“Underdocumented” is not an adjective that applies to pianist Matthew Shipp, who turned 60 last December. As an example, The Unidentifiable, a Fall 2020 release on ESP-Disk, is Shipp’s 14th date helming a piano-bass-drums trio since 1992, and his fourth with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker since 2015. Since that unit’s previous album (2019’s Signature), Shipp’s other releases include the fourth album by his String Trio with bassist William Parker and violinist Mat Maneri; a telepathic encounter by the Shipp-Bisio-Baker trio with flutist Nicole Mitchell; and two solo albums.
On these presentations, Shipp shapes the flow with compositions that function at various levels of notated detail. Several other recent offerings display his skills at collegial navigation of the open space. Then Now, a tabula rasa duo with alto saxophonist Rob Brown, reprises their 1988 meeting, Sonic Explorations, which launched Shipp’s four-score leader/co-leader discography. On Dark Matrix, Shipp scratch-improvises with speculative improv stalwart Daniel Carter on trumpet and saxophone. Spontaneous composition is the watchword on duo encounters with magisterial saxophonists Evan Parker (Leonine Aspects) and Ivo Perelman; Shipp has made more than 30 albums with the latter since 1997, most recently Garden of Jewels, in trio with drummer Whit Dickey.
In each instance, Shipp responds to the dialogical dictates of the moment with his idiosyncratic language — a homegrown argot he culled from the canons of, in Shipp’s words, “Ellington, Monk, Lennie Tristano, Bill Evans, Bud Powell, Andrew Hill, Paul Bley and Cecil Taylor,” and deployed with a sensibility open to code-switching between “out” cat, post bop and Third Stream aesthetics. Shipp expresses himself in words as pungently as he does in the language of notes and tones, as was evident throughout our mid-March Zoom discussion.
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Matthew Shipp (Photo by Daniel Sheehan)[/caption]
Has each configuration of your trio evoked different attitudes or mentalities in your playing and composing?
At the beginning of this century, my trio was William Parker and Gerald Cleaver, and then William and Guillermo E. Brown, who had played with us in the David S. Ware Quartet. After that, William got so busy as a leader that I decided to form another trio, with Whit Dickey and Joe Morris, the guitarist, who also plays double bass. After Joe left, I brought in Michael Bisio, who I’d met in the ’90s. Then Whit was dealing with some health problems, and I wasn’t sure he’d be able to tour — that’s when Newman entered the group.
When you change personnel, it changes the trajectory of how the group sounds and what it does. How I relate to the bass player — the ongoing dialogue and wraparound — is fundamental to how I play and organize music. William and Bisio are completely different vibrations — you go with the flow of who they are and let the music develop from that standpoint. As far as drummers, Whit is a complete original. He operates in a kind of virgin space. He’s very analytical. Newman has a really strong jazz pedigree. He’s played with McCoy Tyner, Ahmad Jamal, Billy Harper, Henry Threadgill. He has a certain elegance like a fine wine with age, and that suits what I’m trying to do. I have no desire to be an enfant terrible at this point in my career. I’m going deeper into my jazz roots, and Newman is the perfect drummer to flesh that out.
Now, there are several aspects to my playing. I’m involved with a linear, post-Bud Powell-type of thing. I can be very jarring and spatially oriented, à la Monk. I’m also interested in a post-Ellington idea of elegance — voicing and sequencing chords in ways that define new harmonic spaces or explore new harmonic pathways, thinking of tone colors, resonance and placement in ways that can be jarring, but at the same time take people on a heavenly carpet ride.
Let’s talk about putting together The Unidentifiable, which was recorded pre-pandemic.
I was concerned with honoring this trio’s development — incorporating stuff that had developed on the road and differentiating this album from our previous three. On the first one, Conduct of Jazz, when the trio was new, I didn’t have a narrative in mind other than a few compositions. By the second CD [Piano Song], I had an overall arc. This narrative is a certain cinematic thing, an imaginary film, though I don’t know how listeners will perceive it or if they’ll blow up the experience from tune to tune as I do. I threw very subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — roadblocks for Mike and Newman in the studio, just to force the differences I wanted. I didn’t talk it through with them because I didn’t want it to be too conscious. At the same time, I didn’t want people falling into things we did on other CDs. Each piece had to fit its slot and be what it was supposed to be. I didn’t have a section just function as, say, a free jazz section; specific gestural ideas needed to be realized each moment to make the whole work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N-Uk4-1GxM
Your Facebook feed reveals polymath interests — you address Genet, dance, boxing, professional wrestling, your pianistic influences, politics. How do these preoccupations inflect the notes and tones?
At the core of everything is cellular information of some sort. On a certain level, there’s no difference between watching a boxing or professional wrestling match, reading Finnegan’s Wake, which I read at 19, or a dream, which is a kind of pattern of electrical energy. I see boxing as modern dance. I see poetry as basic phrasing and rhythm. Everything goes into the pot, gets broken down to basic energy, and then all resurfaces however nature decrees, and somehow refocuses into a musical product. The mysterious element is that no matter how much control you try to exert as a composer, you do give over to natural forces, which are out of your control.
When you compose, does the narrative imply some conscious sense of influence, however refracted? You’re also quite specific about the antecedent pianists who’ve informed you over the years.
I don’t shy away from talking about my influences, or even referencing them, if it suits my purpose for a piece — or if I just feel like it! If you’re bored with yourself, or feel a limitation on a certain day, there’s something about somebody else’s language that can give you inspiration and fecundate your own imagination. I’m sure of my language pretty much all the time. But if there is a break in concentration as to my language, there’s a Monk thing, a McCoy Tyner thing, a Bill Evans thing, a Cecil Taylor thing that I can pull on for any second — and there’s nothing wrong with that, because it’s language and it’s all out there. When you do that from the standpoint of already having an original style, you’re basically embodying what Ralph Waldo Emerson talked about, that everything is a quotation. You’re a quotation of your parents; their DNA is in you. Nobody is just coming out here as a completely original language, although there is unity in diversity and diversity in unity, and everybody has their distinct blueprint or fingerprint. That’s all to say that I function as myself, an individual who is unique and original, and I also function as part of a family of people that play jazz piano. And if I want to give homage to the family — even if it’s for a couple of seconds, as in I might play harmony and rhythm in a way that Monk might do it — so be it.
Can you offer a succinct impression of Monk?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY4moMq9T4Y
I like Monk’s fearless, laser-like focus on developing his own personality in the music. He cut a figure that encapsulated the archetype of a pianist-composer in such an easily seen package, in the way you think of Scott Joplin or Chopin as both a composer and a pianist. I also like the fact that Monk was a modernist who listened to everything and studied everything, who created music in an Afro-American idiom that was very distinctly American.
Bud Powell?
Bud Powell is beyond my comprehension. His sense of line is so profound. I have no idea how from linear fragments he can create this sense of light that he does. You can learn his solos and stuff, but how he got that resonance and balance and sound world out of the piano is elusive. I have no idea how he got where he got to. It’s his realm. You’ve got to have something awfully distinct about your mind to develop that to that level. He was so profound, there’s nowhere to really go with it. Nobody else can really do it. The original wave of bebop just happened in American culture; it was such an energy field of profound hip newness. A lot of great practitioners followed, but there’s no getting to that initial vibration. Now, whenever I hear Tommy Flanagan on a linear thing, I get a big thrill from hearing how he connects his ideas, the sense of buoyancy and color in the line. It’s also very profound.
Ahmad Jamal?
Ahmad Jamal was a hero of my mother, who was into jazz, but it wasn’t like her thing. A bunch of other black males I know, around my age, all their mothers had his albums. Jamal can be a pianist’s pianist, but I find it cool that in that period he chose to not play a lot of stuff that he could play if he wanted to — he was a blueprint for coolness, in some ways. Nobody comps like Jamal. I’ve often said that people like Jamal or Erroll Garner are as idiosyncratic as Monk is, but in a whole different way.
“The mysterious element is that no matter how much control you try to exert as a composer, you do give over to natural forces, which are out of your control.”
Sun Ra?
Sun Ra represents a very outward way of trying to forge mysticism with jazz language. I say outward because, say, with Coltrane, spirituality undergirded his music, and he talked about it a lot, but he didn’t claim to be an Egyptian sun god! Sun Ra represents the idea of everything being information and language. He deals with a continuum from Fletcher Henderson to John Cage, as if he’s coming from the same place with all of it. Each component is another part of the hologram. You can turn the gem over and see a different side of it. Sun Ra understood that this music has a deep American/Afro-American history. He understood that some of it might have been transmitted from forces outside the human realm, however you want to describe them — angels, aliens, vibrational photons somewhere in the cosmos. Even though Sun Ra is very Afrocentric, and his main thing is painting pictures of infinity with the orchestra, he’s also a gifted pianist — at times you hear hints of Liszt and certain Romantic composers in his playing. He poses a lot of questions. Whether he answers them all the time … that’s not maybe the point. The point is to pose the questions and get your mind rolling.
You were raised in the Episcopal church and had early experience as a church organist. How did that impact your aesthetics?
When I was 10-11-12, I was the assistant organist when the church’s regular organist couldn’t make it. The ritualistic Episcopalian liturgy had a big influence on me as a kid. I was also an altar boy, and I could recite the Mass by memory by the time I was 6 or 7. As a kid, I basically memorized a big portion of the Protestant hymn book, which taught me a lot about four-part harmony. Just the actual resonance of Protestant hymns in general was big. I hear tons of hymns in my playing, the harmonic movement, though it might not be obvious to other people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tiS-mU1yUU
Without getting into psychoanalytic reasons, the head space from those formative things is massive. I could say it’s an alchemy mindset. In the Episcopalian church and the Catholic church, you believe that a wafer and cheap wine actually alchemize into the real body and blood of Christ, actually transubstantiate to a godhead. The conversion of mundane factors to a sacred whole is a big influence on the way I think, and it comes out of that church thing. It’s completely different than Gospel, which I learned about when I went to my grandmother’s Baptist church as a teenager to get a taste of the music, which I was trying to learn as much about as I could. I ended up becoming the pianist in the youth choir at her church. I also played in a bunch of funk bands as a teenager.
Does your presentation contain an element of that kind of pageantry?
It can. My whole vibe is to close my eyes and just let the music take me wherever. But I’m a professional and I’ve been doing this my whole life, so I’m assuming I play into other aspects of it sometimes.
Drummerless trios, like the String Trio with William Parker and Mat Maneri, have been important for you. Another recent context is a trio album with Daniel Carter and William Parker.
Those are two very interesting projects to juxtapose. They come from completely different places, even though William is on both.
First, the String Trio. The product of that group is actually very jazz and very who-we-are. But I have an intense classical background, and I delight in playing with timbres of strings and pretending that I’m a classical composer, orchestrating the piano parts in ways that might evoke a feeling of chamber music — which I love. I breathe and phrase differently. I’m free to go in a lot of directions I couldn’t possibly go in with a drummer.
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William Parker, Mat Maneri, Matthew Shipp (Photo: Courtesy Rogue Art)[/caption]
My current album with Daniel and William is a continuation of the Downtown school of music that Daniel and William have been part of since the early ’70s, that I moved to New York in 1984 to be a part of. It’s completely unpretentious New York free jazz. Add a piano to it and put it in a concert hall, it can also take on a chamber music vibe, which is cool. That’s just how elastic the language is. It’s a certain way of dealing with the pulse, what you might call the breaking of the circle, if you look at it from a Renaissance point of view. When Cecil Taylor hired William and [drummer] Rashid Bakr around 1980, they’d already been doing this type of thing, already established a way of playing and a sound that was indicative of the East Village.
I’d like to address your open-ended improvising in the duo space.
I’ll take four sax players I play duo with at this time: Rob Brown, Ivo Perelman, Evan Parker and Daniel Carter. That’s their life. These guys are not dilettantes. They’re not trying to do something different. They dedicate every waking moment to that particular art form — being able to go on a stage or into a studio and do that. Every time they listen to music, their subconscious mind is generating ways to get nourishment to do their own thing. When it’s a discipline to that level, it’s not really free improvisation at that point.
Do you feel fully comfortable in the fully improvised space, as much as the more rigorous space that you occupy in trio or solo contexts?
Well, I’m a free jazz musician. That’s how I’ve been defined. That’s how people see me. That’s the tradition I come out of.
I don’t really think of what you do as free jazz. In those contexts, I perceive you using your language to spontaneously create shapes, sounds, colors to suit the moment.
I like the fact that you don’t think of me as a free jazz pianist. That makes me feel good. I’m my own idiom. Anyway, I don’t think the term “free jazz” really has any meaning. Ornette Coleman named an album, and a certain trajectory happened. People throw it on anything that doesn’t have chord changes in 4/4. It’s an easy term to use, but what does it actually mean? I don’t know. First of all, you’re not free. Nobody is free. Everybody is constricted by whatever constraints their instrument has. There’s physical limitations. And if you think you’re playing something that’s never been played or new, I guarantee that your nervous system is imposing a pattern on what you’re playing, and if you think you’re free, you’re probably playing the same stuff over and over.
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Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons[/caption]
At the end of the day, it’s not about being free. It’s about taste and talent. If your imperative is to start from scratch, you develop a methodology to be able to do that. Somebody who plays really well with chord changes spends a lot of time learning how to play with chord changes. I don’t think anybody knows where freedom starts or it ends, or where a form constrains you. Whether you think you’re free or going by a form, whatever it is, it’s a matter of praxis, discipline and openness all meeting somehow — and stuff just happens. Magic is not caught up in any of those things. It’s all mysterious.
