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MATTHEW SHIPP: PIANO SUTRAS
Matthew Shipp caught ears when he was playing with saxophonist David S. Ware and bassist William Parker, but it soon became clear that this pianist—who will turn 53 this year—was wholly his own man. He formed a great trio, he became the curator of a recording series, he experimented with electronics, he dove back into jazz standards and he developed into a wholly original player in the solo piano history of jazz. He is one of the few jazz musicians of the new millennium to generate ink suggesting that jazz was developing an appeal among rock fans.
What do you want this guy to do next?
Rumors that he might retire turned out to be false. And, in fact, his latest release—a stunning solo piano recital—may just be a classic, the kind of record we talk about and play for each other decades later. Piano Sutras is a glorious, generous, fully mature expression of creativity that could only have come from one artist. It is as good and adventurous as jazz is going to sound in 2013.
These 13 tracks (two, “Giant Steps” and “Nefertiti”, were not written by Shipp) are relatively brief and focused pianistic essays. They cover a wide stylistic range, but each is driven by a logic or strong sense of sequence. They don’t typically sound like standard jazz—there no “tune”, variations on the tune, return to the tune sequence—but neither are they “free jazz” in any meaningful sense. Shipp, in this collection, has refined a style that allows composition and improvisation to work seamlessly as partners, seemingly indistinguishable. Could this be some kind of “modern classical music”? I guess so, except that Shipp remains a jazz player at his core: emphasizing the surging rhythms and blues sensibility that remain the core of great original American music, whatever name you want to give it.
“Cosmic Shuffle” is not alone in Shipp’s recent music in being driven by a core swing rhythm, his left hand “walking” like an upright bass in places but never restricted to that feeling. The whole piece is as swung as hard any Count Basie performance, but it swings beyond the usual rules of structure and convention, taking detours into moments of contemplation before heading back into free-wheeling call-and-response patterns that would make Jimmie Lunceford smile. Or check out (the related?) “Cosmic Dust”, which uses surges and shifts in tempo every few bars to create a feeling of manic momentum. The daring squiggles—what a previous generation might have called licks or riffs—that he generates in these tunes seems free of cliché but also tonal within his own system. That is, “Cosmic Dust” is really as accessible to the untutored ear as a solo by, say, Chick Corea, as long as you’re not looking for the usual Tin Pan Alley harmonic patterns that jazz piano relied on until Cecil Taylor and other like-minded pianists declared otherwise. Shipp works that vein with a sense of structured classicism.
Some of this work has a dramatic foreboding. “Uncreated Light” begins with alternation between dark low clusters and pretty high chords. Shipp lets his left-hand figures ring with overtones, the sustain suggesting music beyond what you can hear. A spiraling theme then emerges in his delicate right hand between the thunderous statements from below. It’s easy to imagine this music accompanying a scene of danger imposing on innocence from a suspense movie, perhaps.
Other songs here are as light as air. “Angelic Brain Cell” is like a post-modern minuet—a light dance piece that flitters and skips and suggests the spark of movement and intelligence in every note. Patterns of repetition arise and vanish, Licks turn into variation, unison lines grow quickly out of phase and then transform into counterpoint. It is an astonishing, ingenious performance.
Shipp’s takes on the two jazz standards are also riveting. “Giant Steps” is set out as a delicate ballad, with Shipp’s control of harmony and his sustain pedal on display. He just plays it once, no improvising, like a psalm or a love song. “Nefertiti” is also played with a sense of respect—the questioning melody absolutely intact—but Shipp also explores the tune as a challenge for his pianism, moving through it in waves of arpeggios that suggest Liszt as much as Wayne Shorter.
I think so much of Piano Sutras because it reaches into me and brings me pleasure and recognition and surprise. “The Indivisible” ends the collection with crashing bass notes and rolling tremolo, with delicate rising interludes and splashes of light in the form of sudden high octaves. It sounds to me like a mountain climber and a deep-sea diver, like a person coming to terms with herself and like a history of a music suddenly pounding its way to a conclusion. Maybe it’s just a feeling I have and nothing I can articulate in a review typed out on a keyboard, but this is music that frames up a whole history: of an artist, of listeners, of the artists who formed the history of the art form, of the culture and time that allowed this art to flourish.
All of this is in there, inside this brilliant recording by Matthew Shipp.
RATING 9
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MATTHEW SHIPP’S ‘THE PIANO EQUATION’ WILL STAND THE TEST OF TIME
Matthew Shipp's The Piano Equation is a fully improvised solo piano recital to stand the test of time, sitting in the realm where mathematics and magic collide.
Free improvisation, as practiced by a band, requires musicians sufficiently egoless and blessed with ears such that satisfying patterns can emerge, uniting all musicians in a single, spontaneously discovered pursuit. Years of experience (and, usually, experience in playing together) are near-necessities.
For solo pianists, playing without a composed theme creates different but related challenges. The listening is internal. Where am I going? How do musical ideas connect? Am I merely leaning back on old licks or favorite patterns? How can I use my exceptionally orchestral solo instrument? How do the independent lines I create with two hands relate to each other?
Pianist Matthew Shipp has performed improvised solo piano often in a storied career. And, although Shipp is often heard as a knotty and “out” downtown player, The Piano Equation finds him celebrating his 60th birthday with logical grace. Performing 11 freely improvised pieces, he nonetheless has produced a recording of great beauty and logic, creating distinct performances that are simultaneously shocking and beautiful, equally classic and daring.
First, Shipp is playing here with a technical precision and brilliance that are unassailable. Before digging into questions of melody or harmonic invention, this recording demonstrates mastery of the piano itself. Shipp’s lines ripple with precision when he needed them to, and they slur like saxophone licks as required. They thunder and ring, strum and strut. He elicits overtones from the instrument to make the performances more orchestral, and he uses the piano pedals to create startling effects. His ability to shift from loud to soft or from rumbling distortion to chiming bell-like thrill is a pure thrill. “Tone Pocket” is a tour de force of sound and sound technique, with the wooden box of the piano echoing on command in accompaniment, with garrulous banged passages suddenly disappearing into wind chimes, and with the piano seeming to be strummed or plucked even though Shipp’s hands are only working the keys.
More importantly, however, Shipp has been able to create pieces out of thin air that seem utterly worthy of composition. They do not meander from one cool lick to another but instead adhere to a principle or central idea throughout, achieving unity while still sounding like adventures in the moment. “Radio Signals Equation”, for example, begins with a strong but short phrase in two parts, and Shipp keeps that phrase in his head and fingers for the full length of the performance. He repeats it in subtly different ways, returns to its initial tonality or key, or moves the shape of that phrase to other tonalities at will. He pulls it apart and distributes its elements to one hand or another. He uses the phrase to inspire a “solo” in the middle of the performance that works as a more expansive elaboration of the phrase’s interest and strength, including finding a rocking chordal motif three minutes in that launches the second portion of the performance. Still, Shipp plays the craggy but precise counterpoint that’s characteristic of his style eventually, finding both the chordal lick and the opening phrase both at home in a set of repeated phrases that sound as appealing as a Keith Jarrett solo despite being more tensile and less sentimental.
gic, creating distinct performances that are simultaneously shocking and beautiful, equally classic and daring.
First, Shipp is playing here with a technical precision and brilliance that are unassailable. Before digging into questions of melody or harmonic invention, this recording demonstrates mastery of the piano itself. Shipp’s lines ripple with precision when he needed them to, and they slur like saxophone licks as required. They thunder and ring, strum and strut. He elicits overtones from the instrument to make the performances more orchestral, and he uses the piano pedals to create startling effects. His ability to shift from loud to soft or from rumbling distortion to chiming bell-like thrill is a pure thrill. “Tone Pocket” is a tour de force of sound and sound technique, with the wooden box of the piano echoing on command in accompaniment, with garrulous banged passages suddenly disappearing into wind chimes, and with the piano seeming to be strummed or plucked even though Shipp’s hands are only working the keys.
More importantly, however, Shipp has been able to create pieces out of thin air that seem utterly worthy of composition. They do not meander from one cool lick to another but instead adhere to a principle or central idea throughout, achieving unity while still sounding like adventures in the moment. “Radio Signals Equation”, for example, begins with a strong but short phrase in two parts, and Shipp keeps that phrase in his head and fingers for the full length of the performance. He repeats it in subtly different ways, returns to its initial tonality or key, or moves the shape of that phrase to other tonalities at will. He pulls it apart and distributes its elements to one hand or another. He uses the phrase to inspire a “solo” in the middle of the performance that works as a more expansive elaboration of the phrase’s interest and strength, including finding a rocking chordal motif three minutes in that launches the second portion of the performance. Still, Shipp plays the craggy but precise counterpoint that’s characteristic of his style eventually, finding both the chordal lick and the opening phrase both at home in a set of repeated phrases that sound as appealing as a Keith Jarrett solo despite being more tensile and less sentimental.
For listeners who might be new to this kind of thing, Shipp even provides a brilliant two-minute miniature with a hummable blues lick at its start, middle, and finish. “Clown Pulse” is built on a simple idea, and it is toyed with for just enough time, like a sleight-of-hand coin trick at close range. Shipp swings it and sashays it and doesn’t dally.
What Matthew Shipp has done on The Piano Equation is a profound achievement. He has distilled his piano style into something sharp and distinct—very possibly the most concise and cogent statement of his pianistic sensibility. Shipp has demonstrated how free improvisation can produce results that get right to the essence without almost any wasted notes. And he has made a recording that seems comparable in the best ways to things like Keith Jarrett’s early Facing You or Chick Corea’s Piano Improvisations Volume 1. But the album is also more dazzling for being wholly improvised and for merging and engaging romantic piano sensibility with both more harmonically dissonant playing and the knotty patterns and concepts that are original to Shipp himself.
This is a recital to stand the test of time.
RATING 9
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