Matthew Shipp celebrates landmark 60th year with his latest solo piano recording, further honing a singular cosmic musical language
"The Piano Equation", due out May 1, 2020, is the first release from Tao Forms, the new label founded by drummer Whit Dickey
Throughout 2020, the singular piano master Matthew Shipp will celebrate his sixth decade on the planet, culminating in the celebration of his 60th birthday in December. Over more than half of his lifespan, Shipp has built up an unparalleled body of work and a wholly original musical language that only becomes more hyper-focused and utterly distinctive with the passage of years.
Shipp’s abstract eloquence is on vivid display throughout the first of two stellar albums he’ll release this year: The Piano Equation is his latest solo piano release, a form that has increasingly showcased him at his most profoundly exploratory.
Due out May 1, 2020, The Piano Equation is the inaugural release on the newly-launched label Tao Forms, founded by Shipp’s longtime collaborator, drummer Whit Dickey. The two have worked together since the pianist’s earliest efforts as a leader, the 1992 releases Circular Temple and Points, and went on to form half of the iconic David S. Ware Quartet. In September, Shipp will follow this album with The Unidentifiable, the latest release by his own acclaimed Trio featuring bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker.
While some may have used the arrival of such a landmark occasion as their 60th birthday to look backwards, Shipp will spend the year continuing to move resolutely forward, further evolving a voice that is as intimately personal as it is cosmically adventurous. “I have no choice,” he insists.
“I still get up in the morning and have something to say. As long as the vibrations are still flowing through me, I still want to do it. I don’t feel like I have to prove anything anymore, but it’s fun to push these notes down.”
Shipp’s abstract eloquence is on vivid display throughout the first of two stellar albums he’ll release this year: The Piano Equation is his latest solo piano release, a form that has increasingly showcased him at his most profoundly exploratory.
Due out May 1, 2020, The Piano Equation is the inaugural release on the newly-launched label Tao Forms, founded by Shipp’s longtime collaborator, drummer Whit Dickey. The two have worked together since the pianist’s earliest efforts as a leader, the 1992 releases Circular Temple and Points, and went on to form half of the iconic David S. Ware Quartet. In September, Shipp will follow this album with The Unidentifiable, the latest release by his own acclaimed Trio featuring bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker.
While some may have used the arrival of such a landmark occasion as their 60th birthday to look backwards, Shipp will spend the year continuing to move resolutely forward, further evolving a voice that is as intimately personal as it is cosmically adventurous. “I have no choice,” he insists.
“I still get up in the morning and have something to say. As long as the vibrations are still flowing through me, I still want to do it. I don’t feel like I have to prove anything anymore, but it’s fun to push these notes down.”
Photo: Anna Yatskevich
Over the course of his prolific career, Shipp has more than proved his individuality and made a strong impact on the music’s development. DownBeat has written that he “deserves a place of choice in the jazz piano pantheon [and] is the connection between this past, present and future for jazz heads of all ages.” All About Jazz declared that he “has become an elder statesman in the jazz world” – an accolade all the more impressive for the fact that Shipp has maintained his defiantly iconoclastic approach, his every attack on the keys questioning the received wisdom of the tradition.
In his current thinking, though, Shipp is more interested in following his own pathways than in veering away from those already carved. “At 60 you’re not creating music with the same punk attitude you had in your 20s or 30s, where you were trying to shake up the world,” he explains. “There’s a different energy, but at the same time you can look back at all the different segments of your career and savor them. I can see the ways in which all those periods intersect and how I’ve remained myself through them all while constantly changing.”
The Piano Equation presents Shipp alone at the piano, brilliantly solving his higher-order musical mathematics, approaching each new unknown from unexpected vantage points as in some form of cubist algebra. Shipp builds his solo music in a cellular fashion, formed like the building blocks of human life out of disparate elements that combine and evolve in novel and fascinating forms. “There are billions of different human beings on the planet, all constituted with the same genetic material but all completely different,” he says. “People come together in haphazard ways. All these pieces can be generated with a different mother/father idea and the basic cellular material can unfold in billions of ways.”
Eruptive Cecil Taylor clusters are mutated by the interstellar rays of Sun Ra’s philosophizing, then spiral earthward in taut, obsessive figures. Stride, swing and the avant-garde collide like so many elemental particles, the aftereffects radiating outward in increasingly complex and intricate formations.
The scientific, the personal, the political and the fantastic co-exist throughout Shipp’s work, melding in the radical vocabulary that the pianist employs on the album, which speaks with its own alien yet familiar logic. Fragments of melody coalesce and transform, dissolve or shatter into kaleidoscopic reveries; sly humor and curious intellect interweave, in the form of a piece like “Clown Pulse” that simultaneously references its own bold, swaggering rhythmic sense and the circus tchotchkes that Shipp’s mother collected in his childhood home in Wilmington, Delaware.
While the music on both of his new albums progresses towards the future, Shipp acknowledges that it carries with it a rich and multifarious history. “With turning 60 comes the fact that a lot of the people you’ve made music with might not be on the planet anymore,” he says, citing such important collaborators as Ware, trumpeter Roy Campbell, and poet Steve Dalachinsky. “It also generates lifelong relationships, whether it’s with William Parker or Michael Bisio, Daniel Carter or Ivo Perelman.”
That includes Dickey, whose Tao Forms label provides a thrilling new outlet for the music these artists have forged together and separately, along with a new generation of musicians who’ve arrived in their wake.
“If you make it to 60 in jazz you feel gratitude for just surviving,” Shipp concludes. “No matter how hard it is, you’ve got to be thankful for the fact that you’ve been able to document your music and have a situation where people can listen to it and react to it.”
In his current thinking, though, Shipp is more interested in following his own pathways than in veering away from those already carved. “At 60 you’re not creating music with the same punk attitude you had in your 20s or 30s, where you were trying to shake up the world,” he explains. “There’s a different energy, but at the same time you can look back at all the different segments of your career and savor them. I can see the ways in which all those periods intersect and how I’ve remained myself through them all while constantly changing.”
The Piano Equation presents Shipp alone at the piano, brilliantly solving his higher-order musical mathematics, approaching each new unknown from unexpected vantage points as in some form of cubist algebra. Shipp builds his solo music in a cellular fashion, formed like the building blocks of human life out of disparate elements that combine and evolve in novel and fascinating forms. “There are billions of different human beings on the planet, all constituted with the same genetic material but all completely different,” he says. “People come together in haphazard ways. All these pieces can be generated with a different mother/father idea and the basic cellular material can unfold in billions of ways.”
Eruptive Cecil Taylor clusters are mutated by the interstellar rays of Sun Ra’s philosophizing, then spiral earthward in taut, obsessive figures. Stride, swing and the avant-garde collide like so many elemental particles, the aftereffects radiating outward in increasingly complex and intricate formations.
The scientific, the personal, the political and the fantastic co-exist throughout Shipp’s work, melding in the radical vocabulary that the pianist employs on the album, which speaks with its own alien yet familiar logic. Fragments of melody coalesce and transform, dissolve or shatter into kaleidoscopic reveries; sly humor and curious intellect interweave, in the form of a piece like “Clown Pulse” that simultaneously references its own bold, swaggering rhythmic sense and the circus tchotchkes that Shipp’s mother collected in his childhood home in Wilmington, Delaware.
While the music on both of his new albums progresses towards the future, Shipp acknowledges that it carries with it a rich and multifarious history. “With turning 60 comes the fact that a lot of the people you’ve made music with might not be on the planet anymore,” he says, citing such important collaborators as Ware, trumpeter Roy Campbell, and poet Steve Dalachinsky. “It also generates lifelong relationships, whether it’s with William Parker or Michael Bisio, Daniel Carter or Ivo Perelman.”
That includes Dickey, whose Tao Forms label provides a thrilling new outlet for the music these artists have forged together and separately, along with a new generation of musicians who’ve arrived in their wake.
“If you make it to 60 in jazz you feel gratitude for just surviving,” Shipp concludes. “No matter how hard it is, you’ve got to be thankful for the fact that you’ve been able to document your music and have a situation where people can listen to it and react to it.”
RELEASE DATE: March 1st, 2020
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