first being the introduction and then stripping away of overt hip-hop influence, synthesizers and post-production tweaking found on cuts such as "Cohesion," New ID," and "Nu-Bop," to leave a more abstract acoustic vernacular. At the same, time there is a retrenchment in lineup, so that the quartets and quintets give way from 2005 to piano trios and solos without horns—the classic jazz formats in which the keyboard assumes the greatest prominence. While it's inadvisable to read too much into this—Shipp has continued to record with reeds on other labels, witness SaMa (Not Two, 2010) with Sabir Mateen, and Cosmic Lieder (Aum Fidelity, 2011) with Darius Jones, to name just two—unsurprisingly, the current approach is favored, with the only album that provides more than a single cut being 2012's enigmatic but compelling Elastic Aspects, though even here Shipp shares the limelight, especially with monster bassist Michael Bisio.
Irrespective of setting, the pianist demonstrates a unique sensibility in which brawny insistent rhythms jostle with sudden diversions off the page, only to make way for sparkling crystalline melodies. One of his most attractive recordings, the singular New Orbit (2001), is represented by the lyrical title track, featuring Wadada Leo Smith's blues-infused trumpet. Other standouts include the motif-driven invention of "GNG" (from Harmonic Disorder, (2009)), the infectious dance of "Cohesion" (from Equilibrium, (2003)) and the prancing "Key Swing" (from Piano Vortex, (2007)). But while the shrewd programming means that the album works as an outstanding sequence of music if consumed in a single sitting, it acts even more powerfully as a prompt to go and search out some of the source discs to enjoy fuller servings of particularly appealing flavors.
Loosely in chronological order, the set charts two trends. The first being the introduction and then stripping away of overt hip-hop influence, synthesizers and post-production tweaking found on cuts such as "Cohesion," New ID," and "Nu-Bop," to leave a more abstract acoustic vernacular. At the same, time there is a retrenchment in lineup, so that the quartets and quintets give way from 2005 to piano trios and solos without horns—the classic jazz formats in which the keyboard assumes the greatest prominence. While it's inadvisable to read too much into this—Shipp has continued to record with reeds on other labels, witness SaMa (Not Two, 2010) with Sabir Mateen, and Cosmic Lieder (Aum Fidelity, 2011) with Darius Jones, to name just two—unsurprisingly, the current approach is favored, with the only album that provides more than a single cut being 2012's enigmatic but compelling Elastic Aspects, though even here Shipp shares the limelight, especially with monster bassist Michael Bisio.
Irrespective of setting, the pianist demonstrates a unique sensibility in which brawny insistent rhythms jostle with sudden diversions off the page, only to make way for sparkling crystalline melodies. One of his most attractive recordings, the singular New Orbit (2001), is represented by the lyrical title track, featuring Wadada Leo Smith's blues-infused trumpet. Other standouts include the motif-driven invention of "GNG" (from Harmonic Disorder, (2009)), the infectious dance of "Cohesion" (from Equilibrium, (2003)) and the prancing "Key Swing" (from Piano Vortex, (2007)). But while the shrewd programming means that the album works as an outstanding sequence of music if consumed in a single sitting, it acts even more powerfully as a prompt to go and search out some of the source discs to enjoy fuller servings of particularly appealing flavors.
Track Listing: Gesture; New Orbit; Cohesion; Module; GNG; New ID;
4D; Stage 10; Nu-Bop; Key Swing; Elastic Aspects; Circular Temple #1.
Personnel: Matthew Shipp: piano, synthesizer (6); Roy Campbell: trumpet (1); William Parker: bass (1-3, 6, 9); Gerald Cleaver: drums (1-3, 6); Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet (2); Khan Jamal: vibes (3); Flam: synthesizers, programming (3, 6, 9); Joe Morris: bass (5, 10), Whit Dickey: drums (5, 8, 10-12); Michael Bisio: bass (8, 11, 12); Daniel Carter: alto saxophone, flute (9); Guillermo E. Brown: drums (9).
Title: Greatest Hits | Year Released: 2013 | Record Label: Thirsty Ear Recordings
Personnel: Matthew Shipp: piano, synthesizer (6); Roy Campbell: trumpet (1); William Parker: bass (1-3, 6, 9); Gerald Cleaver: drums (1-3, 6); Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet (2); Khan Jamal: vibes (3); Flam: synthesizers, programming (3, 6, 9); Joe Morris: bass (5, 10), Whit Dickey: drums (5, 8, 10-12); Michael Bisio: bass (8, 11, 12); Daniel Carter: alto saxophone, flute (9); Guillermo E. Brown: drums (9).
Title: Greatest Hits | Year Released: 2013 | Record Label: Thirsty Ear Recordings
MATTHEW SHIPP
All Music Review by Thom Jurek
In 1995 most folks were still equating Matthew Shipp with Cecil Taylor because of his occasionally percussive method of improvisation, but Shipp
was already in the studio proving them wrong. This solo recording from
that period of 14 short- and medium-length pieces (the longest piece
here, "Flow of Meaning," is only seven minutes and 14 seconds) shows a
very introspective composer and improviser exploring textural as well as
tonal worlds, and employing this complex yet haunting, beautiful
harmonic framework into play in a sequence of tunes that explicate his
methodology better than even the Hat album by The Law of Music. Shipp
isn't looking at sound on any of these pieces so much as he's looking
for the font of sound itself. On "Self-Regulated Motion," he's breaking
down the diatonic system one chord at a time and cleverly creating an
alternate modality. On "Clocks" he takes a gradual approach to reworking
the chromatics of the entire lower register of the keyboard. On
"Harmonic Oscillator" he begins by combining the left-hand techniques of
Bud Powell and the rhythmic ideas of Herbie Nichols to complete a bridge of tonal chromatics and contrapuntal ostinato. In other words, there is no meditation that Shipp
isn't undertaking here. And none of it is academic. There is real soul
and beauty in this music, true warmth and character in its dynamic and
dramatic reaches. Symbol Systems is a recommended place for those who are interested but unfamiliar with Shipp as a pianist, improviser, and composer to discover why, along with Marilyn Crispell and Myra Melford, he is the most exciting pianist in jazz music.
Matthew Shipp: Song of Himself
As his 50th birthday approaches, Matthew Shipp upholds the avant-garde ideal with a new solo piano album and a creative temperament as restless as ever
To be seated less than 6 feet behind Shipp’s back was to feel that shaking floor, to absorb the physical impact of his repeating fortissimo rhythms, flowing cyclical melodies and sudden ascents into sonic abstraction, coaxed from the piano’s interior. This was turbulent music from a turbulent, perplexing soul, one of the most imaginative and influential figures in free jazz today.
Along with his stature as a pianist, Shipp has gained notoriety as a rhetorical bomb-thrower-venomous toward his critics, dismissive of icons as prominent as Herbie Hancock, grandiloquent in his view of himself. In a review of Shipp’s 2002 album Nu Bop, former JazzTimes editor Christopher Porter made reference to the pianist’s “hand-scrawled notes to music editors proclaiming his own greatness.” Shipp hasn’t lost his flair for such things. In an as-told-to spiel published by Chris Rich on his blog Brilliant Corners in July 2009, Shipp declared: “I hear no one in the world with as developed and distinct voice [sic] as I have on my instrument for this period in the music.” Can he be serious? Put it this way: When he heard the statement read back to him, he began laughing exuberantly before it was even through.
In a word, Shipp likes to wind people up. Part of it may be overcompensation for perceived slights or simply a gambit for attention, but there are deeper issues involved. As he heads toward a milestone-he turns 50 in December 2010-he’s taking stock of his achievements and plowing forward under career conditions that are unvaryingly tough. It’s the lot of any artist whose chief ideal is self-assertion at all costs. Shipp just manifests it more acutely.
To a degree, the Evan Parker gig recalled the drumless chamber jazz that Shipp documented so richly on the Hat Hut label starting in the mid-’90s. But Shipp has expanded his role over the past decade, facilitating new aesthetic models as curator of Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series. By now the series boasts a sprawling catalog of music ranging from pure acoustic to pure electronic and many points between-from trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr. to “mutantrumpeter” Ben Neill, from the microtonal viola of Mat Maneri to the futurist turntable collage of DJ Spooky. Shipp’s earlier encounters with Evan Parker, heard on Spring Heel Jack’s Blue Series efforts Amassed (2002) and Live (2003), involved improvisers and sound designers in a unique and compelling transaction.
It was the Blue Series that landed Shipp on the March 2003 cover of JazzTimes, as the poster child for “jazztronica.” The practice of blurring and melding musical worldviews has only continued to flower and refine itself in the ensuing years. “It was nothing new, jazz musicians doing electronic or electric music,” Shipp observes. “But I guess in my sense I was keeping my ‘avant-garde’ pedigree intact while doing it, which might have been a slightly new angle.”
Shipp’s Blue Series albums have varied widely: acoustic quartets on Pastoral Composure and New Orbit, electro-acoustic hybrids with programmer/engineer FLAM on Nu Bop, Equilibrium and Harmony and Abyss, solo piano on One and the new 4D. “Well, I see everything merging,” Shipp remarks. “I’m not trying to prove any points. I’m just doing whatever needs to be done in the moment. With that in mind, it allows you to integrate everything you’ve ever experienced. I can even do a solo recording like 4D and use things I learned doing electronic stuff.” Examples? “Not that I could overtly say. It’s something very subtle that goes on in my own psyche. Ideas about spacing, resonance.”
Apart from a forthcoming sequel to Antipop Consortium vs. Matthew Shipp (2003), Shipp says he’s more or less done with electronica. His most recent Blue Series discs, Piano Vortex and Harmonic Disorder, showcased his trio with Joe Morris on bass and Whit Dickey on drums, but this unit too has fallen by the wayside. (Shipp has formed another trio with Dickey, featuring Michael Bisio on bass.) Of his decision to return to solo piano, he explains: “I felt that the trio had built to an apotheosis, and coming off of that, I didn’t want to do anything with other people right now. I felt I could depend on myself to get to the next step.”
Another factor pushing Shipp toward independence was life after the David S. Ware Quartet. Shipp takes justifiable pride in the group, to the point of proclaiming its work “infinitely superior” to Wayne Shorter’s current quartet-a remark that stirred much controversy when it appeared in the Village Voice in 2007. (More on that later.) Whatever the case, Ware remains a tremendous saxophone force, still working through the aftermath of a kidney transplant in May 2009. It’s fitting that Live in the World, a three-disc retrospective, arguably the quartet’s definitive document, found a home on the Blue Series imprint. “I wish I could have kept [the quartet] together forever,” Ware comments. “But things are not like that, man. The world is relative.”
“It took me a long time to get out of the band,” says Shipp. “David didn’t want me to leave, and I kept trying to figure out a way. After 16 years, I felt I did whatever I could do in that setting, and there was nowhere else for me to go.”
Poet Steve Dalachinsky, a longtime friend and collaborator of Shipp’s, implies that 16 years was longer than anyone could have expected. “[At first] Matt wasn’t sure about whether he should play with folks like Ware or Roscoe Mitchell,” Dalachinsky recalls. “He always wanted to be a leader, not a follower.” William Parker calls Shipp “a homebody, in the sense that he’s comfortable being at home in his own world. His own world was calling him to spend a little bit more time at home. [Laughs.] He had a few more things to investigate.”
Like Clifford Brown, Shipp hails from Wilmington, Del.-in fact, he was born just four years after the trumpeter’s tragic death. He studied with Dennis Sandole in Philadelphia and acknowledges a certain “regional thing” in his approach to the piano. “Coming from where I do, seeing as Sun Ra lived in Philly, and being that I’m a mystic, there’s a whole kind of post-Sun Ra mystical element to what I do. Which also relates to Coltrane and McCoy Tyner coming out of Philly, and a whole other regional quasi-mystic element that enters my playing from there.”
Shipp categorically denies being influenced by Cecil Taylor, and he’s always distanced himself from the “post-Miles” triumvirate of Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. “It’s not my mentality,” says Shipp. “In some ways I think I’m more old-school, actually. First of all, in my mind I have no influences. But I love Bud Powell-to me he’s the essence of purity, an angel. To a lesser degree I really connect with the figure of Thelonious Monk. I also really relate to Duke Ellington as a pianist. There’s a hardness in Duke’s sound, and a whole extended blues tonality. … Also, the group of pianists who come out of that Ellington branch: Elmo Hope, Hassan Ibn Ali of Philadelphia, Mal Waldron, Randy Weston. Now, with all of that said, I actually still claim to have no influences. I’m a complete, 100-percent original in my own distorted imagination.”
Most of Shipp’s previous solo-piano music-on Symbol Systems, Before the World, One and Un Piano-is exclusively his own. The 2002 solo disc Songs, all standards, is highly atypical. 4D bridges the gap, placing “Autumn Leaves” and “What Is This Thing Called Love?” alongside “Teleportation,” “Primal Harmonic” and other remote abstractions. “The goal was to have a universe that’s tied together,” says Shipp, “where the pieces equal one vast organic whole. I feel like I was able to get to the fourth dimension of the piano, hence the title. I really feel that I’ve grown.”
Recorded at Roulette in downtown New York before a small group of invitees, 4D is neither a studio album nor a live album in the strict sense. Some of the repertoire hints at Shipp’s past: “Frère Jacques” as a swift, disintegrating pedal-point romp, “Prelude to a Kiss” in a calmer melodic vein, both heard back in 2000 on Pastoral Composure. Shipp also revisits the spidery arpeggiated theme of “Equilibrium,” which vibraphonist Khan Jamal endowed with a silken transparency on the 2003 album of the same name. Shipp’s 4D version is more cutting and severe. “I’m trying to draw together my Blue Series recordings,” he remarks, “and convey that where I am now is a culmination, that I’ve grown from all of them.”
Clearly one doesn’t go to Shipp for a definitive reading of “Autumn Leaves.” His approach to standards is so witheringly deconstructionist that it can verge on slapdash. It’s the original music that reveals Shipp’s gift in its fullness, his way of combining harmonic opacity and hypnotic beauty. In such pieces as “Virgin Complex” from Critical Mass (and Harmony and Abyss), “Space Shipp” from Nu Bop, or the “Orbit” leitmotif winding through New Orbit-one of the most ravishing albums of the last 10 years-there is a directness, a thematic coherence, even a riff-oriented catchiness, that one doesn’t always hear in avant-garde jazz. (It’s one clear difference between Shipp and Cecil Taylor.) Shipp himself described the aesthetic rather well with a song title from Equilibrium: “World of Blue Glass.” “We search for forms of light in tones of blue,” Shipp muses in Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue, a book he co-published with Dalachinsky. “We seek the mathematical point where equations of blue pulsating light form a space of pure harmonics.”
“Matthew is a natural-born musician, and he has the ability to make the music his own,” opines Ware. “That’s why I nicknamed him ‘The Doctor,’ man, because he knows how to, so to speak, ‘fix’ a piece of music that you put in front of him. That’s what music is about-music is infinite.”
Joe Morris, in the rare position of having worked with Shipp as both a guitarist and a bassist, comments: “Matt practices all the time and he trusts his instincts, so there’s an organic sense of order that emerges out of a pretty cosmic environment. … He always plays what he intends to play. And it’s always meant to be music that is transcendent. Some people think it’s somehow passé to reach for that. I suspect they haven’t had the kind of experience that Matt reaches for.”
When Shipp refers to 4D as “my last album,” one must recall that he’s been swearing off recording since at least 1999. “If my touring schedule was what I wanted it to be, I would never go into the studio again, ever,” he declares. “I really want to stop recording but I just can’t seem to get out of the cycle. I’m tired of conceptualizing recordings, even though I feel I have a gift for doing that. I just want to perform live. I basically keep going into the studio because I need the cash advances every once in a while.”
Shipp’s blunt assessment of business realities underlies his most polemical statements, including his controversial take on Shorter and Hancock. Thinking back on his anti-Shorter remarks of 2007, he admits: “Look, Wayne has a quartet of young players that are on fire.” Does he dig Shorter’s pianist, Danilo Perez? “Yeah. I think he’s an excellent musician. It’s not even a matter of that. I’ve heard the band a couple of times where Wayne was really questionable. People like him and Herbie Hancock, their careers were made from their early 20s on, and they’ve had all the accoutrements that the jazz industry can give. You can’t give them the benefit of the doubt.
“Writers have often gotten me on a day when I’m in a bad mood over the fact that somebody like Ware or myself has to go out and prove ourselves every time, whereas people like this can go out there and bullshit and get away with it. And whenever they play a festival they’re getting like 90 percent of the money the festival has. At times I feel someone like Herbie Hancock is taking up space. I feel his work doesn’t warrant it. I feel everything he’s done in the last 20 or 30 years is crap. That’s my personal opinion. I have a right to say it.”
The bloggers of Destination: Out mocked Shipp’s comments on Shorter versus Ware as “plain cra-zee.” Pianist Ethan Iverson lamented Shipp’s “truly uninformed assessments” of Shorter, which, he argued, “happily go into the fool’s ring and hang out along with the worst of Wynton, Branford, and Crouch.” Shipp responds: “I don’t hold the jazz tradition in the respect that Ethan does. On one level I do-I mean, it’s the tradition. On another level, fuck all of them. And I mean that-fuck Herbie Hancock, fuck Wayne Shorter. On a certain level, fuck Louis Armstrong. I’ve had really nice conversations with Ethan, but, you know, if he wants to genuflect to these people, fine. I don’t. They were out here doing what they needed to do. They obviously have a place in history and it’s obviously deserved. But I’ve got to do what I do, I’ve got to say what I need to say to market myself the way I need to market myself, and if it means I say something that’s perceived as nasty about an icon, then I’ll do it, and I don’t really give a fuck. [Laughs.] I don’t care about them, and what does Wayne Shorter care?”
That’s a mouthful, and Shipp knows it. “Sometimes when I do interviews I’m sort of playing a character. I mean everything I say, but there’s a slight schizophrenic element. People have to realize that being a jazz musician is very frustrating. On any given day, you end up saying stuff. [And] this historical thing is so heavy in jazz that it’s just distressing sometimes. You just want to relax and be in the moment. To have the whole weight of history being bandied about, all the time-that leads you sometimes to that extreme statement.”
One of Shipp’s prose pieces in Logos and Language, titled “Boxing and Jazz,” puts all the gibes and bravado into further perspective. Noting how both disciplines involve “a refined language of will and transposed aggression,” Shipp draws a parallel that wasn’t lost on Miles Davis when he made A Tribute to Jack Johnson in 1970. “I am the greatest!” roared another boxing legend, and Shipp indeed seems to have borrowed a page from Muhammad Ali, even if it sometimes means being his own worst enemy.
Matthew Shipp Talks Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette’s Somewhere
I
have struggled long and hard to evaluate the position that Keith
Jarrett's music occupies in the hierarchy of the jazz industry. I have
always...
Talkhouse Contributing Writer Matthew Shipp is a pianist and composer. You can visit his website here.
People often ask, “Are there ever negative pieces in the Talkhouse?” There sure are, and we figured it was time for a week’s worth of outstanding pans. It does take a little gumption to knock the work of one of your peers in such a high-profile forum, but plenty of Talkhouse writers have registered their displeasure. As ever, though, they do so from a musician’s perspective, a rare and very valuable point of view. Best of all, the pieces come from a place of respect… usually. But we’ll let you decide.
— The editors of Talkhouse Music
I have struggled long and hard to evaluate the position that Keith Jarrett’s music occupies in the hierarchy of the jazz industry. I have always felt a tremendous amount of pretense surrounding his whole universe. Of course he has some real skill, and sometimes sounds inspired. But I just can’t get past the layers and layers and layers of pretension. I’ve tried. Maybe it’s just me.
In the ’70s, as a teenager I struggled to make sense out of what was, to me, the pseudo jazz/new age meandering that was the completely improvised solo piano concerts that he did. He never seemed to me to have sculpted a specific language system, but instead seemed like someone who had a lot of piano chops and knew a lot of devices from classical music and had some jazz chops and could get a line going when needed. Sometimes the devices sort of sometimes fell together and worked — sometimes — but a lot of times they did not. It seemed to me at the time to never get beyond the devices and matriculate into an actual language. He peddled a rhetoric around his solo work like he was channeling from the void, or translating the music from some platonic realm of pure forms. That is all fine and well. That type of talk has always been around the music, and I have used that mode of philosophy as a way to fuel my art too.
Cecil Taylor, who was also doing solo concerts in the 1970s, used language of that sort to talk about what he did. But on some level Taylor knows that it’s a poetic metaphor — even if it’s true on some level — and he actually has to construct a real language to live up to the mythos. When Jarrett talks this talk one gets the sense that he did not intuit that it is a poetic metaphor — though rooted in truth — it seems to me that Jarrett actually thought he was a god, and anything he played, whether it was vapid, watered-down impressionist devices or insipid vamps, was sacrosanct just because he was Keith Jarrett.
So what does this have to do with this trio record, Somewhere, which was recorded live in Lucerne in 2009? Well, first of all, there is some nice music on the disc. That should be all that matters. I should be able to get past what I perceive as the Jarrett pretense and just enjoy what is here for what it is. I’m having a hard time with that.
Guess my main beef is the tremendous status that is accorded to Jarrett’s trio — with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, they’ve been together for 30 years now — by middle-aged white jazz critics. I just fail to see what makes his trio playing standards any more ”state of the art” or dynamic than any number of African-American pianists I can think of. Just for example, take someone like Joe Sample. He has a holistic sense of the piano, where the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic elements arise out of a unitary matrix. He has impeccable articulation. The melodic tissue of his motifs are exactly that, melodic, and his syntax is completely original. He can do long looping phrases and gather a hypnotic storm, and if he decided to play a vamp Jarrett would have to leave the room.
I guess what I am getting at is I don’t think Jarrett’s work lives up to the hype as a mature artistic statement. Somewhere feels like a dated trio concept. It does not even live up to its predecessors. It has none of the austerity and depth of the early ’60s Bill Evans/Scott LaFaro/Paul Motian trio or of Paul Bley as, say, on the 1963 Sonny Rollins/Coleman Hawkins album Sonny Meets Hawk! — Bley’s playing on that album is the template for a lot of Jarrett’s straight-ahead work.
To be fair, on the uptempo numbers Keith can gather some steam and get a line really going; he can phrase all over the place and approach the changes from some oblique angles, but I personally don’t really buy into his phrasing. What can I say? I worship the phrasing of Bud Powell-Monk-Hampton Hawes and Phineas Newborn, Jr. Even when Jarrett gets a sort of hypnotic line going it does not have the same internal dynamism to me that these other gentleman have. The ballad playing on Jarrett’s album I have nothing to say about — it goes nowhere; likewise with the vamping on the insipid title cut —when it comes to vamping I worship Mal Waldron.
I am not a music writer — just an asshole musician — so I don’t put any weight behind my taste. It’s just that — my taste. There is some nice stuff on Somewhere — although some of it sounds like watered-down Muzak to me — and if you buy into Jarrett’s universe you will most likely like this record, but if you don’t there is nothing here to get you pass the tremendous pretense.
https://www.npr.org/2012/01/13/112931672/matthew-shipp-on-piano-jazz
Matthew Shipp On Piano Jazz
57:52
September 18, 2009
by Alfred Turner
National Public Radio (NPR)
Matthew Shipp.
AUDIO: <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/112931672/145159603" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"></iframe>
Set List:
- "Patmos" (Matthew Shipp)
- "Angel Eyes" (Earl Brent, Matt Dennis)
- "Summertime" (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Dubose Heyward)
- "Warm Valley" (Duke Ellington)
- "Naima" (John Coltrane)
- "Module" (Matthew Shipp)
- "Gamma Ray" (Matthew Shipp)
- "Portrait of Matthew" (Marian McPartland)
- "C-Jam Blues" (Barney Bigard, Duke Ellington)
At the beginning of the session he tells Marian McPartland, "I like to be felt. If I'm successful ... it hits people on many different levels."
There are many different emotional strands in Shipp's music, and one can hear his roots quite clearly, ranging from his interest in the organ music played at the Episcopal Church of his youth, to the classical lessons he began at age five, the diverse jazz recordings his parents collected (which Shipp started devouring when he was 12) and his studies at the New England Conservatory of Music.
The session features three of Shipp's compositions. He solos on "Module," as well as "Patmos," a tune that paints a very clear scene for McPartland: "I actually get a picture of some people in a forest, walking through the trees." Their duet on "Gamma Ray" is something of a departure from Shipp's often dramatic style, with its playfulness and Thelonius Monk-like angularity.
When Shipp plays the standards he offers startling revelations. "Angel Eyes" expands with thick chords and rumbling arpeggios, creating dramatic tension and release. He inspires McPartland to take a page from his notebook when she plays Duke Ellington's "Warm Valley," her solid left hand often providing counterpoint to the melodic inventions she hangs on what Shipp calls Ellington's "rock-solid backbone."
McPartland's "Portrait of Matthew" also incorporates some of Shipp's style, painting a complex and thoughtful portrait of him. Afterwards, she tells him, "It's inspiring to hear someone like you play, because it does make me sort of think differently."
McPartland and Shipp play three other duets, including the Gershwin classic "Summertime," which transforms into a classically-inspired fantasia, as well as John Coltrane's "Naima." They close with an inspired "C-Jam Blues," an almost baroque, bluesy fugue that alternately walks, skips, strolls and struts.
Originally recorded March 7, 2006.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/feb/19/jazz-pianist-matthew-shipp-freethinker
Matthew Shipp: the jazz pianist still messing with our minds
Matthew Shipp's free-thinking approach to jazz inspired
Philip Clark several years ago. Today, the pianist is still thinking outside the box
Life was in a rut and New York City was calling. The Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn – its bookshops, cafes and general civility – was an antidote to drab, unhappy Norwood Junction in depressing south-east London where, ten years ago, I existed day-to-day. Everything in my life had become geared towards securing my next fix, and the music that kept drawing me back. Nothing at home could match the improvisational majesty and ecstatic grooves of saxophonist David S Ware, bassist William Parker and pianist Matthew Shipp.
And nothing could have prepared me for my first in-the-flesh encounter in a New York jazz club with the David S Ware Quartet - drummer Guillermo E. Brown, Ware, Parker and Shipp. What was this music called? I couldn't find a convincing label - a fact I liked. Was this free jazz? Ware, who died in 2012, embodied the exploratory musical instincts and spirit of 1960s free jazz pioneers John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. The inspiration of his other great saxophone hero Sonny Rollins resounded inside every melodic turn and overarching phrase, and yet his music understood something very fundamental: merely retracing the dislocating rhythmic ricochet and melodic cry points characteristic of the 1960s mother music was no freedom at all.
The title of Ware's 1997 album, Wisdom of Uncertainty, was as much a statement of intent. Chewy, inchoate slabs of composed beginnings were a call to improvised action, or a Ware Quartet performance might equally generate itself as the musicians zoned inside each other's emerging patterns: a toe in the water triggering a torrent of sound. A Ware gig might leave you punchdrunk from the brutalist beauty of his music's relentlessly scattering lines and forms; or with your emotions buoyed by floating on a slipstream of euphoric grooves for longer than is usually considered decent.
One thing was for sure: this music felt thrillingly at odds with idea of jazz that was then being peddled by the major record labels desperately trying to make jazz economics add up. The once-treasured Blue Note label was reduced to marketing their star saxophonist Joe Lovano's theme-park jazz – Celebrating Sinatra and Viva Caruso, while Wynton Marsalis' mantra that jazz was "America's classical music", and therefore a smiley repertory music safely frozen in time, dimmed the ambitions of anyone gullible enough to listen. Ware, Parker, Shipp and their colleagues begged to differ: jazz for them was very much now, a music that roamed free in the realm of speculation.
Into this ideological minefield I stepped, an innocent abroad. I'd heard a few CDs, and about Shipp's infamous punch-up with jazz writer Stanley Crouch, the Peter Mandelson scowl behind Marsalis' Tony Blair grin. I circled the scene surrounding Ware trying to find a point of entry both as a jazz-lover and as a music writer, and a few things quickly became obvious. David Ware didn't do small talk, but Matthew Shipp was happy to shoot the breeze and spoke with devastating candour about his own vision of music. I was genuinely taken aback when a few minutes into our first interview he said: "I love Coltrane, I love Ornette, I love Monk – but fuck them all, fuck the tradition and certainly fuck Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. I'm weary of being thought of as a free jazz pianist. I want to find new ways of messing with people's minds." And as I disappeared into the New York night – every night – to sometimes obscure little jazz clubs around Brooklyn, Queens and downtown Manhattan for a nightly dose of jazz, those words stayed with me.
For a while, Shipp junked the whole jazz format and such albums as Equilbrium and Antipop Consortium vs Matthew Shipp unpicked the processes of DJ Culture and funk from the vantage point of his steely improviser's gaze. Since then Shipp has reintegrated the lessons of those records into his work as a solo and group improviser, his elastic rhythms and coat of many melodic colours re-energised by thinking beyond the acoustic box. Typically, when Shipp begins his three-day residency at Caf̩ Oto tonight, he'll be playing with British free improviser John Butcher and German synth improviser Thomas Lehn Рmusicians for whom jazz represents a marginal creative interest.
Ware has gone, handing responsibility to the likes of William Parker and Shipp to continue renewing the quest for freedom by keeping basic jazz beliefs under scrutiny. I was fortunate to have wound up in New York when it felt jazz was in serious flux, and witnessing these musicians confront the music as they were playing it was ear-opening and intellectually liberating. The formats of my own life came under question, and after three years of shuttling backwards and forwards between London and New York, I relocated not to New York, but at least to a different part of London, away from depressing Norwood Junction, happy never to return there.
• Matthew Shipp is at Cafe Oto, Dalston, London, 19-21 February, 2014.
Thoughtful Words from Matthew Shipp
On April 27, 2017
Matthew Shipp
This morning I was cleaning out some files and I came across these words from composer and pianist Matthew Shipp when he introduced my Deems Taylor / Virgil Thomson Award on November 17, 2015 at a ceremony put together by ASCAP in New York City. The award was for my piece for The Paris Review about John Coltrane’s first biographer, Dr. Cuthbert Simpkins. Reading his words now, Shipp’s perceptions of my “unusual” approach portend, hopefully, similar perceptions of the approach in my forthcoming Gene Smith’s Sink.
With permission of Shipp, and courtesy of the award presenters ASCAP, here’s a transcript of what he said:
We now honor North Carolinian author, Sam Stephenson…for an article that was published in The Paris Review titled “An Absolute Truth: On Writing a Life of Coltrane.”
Mr. Stephenson writes about a 1975 book, Coltrane: A Biography, and its young, self-published author at the time, Cuthbert Simpkins. Simpkins was neither a musician nor a writer – he was a black medical student who was so moved by Coltrane’s music that he decided he had to learn about the great musician by writing his biography. After spending time with Dr. Simpkins and his family in Shreveport, Sam Stephenson captures the essence of what drove Dr. Simpkins to write his book and makes the case for its lingering importance.
Of all the years I’ve been on this panel, this is one of the most unusual articles I’ve read. Instead of writing directly about a musician it goes after an obscure author of a bio on Coltrane, but in so doing it touches on so many things in the author’s life and on Coltrane, including really getting at the place that Coltrane occupied in both spirituality and universal consciousness and Black consciousness in the 1970s.
Sam Stephenson is with us tonight and accepting for The Paris Review is managing editor, Nicole Rudick.
Thank you, Matt Shipp.
MATTHEW SHIPP
Interview by Dave Reitzes (May 1999)
If this decade isn't looked back upon as the Roaring Nineties, it won't be Matthew Shipp's fault. For all the heart-stopping architectonics of Shipp's music, however, its solid melodic foundation guarantees that the pianist's impact will be felt long after the 20th century is history.
The past decade has seen Shipp sculpt a body of work that includes his continuing and highly rewarding contributions to the David S. Ware Quartet, a stint with Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory, and over thirty albums in an impressive variety of solo, duo, trio and quartet formats, with such collaborators as guitarist Joe Morris, saxophonists Roy Campbell and Rob Brown, trumpeter Roy Campbell, bassist William Parker, violinist Matt Maneri, and drummers Whit Dickey and Susie Ibarra.
His latest album, DNA (on Thirsty Ear), is Shipp's fifteenth album as a leader. A duo recording with William Parker, DNA is full of introspective and abstract soundscapes with roots in Monk and Powell, and branches reaching out to American traditional music and spirituals, as in an impassioned version of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" and the eloquent, straightforward reading of "Amazing Grace" that brings the album to a close.
We had a chance to talk to Matt just as he was getting ready for the Ware Quartet's first performance with new drummer Guillermo Brown, opening for Sonic Youth at New York City's Roseland.
PSF: I don't know where to start, so why not start with the here and now? You're not recording for a while.
Yeah, I'm doing this duo album with William on Thirsty Ear, then I'm going on a sabbatical from recording, the recording process. But I do have some imports that have already been recorded, that'll be straggling into the country over the next couple years on hatArt. But I have a lot of albums out and it's time to take a rest.
PSF: Do you know how long that's going to last? Is it just going to be when you feel like it?
Right. You know, actually, to be quite honest, DNA, which is the duo album we have on Thirsty Ear, is number fifteen of my own albums --
PSF: As a leader.
Right, and that's in a very short period of time, in a seven-year period. And to me it's kind of capping off the primary body of work. So I'm not really feeling the urge to record at (laughs) to be honest.
PSF: The line between your work as a leader and a sideman kind of blurs sometimes. I think you're somebody who probably, consciously, doesn't stay off to the side too much.
Well, pretty much everything I do, except for Roscoe Mitchell, I kind of cross the line into a collaborator. My own things I'm definitely the leader. With David Ware I'm co-orchestrator (laughs). I've developed a role for myself in that group. I mean, he's the leader but I'm definitely organically a huge part of the whole concept of the quartet. So I think I kind of cross the line. I'm not strictly a sideman; I'm a co -- (shrugs) You could choose to see it many ways.
PSF: Well, it shows. I was listening to Go See the World [David S. Ware Quartet] today and I was thinking that it's hard to imagine the Quartet with a different piano player.
Yeah, I think I've a developed a role for my particular style in that group. We think of it as a piece. There's nobody else who would fit in that role exactly. And that's a bit of an organic marriage between his style as a composer and my actual style as a pianist, accompanist, musical thinker, musical landscape developer, there's a natural organic marriage between David and myself. And then if you look at the rhythm section, there's an organic marriage between William Parker and myself. Therefore that group has grown over the years to be like an organic totality that all our personalities contribute to largely.
PSF: You had Whit Dickey for a while, then you had Susie [Ibarra] for a little while and now this new guy, Guillermo . . .
Guillermo Brown.
PSF: He's only been with you, I'm guessing, about a month or so? Two months?
Ah, no -- two days.
PSF: Oh! Well.
(Laughs) We've rehearsed the last two days.
PSF: How's that working out so far?
He's a very good drummer. He's different. He's young; he's 22. Therefore, without a lot of baggage. (Grins) He's definitely going to work.
PSF: What does that do when you have a different player -- player in the sense of a team. What happens when that fourth corner changes?
Well, I would say in that particular group, the sonic landscape, the concept of the rhythm section in that group is one that has been developed over a decade, and it's pretty solid. The actual landscape is generated from myself and William, so the drummer is an added appendage. I mean, a lot of people think of drummers as the foundation of the rhythm section. I would actually say in this group that's not the case. Even though David feeds off a drummer. But the actual sonic landscape is generated by William and myself, so a drummer more or less has to fit into that, because that's already a developed concept. Usually a drummer's style does kind of dictate how we interact with him, but the basic concept of the rhythm section is already established. Elvin Jones could come into the group and he would have to adjust to us.
PSF: Well, number one, you and David and William all have strong personalities as musicians . . .
In and of ourselves.
PSF: Right. And then you put the three of you together, and it's like -- it's one times two times three . . .
Right, it's multiplying, not adding (laughs).
PSF: So you'd have to be a dynamo drummer just to stay afloat. I don't mean just in terms of sheer power; you'd have to be pretty quick mentally and pretty flexible to fit in. And then a little power doesn't hurt, too.
He definitely -- he has it. He brings something different. All the drummers that have been with the Ware group have added something very good to the group, from Mark Edwards to Whit Dickey to Susie Ibarra. He has something different and it should be interesting to see how it grows. I can't predict exactly where it's going to go.
PSF: You're someone whose music is not easy to describe. In terms of nailing it, saying, "Here's what it is," I have more trouble with yours (laughs) than anyone else's. Critics seem to describe your music as being about challenge or about struggle. How do you feel about that?
About what? (Laughs)
PSF: About having people either shrugging, going, "I don't know what it is," or else describing it in terms that are sort of antagonistic. Does that strike you as an insult?
No, because I think somebody's trying to do the best they can to describe it. I like people not being able to be pigeon-holed. I feel I bring a lot to the table as far as what I've been influenced by and what I like. I'm obviously in the jazz avant-garde idiom and one thing that's always struck me about the genius of that idiom is that it can kind of encompass everything, theoretically. If you listen to Albert Ayler, you hear folk songs, you hear elements of traditional jazz on some of his earlier albums, you hear folk melodies, you hear spirituals. If you listen to Coltrane you'll hear Indian music, African music, along with his obvious underpinnings in jazz. If you listen to Cecil Taylor you'll hear some classical things. So the genius of this idiom is that you can bring anything into it. I mean, that's any music, really, when you get down to it. If you listen to Stevie Wonder, he brings elements of Latin music, he performs Bob Dylan songs. But the jazz avant-garde seems like you can incorporate anything into it, like a melting pot, within your own style. I personally have grown up listening to a lot of different things and have been influenced by a lot of different things. I approach the music as music, not as the various genres. So I'm not trying to make a music that's a mixture of this or that, but a lot of this or that is in it.
PSF: It just comes out.
Naturally. So that elements of the different things that are part of me are synthesizing naturally. Therefore, for some people it might be harder to pigeonhole. I mean, when you get down to it, I obviously come out of a certain thing. I definitely come out of the jazz avant-garde tradition and therefore the jazz piano tradition, but there's a lot of things going on that really meant a lot to me, be it Bud Powell or Jimi Hendrix, Anton Webern, Andrew Hill. So there's a lot of people I like and I've just soaked it all in.
PSF: Sometimes you'll play something where maybe more jazz will come out -- well, it's wrong to even say that, but you know what I mean -- some kind of a jazz style comes out more in one piece where maybe in another piece you hear more of a classical influence. You must be sick of being compared to Cecil Taylor.
Oh, yeah.
PSF: And I wouldn't compare the two of you.
I don't think I sound anything like him. But I understand that, because if you mention that idiom, you almost have to mention that.
PSF: Right, just in terms of you being two avant-garde jazz piano players. The average jazz listener who's not too familiar with the avant-garde side of it might hear it that way.
Some people listen very superficially. They get out of it that there's a lot of density and dissonance. If they get that, then they say, you know, you're out of Cecil Taylor.
PSF: Yes, you're coming out of some of the same traditions, but clearly --
A different vector.
PSF: I don't know why I feel I'm on more solid ground when I listen to Cecil.
If you want to describe me as a turn of the century American pianist, I play turn of the century American piano music. (Laughs)
PSF: And I'm not somebody who worries about genre; I just can't think of another person whose music uproots me the way yours does. You know that old quote from Andre Previn, where he says, Stan Kenton makes a big motion, his band plays something, and every arranger in the house nods their head and says, "Yes, that's how it's done." But then Duke Ellington raises a finger, two horns play something, and Previn says, "I don't know what it is."
(Laughs)
PSF: There's all this other stuff where I feel I'm on solid ground, but then with you --
It's a mystery.
PSF: Even with your music with Ware, I feel I'm on more familiar territory than your solo work. Do you feel there's a big leap between your music and the music you play with him?
Oh, it's different worlds.
PSF: Because I feel that way.
No, they're two different worlds altogether. In my relating to him, it's creating a different universe than when I put my own name as a leader on it, definitely. They're two different universes with different logics. Purposely so.
PSF: Though, obviously, it's not something where you sit and you think about, "I'm going to do it this way."
No, but I think a burly horn that is that capacious makes the musical landscape a certain thing. And even within the context of the quartet, when he stops playing and the trio is doing something, what you're doing as a trio has to index what he had done before. So it's different when you start with a whole different premise, without that burly tenor, it's a whole different premise. The way he writes is different. The way I accompany him is different. The way I use a horn or a violin in the context of my own group is completely different -- the aims and the means. But related.
PSF: As the writer or the so-called journalist, it's my job to characterize what the difference is, but I'm going to ask you what you think the difference is.
It's hard for me to precisely define those things, but I would say that his group is music coming out of the tenor tradition. There's that definite post-Sonny Rollins, post-Albert Ayler, post-Coltrane thing. And it's a quartet, coming out of a classic quartet concept. Whereas, I think I'm much more concerned with . . . how can I put this? (Laughs) I'm just coming from a different space. I'm a different generation. I'm trying to think of the exact term to say where I'm coming from, and it's not really . . .
PSF: It's almost like doing psychotherapy on yourself to try to figure it out.
Yeah, but I'm good at that. (Laughs)
PSF: Good. (Laughs)
The term is still not coming to me. I mean, he's from a jazz generation. I'm a jazz musician, but the way I think about putting albums out or the way I think about myself as an artist even is more comparable to David Bowie than Sonny Rollins. Post-modern is not the word; in fact, it's definitely not the word. I can't really think of a term. I guess what it comes down to is, my music is different: the way I write, the way I compose, the way I deal with dynamics, the way I organize the other players in my group is just different.
PSF: There's a different sense of structure, but (laughs) don't ask me to describe it.
Well, I think what that comes down to is in his groups, the basic emphasis is accompaniment for him. It's a quartet in that sense, where even though there's a lot of detail going on in the rhythm section that has its own interest, on another level it is more accompaniment -- on another level -- and he's the leader. And I kind of de-emphasize that in my own groups, unless it's a solo or a duo. I orchestrate differently. And I don't mean this as a put-down, but on my album Strata (hatArt), I really try to do the piano as a coloristic device in an Ellingtonian sense, and in his groups I don't think he would take a back job like that. I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, I'm just saying that one group is organized along the lines of that type of classic jazz quartet and the other is organized along the lines of a portrait or a novel.
PSF: With Strata, you give them [the horns] a lot of space on that.
Right. Which makes the album what it is.
PSF: My initial reaction to that album was that, even though we've been hearing your compositions all along, it gives me a way to hear them more, when I can separate the composition from the player. Do people ask you a lot, when you're done a performance, how much of it was written?
Yeah, there's all kinds of questions and there's all kinds of answers to that.
PSF: Occasionally that question arises, if you haven't heard someone play the same piece a couple times. I'll give you one example, in fact, the first time I can think of when that question occurred to me [with your music] was when I was listening to the album with Joe Morris [Matthew Shipp Duo with Joe Morris, Thesis (hatArt)], the piece called "The Middle Region," where there's this very intricate interplay.
I'm trying to remember which one that is. Is that number eleven?
PSF: Maybe ten?
Is that a very African one, where we're both playing . . .
December 8, 2017
Joe Henderson Lab
Taking the measure of Matthew Shipp’s influence on 21st century jazz requires a multidimensional model. One of the most intrepid pianists and musical thinkers on the scene, he’s an exceptionally dynamic improviser, commanding bandleader, insistently inventive composer, and essential conduit for new sounds as artistic director of Thirsty Ear’s acclaimed Blue Series imprint.
He first gained widespread attention in the powerhouse quartet of protean tenor saxophone David S. Ware, while also recording memorable sessions with free jazz explorers Roscoe Mitchell and Ivo Perlman. As a leader he’s made some 50 albums under his own name, and his recent Thirsty Ear album Piano Song is an arrestingly beautiful project featuring his trio with longtime bassist Michael Bisio and and drummer Newman Taylor Baker. While often associated with free jazz, Shipp is far too capacious for any one school or aesthetic. His famously percussive attack is evident on Piano Song, but so is his rhapsodic lyricism, his love of open space, and his deep and abidingly personal reflections on jazz’s eternal dialogue between its storied past and searching future.
More than a band, the Matthew Shipp Trio is a time-bending transport to spaces uncannily familiar and recognizably unknown.
"Matthew Shipp boosts one of the most prolific, consistent, and challenging catalogs — the pianist's brain seems to fire on all cylinders all the time."
--JazzTimes
Jazz Icon Matthew Shipp on Ending His Recording Career With ‘Piano Song’
Matthew Shipp Glen Tollington
Since the early 1990s, piano maestro Matthew Shipp
has been a chief linchpin of the avant-garde jazz underground,
producing a monolithic catalog that has pioneered—and polarized—the jazz
lexicon.
The East Village fixture (he’s been living downtown
since the mid-’80s), alongside bassist/composer William Parker and the
late, great saxophonist David S. Ware, formed a godlike trifecta of jazz
giants who will forever remain pillars of the avant scene.
While
Parker remains as productive as ever in his sixth decade and change, his
pal Shipp is calling it quits—recording-wise that is. After
soul-searching discussions with Thirsty Ear Records owner Peter Gordon, Shipp decided the just-released Piano Song would be his swan song.
But
Shipp enthusiasts needn’t panic just yet. Not only will he be hanging
onto his role as curator at Thirsty Ear but a spate of records are on
tap to be released on other labels including, RogueArt and a pair (in
quartet mode and solo) for the resurgent ESP-Disk imprint.
As Shipp winds down his recorded tenure at Thirsty Ear, we can heap praise on Shipp’s Piano Song. Backed
by his Trio, including bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor
Baker, the album continues his head-spinning streak. Teeming with his
creative force of nature where he deconstructs the jazz idiom using his
very own sonic language and superhuman lyricism, the album is akin to
his definitive Thirsty Ear collection Greatest Hits (’13) and recent Trio joints, Root of Things (‘14) and The Conduct of Jazz (’15).
Then
there’s Shipp’s punk rock and DIY underground M.O., a don’t-give-a-fuck
ethos he’s cultivated since his days hustling for then-label manager at
Homestead Records, Steven Joerg, who would go on to launch AUM Fidelity Records with the Ware/Parker/Shipp threesome that remain that label’s holy cornerstones.
Under
Shipp’s stewardship, Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series has been an “out”-music
game changer as he’s served as resident provocateur. Unfazed and
undeterred, the exceptional tastemaker Shipp fused jazz with myriad
musics including, electronics, collaborating with and releasing records
by turntablists, knob-twiddlers and noisemakers like FLAM, DJ Spooky, a
pre-Run The Jewels El-P, Spring Heel Jack and more.
As Shipp and his Trio gear up to play The Cutting Room this coming Thursday for the record release show to celebrate Piano Song,
we sat down with the pianist at an Avenue A café to trace his Thirsty
Ear lineage, his retirement from recording, enraging jazz elitists, his
punk rock proclivities, the David S. Ware Quartet opening for Sonic
Youth and fucking with people’s heads.
Let’s start with Piano Song. Why do you see this record as the closing chapter on your recording tenure with Thirsty Ear?
Well,
Peter and I have been discussing—because I’ve been there a long
time—and it’s kind of time to figure out a little different take on
everything. We’ve been talking a long time about me eventually exiting
as a recording artist. It just seemed the right time. I don’t know why
but it did.
So it wasn’t like you recorded Piano Song then said to yourself, “This is it.”
It was nothing about the actual process of recording this album and the exact musical state.
What about recording for other labels? You’re done with those, too?
No, I’m gonna do a couple more records for ESP-Disk.
Ah, so you’re not ceasing all recording operations.
No, but I am immensely slowing down with it.
Why do you think you’ve come to that decision?
Oh, I’ve been trying to do that for a long time. [Laughing]
But you’re going to stick around Thirsty Ear as…
Curator.
Which records are you most proud of in that whole catalog you’ve curated as The Blue Series, other than your own works?
The beginning of it was really exciting. It was really great to have been involved in a couple of Mat Maneri
albums, just because my like for Mat’s position in the music and what
he is is immense. It was also great to be involved with a couple of Craig Taborn
albums, especially now that Craig’s on ECM and he wasn’t recording much
as a leader. It just felt really good to be involved with a couple of
his earlier albums as a leader.
Matthew Shipp. Peter Gannushkin
What about the more outsider-y records you worked and played on like Black Music Disaster, things that didn’t particularly please jazz purists.
[Laughing]
It’s fun to piss off people. I really enjoy working with Spring Heel
Jack a lot because they turned me on to a whole new world of stuff.
That’s a special album. There are certain albums you do. I did a duo
album with J Spaceman on Spring Heel Jack’s label, Treader, and it’s
just harmonium. It’s all like a drone, one drone.
It seems like you get off on getting a rise out of people.
Umm…yes [Laughs]
I’m also accommodating. But I like fitting into people’s preconceived
ideas then I like pulling the rug out from under them and really fucking
with their heads.
What about the hip-hop and electronics-leaning material of The Blue Series?
That
was a great period that started around 2003, a really alive period. We
were really trying to stretch it, you know? I’m really proud of that
period. That was a really “for real” period.
How did you wind up spearheading putting that music out there?
First
of all, even though I’m considered a jazz avant-gardist, I’ve always
listened to a lot of pop music and black pop music. I grew up with funk
and I really could have easily gone with a ’70s funk thing because I
grew up with that. My mother wanted me to play with Grover Washington.
She
talked to him once and he said I should come out and audition for the
band. Then I went into my thing. But always in the back of my head I was
always really fascinated with dance music; I used to go to discos.
When
I first moved to New York, I would hang out at The Pyramid [Club] and
all these discos at night. I was hanging out in the Basquiat crowd in
the early ’80s. I remember being really wasted and coming out of discos
with like, Run-D.M.C in my head. I remember that image one night, almost
having it juxtaposed what I do against that.
Then the idea of doing something musically like that manifested later on?
I
wasn’t thinking of doing it but I remember that that idea kind of made
sense; it was in the back of my head. Years later, Spring Heel Jack was
actually recording with them [Thirsty Ear] and he told me they were jazz
fans and wanted to do a collaboration. So I thought “Why not?” It was
more of an ambient album but it got my taste wet. Then I remember one
night going to a party and DJ Spooky was DJing. I went up to him
afterwards just to say hi and introduce myself. He knew who I was right
away and he said, “Oh, we should collaborate sometime.” And I thought to
myself, “Yeah, right.” But then I was like, “Why not?”
Wasn’t
there a there a similar stylistic cross-section thing happening at
places like The Knitting Factory and Tonic back in the late ’90s and
early 2000s?
Knitting Factory was about cross-sections
but not that specific. That’s a very specific head space: like me
playing with El-P, me with Antipop Consortium, me with Spooky—that was
not happening at The Knitting Factory. That was a New York thing. I used
to go to the record store that closed on 4th Street, Other Music, and
Beans used to work there and I didn’t know he was in a band. He used to
come up and talk to me a lot when I would go in. I just thought he was a
guy that worked there.
You didn’t know who he was?
No,
and he used to say we should collaborate. I would say, “O.K., yeah,
let’s do it,” and I was thinking, “Who the fuck is this motherfucker?” [Laughs]
Not in a nasty way…but then one day I actually was flipping through a
magazine and saw a picture of this band and I was like, “That’s the guy
from Other Music!” I was listening to his music and was like, “Oh wow,”
and, yeah, so, it happened.
Was there certain places you were going to check music out in the city?
Not
really. I started hanging out a lot in the early 2000s at lounge-type
of things. I was just trying to soak up the scene in general, get a feel
for the whole thing.
Obviously you were doing your own
thing, and then there was this other stuff that wasn’t jazz you were
interested into. Were you making a concerted effort to intersect it?
Yeah,
yeah. It was kind of interesting. When I started working with John
Coxon from Spring Heel Jack, he was a producer of Everything But The
Girl and my wife’s really into trip-hop. She likes Tricky, Bjork,
Portishead and Massive Attack. That was her world. So when John Coxon
started calling my house and she found out I was gonna work with the guy
that produced Everything But The Girl in it, she started even looking
at me different! [Laughing]
Did your wife get you into trip-hop?
She
was always joking with me like, “You should do some trip-hop. I think
your sound would be good over it.” I was always like, “Yeah, right.”
Then when it actually really started happening, she was really into it.
When you started curating that material and collaborating
with those artists for The Blue Series, were there people who actually
gave you shit for branching out into that?
I expected to
but there were people who didn’t like it; it was never nasty or nobody
ever called me a sellout. But I was actually expecting to get a lot of
negative blowback and I didn’t. [Laughing] There’s people that
didn’t like it or that type of thing where they didn’t like my version
of it. But it was never really nasty or anything—that I saw! [Laughing]
Were
you torn between staying faithful to the avant-garde jazz thing on your
own and going this other route, playing with other non-jazz people?
No,
no. Once I decided to go that way, it was just that’s what I was doing
right now. It was a whole head space that I really got into. I wanted to
collaborate with some people I never did like Amon Tobin, Kool Keith
and Madlib. I wrote him a couple of times but he never got back to me.
Even though I’m not doing that type of thing anymore, I might be playing
on this other producer’s cut and Kool Keith might be on it later this
year so I’ll get a chance to do something with him.
That collab seems like a good match.
My favorite incarnation of Kool Keith is Dr. Octagon. I love that album. It’s one of my favorite albums ever.
Has hip-hop had more of an influence on you than, say, jazz artists might have?
No,
but at any time people veer off in different directions and, to me,
it’s just another kind of way of doing things. Was jazz stale then? You
can make an argument for that. If you look at it that way, I think it
was a way to freshen up certain things.
Do you mean a certain period of jazz was stale or overall?
The
whole mindset is stale but there’s always really talented, inspired
people at all times playing. But that’s not the question. Do things have
a mindset that could be oppressive in some ways? That could be said of
jazz at times.
Do you think you accomplished what you set out to do as a Thirsty Ear artist and curator?
There’s
always the constraint of time and you cut something off. I don’t think
there’s really anything as bringing anything to fruition.
With
your closing the door on recording for Thirsty Ear and ultimately for
all other labels, are you going to concentrate solely on performing
live?
I just basically want to get out on the road. I’ve
been on the road a decent [amount] but I just want to perform and kind
of become an elder statesman eventually.
William Parker certainly fits into that niche as an elder statesmen. Do you mean fitting in as an elder statesmen in his realm?
Well,
no, but in a different way. There’s only one William Parker and I can’t
step into his position or shoes. But I can create my own niche—which I
think I have. William is very special and he’s played with a lot of
people from the ’60s. He’s played with Don Cherry, Cecil [Taylor], Bill
Dixon and that gives him a different type of sheen.
But you are stepping away…
I really don’t want
to be putting out albums when I’m 60, 65, like I’m trying to make a
statement because there’s nothing worse to me than, like, Herbie Hancock
trying to put out a pop album or something, trying to make a statement
when a 19-year-old kid can make a better statement. Of course, I’m not
doing that; I’m doing acoustic jazz. But even with that, I don’t want to
be littering the field for younger people; I’m not at that point yet
where I’m littering the field. But maybe some young person thinks I am. I
want to kind of step away from it and let a new generation…
Who do you see as taking over the helm in that new generation, if anyone?
I
don’t really keep up with that what people are doing but at one point, I
did, mainly because of the label. If I hear a certain name enough, I’ll
check it out. The last two people we signed at Thirsty Ear were younger
and who really made a profound statement would have been Dawn of Midi but they left the label and we just did Tomeka Reid last year. Other than that, the two people I personally promote—they’re both sax players—are James Brandon Lewis, who was a student of mine, and Darius Jones.
You’ve
lived downtown since the mid-’80s and still many others live in the
neighborhood, William, Newman, John Zorn. Is there still a sense of
community in the musical sense?
There used to be a really
big sense of it but now a lot of people have moved to Brooklyn and some
to Jersey. But this is historically a great jazz neighborhood. Mingus
lived on 5th Street, Charlie Parker on 10th Street…
And you lived there at one point, right?
Yeah,
when I was homeless, the woman who owns it, took me in for three months
and let me stay there until I found a place. I feel the history in the
neighborhood, definitely. But other than my friends, I’m in my own
world.
But there was a vibrant scene at the Knit and Tonic that doesn’t really exist anymore?
Well, I don’t know if it’s here because I don’t go out.
[Laughing] And now The Stone is shutting its doors.
Right,
right. Tonic and Knitting Factory were definitely hangs, a scene.
That’s definitely kind of dispersed. I know there’s a lot of places in
Brooklyn but I never go out there. I don’t want to say it’s not like the
good ol’ days but it might not be. [Laughing]
Do you have a preference for playing in New York as opposed to Europe?
I
want to play music so I want to play wherever there’s a warm body
that’ll listen. You never want to be a local, though. To be honest, even
though I need to be on the road as much as possible to make money,
being on the road is hard, especially the older you get. I actually like
playing in New York.
Do you think over the years there’s more of an acceptance of you and your music, like people have come around?
It
seems to me that whatever discomfort some people might have felt with
me at some point, that’s kind of melting away. People seem to be ready
to really deal with whatever that thing is that I am. Things happen when
it’s time for them to happen and the general perception of who you are
and where you fit and I would tend to think my fan base feels the
essence of my language right away and they relate to it.
If you
instantly relate to the language, that’s one thing like you “get it.”
But then there’s other people that look at you and they are not quite
sure of the rationale behind your whole existence and where you fit in.
Once they feel O.K. and then they feel permission to come into the
world, then they actually get the music all of a sudden.
And I’m
feeling that’s really starting to happen now. Not that I have a massive
audience like some straight ahead person—actually sometimes free jazz
has more people into it than straight ahead jazz, just ‘cause you can
get more people on the fringes. I’m feeling mainstream jazz, which I’ve
been so at odds in so many ways for so many years, it’s really starting
to accept me.
Why do you think that is?
Because I’ve worn them out! [Laughing]
At 56, does that sort of…
…End it all? [Laughing]
Is that acceptance sort of gratifying for you?
Theoretically,
you have all the energy in the world but as finite human beings, you
don’t, you know? You can’t keep fighting the system all the time. Well, I
guess you could. You never really want to fit in to the system—unless I
fit in to the system, I’ll figure out a way to fuck something up,
purposely, so…But at the same time, there does come a time where you’re
not in your 20s anymore or your 30s, or your 40s. [Laughing]
Do you think you’ve achieved this acceptance because you are less “out” than you used to be?
No,
no, I would say that there might be more clarity in certain ways in
certain specific ways than there used to be and that’s a purposeful
thing. I kind of think differently now but I’ve always aimed for lyrical
quality. At one time, I was a little crazier player but I’ve always
aimed for a lyrical language always.
So maybe 20 years ago or so, you enjoyed fucking with people’s heads?
I
don’t think that way anymore but there was a time I did think it was
important for me to be cutting-edge. Now it’s just important for me to
be myself—whatever that is. And that can be different things at
different times.
At the same time you are being accepted, you are done with recording.
Well,
people have a whole catalog to catch up with—a very deep one. You know,
I’ve been doing this for a long time, man, and the process of putting
out an album, there’s a whole head space: the conception of it, the
execution of it, the packaging of it, the marketing of it and there’s
actually putting it out here into the world.
That’s an
all-inclusive thing and if you really take it seriously, there’s a lot
of energy and emotion that goes to every aspect of it. You just can’t
keep doing it over and over. I do know older artists that just go
through the motions and I really don’t want to get there. That’s what
I’m actually scared of, that I get to a point where I’m putting out a
product just for a paycheck.
One of the most intriguing periods of your career arc is early on when you and William did that duo record, Zo,
for Rise Records, a small Texas punk label. Later on, Henry Rollins
reissued it on his 2.13.61 label. What do you recall about that and
Rollins being a fan?
That was a really exciting period,
in a different way than electronica because that just happened naturally
also. There was a historical precedent for punk rockers being into free
jazz: MC5 and Sun Ra on bills together, I think Don Cherry was on a Lou
Reed album. It’s not like that paradigm but it was kind of rediscovered
by us and these guys were all into jazz—Rollins, Thurston Moore.
They’re just really jazzheads and Henry has a really extensive jazz
collection and knowledge of jazz.
So you were pretty in the know of Rollins and into Black Flag?
Yeah, I was aware of him and I did like Black Flag a lot. A few years before I met Henry, I got pretty aware of them.
Then Rollins reissued Zo on his label.
It
felt really exciting because all these young people were discovering
free jazz. But what was cool about it was, there was no racism, it was
just a cool scene. I remember feeling like Thurston and Henry were
around my age and they felt really comfortable around the whole thing.
It was a generational thing where everybody was basically cool. It
almost felt like, say, the alternative rock that was coming out of the
punk scene, you could incorporate almost anything.
It was like a
label but in some weird, abstract way—so many things can happen under
that. You could get as much of a power-pop band as Nirvana or a noisy…so
much could happen under that label.
We were in the same magazines. There was an old issue of SPIN
with Courtney Love on the cover and there’s a piece on me in there; it
was just a really cool time. It felt like this kind of bizarre melting
pot of really cool stuff. That stuff dissipated though, that whole thing
ended, and then electronica took over. I was socially in the middle of
that whole scene because I was really close friends with Chan Marshall
from Cat Power and the whole Matador scene. I was just in the middle of
all that. I knew a lot of people.
And Steve Joerg, who later launched AUM Fidelity, worked at Homestead and your relationship with him started there.
The way I met him was William and I did Zo on Rise Records. That label, Rise Records, was distributed by Homestead Records. He had done that William Hooker album [1994’s Radiation] so I gave him a Ware album.
You
mentioned Moore. Did your paths cross in the NYC experimental clubs
where the two of you collaborated or played on a bill together?
Well,
no, at that point Sonic Youth was a big rock band. But actually the
Ware Quartet opened for Sonic Youth. But by that point they were a big
rock group.
Right. Sonic Youth would sometimes tap “out”-jazz
and experimental-leaning groups to open for them in order to introduce
them to a new, bigger audience, like Sun Ra at Central Park in 1992.
What do you remember about that show where the Ware Quartet opened up
for Sonic Youth? That was about mid-’90s, right?
David really liked it. He looked out at all these young kids and he was like, “I like this!” [Laughing] He was completely into it. All these young kids—it felt like a new audience. To him [David], there was no difference between Sonic Youth and The Rolling Stones. It was just all rock to him. But he did like playing for all the young kids.
David really liked it. He looked out at all these young kids and he was like, “I like this!” [Laughing] He was completely into it. All these young kids—it felt like a new audience. To him [David], there was no difference between Sonic Youth and The Rolling Stones. It was just all rock to him. But he did like playing for all the young kids.
Where was that show?
That
was in Midtown—Roseland. That was a really cool period and the
possibilities felt endless. The other thing that was cool about it is a
lot of the punk rock kids would discover the music then educate
themselves on the whole history of the music. It wasn’t just they
related to the noisy elements of it and the energy; they were really
relating to the lyrical aspects of it, too. It was a really great period
and for us. We were being covered in the fanzines and stuff so it
fostered a whole different way for us to get covered other than in the
jazz magazines.
That must have been a thrill for you at
the time to open for Sonic Youth and be playing such a big venue in
front of a crowd that wasn’t your typical audience. Were you like “this
is insane”?
Not insane but like, “this is fucking great.” All these young kids screaming and stuff. There was no jazz shows like that. [Laughing]
I did the things in small venues, too. William and I did a duo tour
once and we opened for this punk band in Houston called Rusted Shut and
Mr. Quintron, he was on the bill.
Finally, back to wrapping up your recording career. What’s your next plans with your Trio after The Cutting Room gig?
I
have a feeling this trio wants to make another album. We’re a team. If
an opportunity presents itself for another album, I’d probably do
it—just for them.
THE MUSIC OF MATTHEW SHIPP: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MATTHEW SHIPP: