An engaging Philadelphia performance last night by pianist Shipp, bassist Joe Morris and drummer Whit Dickey, the lineup heard on Shipp’s latest for Thirsty Ear, Piano Vortex. Thus began the fall season of the Ars Nova Workshop. ANW practically is the creative jazz scene in Philly. When the Jazz Awards ballot next circulates, Jazz Journalists Association members should keep ANW director Mark Christman strongly in mind for presenter of the year.
Settling into Penn’s Rose Recital Hall — basically a large classroom with a Steinway and a PA system — Shipp and crew launched into an unbroken flow of improvisation and stopped nearly 90 minutes later. While the album consists of discrete tracks, the structural concept here was still similar: first solo piano, then thematic material in a midtempo swing feel, gradually moving into warp-speed expressionist interplay, with fleeting passages of unaccompanied bass and drums, finally returning to midtempo swing (though the hymnlike A-minor theme “Virgin Complex,” from 2004’s amazing Harmony and Abyss, closed the set). Along the way there were incongruous forays into “My Funny Valentine” and “Someday My Prince Will Come,” almost as if someone had turned the radio dial at random.
Well into the set, Shipp wrung nasal, harp-like tones from the piano interior, laying out stark intervallic ideas that he would then develop via conventional keyboarding. The effect was meditative, cleansing.
There’s something of a somber quality, an unrelenting seriousness, in Shipp’s music. I hear it too in his work with the David S. Ware Quartet. I remember first hearing “The Way We Were” from Go See The World and finding it hugely depressing. Maybe that was the intent — “Scattered pictures/of the smiles we left behind” indeed.
I’m not in love with Shipp’s approach to standards; he flies into “Giant Steps” on “Quivering With Speed” from Piano Vortex but doesn’t go anywhere with it. But I find him a compelling free player and conceptualist. His curating for the Thirsty Ear Blue Series is ingenious, absolutely one of the best things about the ’00s (see my 2003 appraisal for New Music Box).
In November ’06 I reviewed a premiere of Shipp’s at The Kitchen. Here is what ran in All About Jazz-New York:
Sun Ra famously held that “space is the place,” and Matthew Shipp ran with the idea at The Kitchen (Nov. 11), where he premiered a work called “Sacred Geometry.” Inspired by the idea of an alien creating crop circles, the hour-long piece featured Shipp on piano with Mat Maneri on viola, Okkyung Lee on cello and Michael Bisio on double bass. It was remarkably well conceived and performed, and the setting – a small black-box theater with superb acoustics – perfectly suited the mood and makeup of the ensemble. The piece moved through a sequence of tightly orchestrated themes, however fleeting and fragmentary, strung together by episodes of dynamic and varied improvisation. The transitions were stark, challenging and seamlessly executed.
Shipp paired off the players in unpredictable ways and gave each their unaccompanied turn. In one exchange, Maneri left his seat and walked to the piano, playing slippery lines over a series of ineffable chords that Shipp allowed to ring and decay. In another, Maneri and Lee looped a fast unison figure for two hypnotic minutes and then stopped together on a dime, with no visible cue. The harmonic language was ceaselessly dark and difficult, the textures alternately coarse and mellifluous. Shipp moved from blue tone colors to free flows of energy, his fingers slipping off the keys as though someone were pulling backwards at his elbows.
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