Today, avant-jazz pianist and composer Matthew Shipp released The Cosmic Piano, a new album of solo material, through Cantaloupe Music. Shipp is also playing two solo shows – one at 8:30 in the morning, the second at noon — to premiere a newly commissioned piece at the Rothko Chapel in Houston in celebration of the summer solstice.
The Cosmic Piano taps into the deeper exploratory potential of the piano, with Shipp channeling a lifetime of knowledge and a daunting array of influences into nearly an hour of spontaneous, enlightened and joyfully rendered music. “The preparation is your life,” he says. “If you’re a real improviser — and I mean real by acknowledging that it’s a praxis and an art form and a discipline — it’s like being a boxer. You do your road work, speed bag, heavy bag and then you spar, and it’s an all-day process for you. It’s a lifestyle.”
As with all of Shipp’s music, this recording goes beyond any simple categorization, and in part informs why Shipp wanted to release the album through Cantaloupe, the in-house label of Bang on a Can. The New York-based arts collective has built a worldwide reputation for nurturing new music dubbed as “alternative classical,” “experimental classical” or “indie classical,” and is known for collaborating with artists and composers across all genres, including jazz, electronic, rock, pop and hip-hop.
As Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang writes in the liner notes for The Cosmic Piano, “Matthew had the idea that if his music could be heard in the context of Cantaloupe’s catalog, it could encourage people to hear a different aspect of what he does. It isn’t that Matthew made a different kind of music than he usually makes — this music is clearly his! The powerful architecture, the sly dissonance, the joyful and quick changes of pace, they are all still here. What has changed is the context in which we are listening to it. Matthew imagined that changing the frame in which we hear the music might allow us to hear something new in it, something we did not expect.”
Shipp is playing two shows at the Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational chapel in Houston, today, June 20, to mark the summer solstice. The chapel’s website, which features the work of renowned painter Mark Rothko, contrasts the artist with the musician in terms that stretch the imagination: “Mark Rothko’s painted fields somehow resonate. They live in time, like sound, floating off the canvas by way of the viewers’ observation…whereas the sonic resonances of Matthew Shipp’s piano create vibrating sculptures, forms made from the particles of air.”
Shipp’s music has inspired many admirers, including David Bowie, Thurston Moore and Henry Rollins, who has released some of Shipp’s music on his 2.13.61 record label. Shipp himself is a restless spirit, always at work with new creative endeavors and challenges, and rarely with even a moment to enjoy the accolades — so it’s no surprise that he recently published a collection of essays and prose poems, Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings (Autonomedia) in April. Meanwhile, on the same date as The Cosmic Piano, the Tao Forms imprint will release Armageddon Flower, an album pairing the Matthew Shipp String Trio with Brazilian saxophonist Ivo Perelman. And the work continues… | 
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