The Book Cooks
Excerpt from
Singularity Codex
Matthew Shipp on RogueArt
Clifford Allen
(RogueArt, Paris)
Matthew Shipp © 2023 RogueArt
Why Shipp?
In Conversations, multi-instrumentalist and composer William Parker’s series of interview compendia published by RogueArt, he interviews numerous musicians and artists connected to creative improvisation (including Matthew Shipp in Conversations III). Parker often starts by asking not only biographical particulars, but the artist’s recollection of their “first entrance into the world of sound.” I’ll extrapolate on this by asking and answering myself on the subject of when and where I first entered into Shipp’s world of sound. I was in college in Kansas in the mid-1990s and a steady diet of punk and underground rock music had grown into curiosity about improvised music, which for me started with John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and Eric Dolphy and quickly encompassed then-current artists. A contemporary analog of the saxophone-piano-bass-drums quartet that girded much of the new music in decades prior, saxophonist David S. Ware’s quartet CDs on Homestead and AUM Fidelity were soon on my radar. It was a bit early for me to begin teasing out components and figure out how each piece worked together, but Shipp’s approach to the keyboard in that whorl of sound impressed me. Being new to the music at that point I attached him to Cecil Taylor, but the playing felt more jagged and chunky – rhythmic blocks I’d later come to associate with Duke Ellington, Mal Waldron, and Thelonious Monk. It was the Vision Festival in 2001 where I believe I first saw Shipp, in a trio with drummer Whit Dickey and violist Mat Maneri (a band that reconvened to record Vessel in Orbit for AUM Fidelity in 2016) and I was struck by that group’s power, introspection, and grace. Though my interest in improvised music has taken a variety of paths since then, Shipp has always been part of it on some level. In the last decade I have gotten to know Shipp on a personal level and interviewed him about his art on a number of occasions – for The New York City Jazz Record, Tiny Mix Tapes, my own website, and liner notes for the Whit Dickey CD Morph (ESP-Disk’). I’ve learned a lot about myself in this process as well – how to listen, ways to think – and Shipp’s approach to music, sound, and life is incredibly compelling, if not always easy to grasp on the first try.
Matthew Shipp was born on 7 December 1960 in Wilmington, Delaware and began studying the piano at age five. Growing up outside Philadelphia and with a family connection to storied hard bop trumpeter Clifford Brown and vibraphonist Lem Winchester, music and intense introspection around the art form were supported by his parents. He took classical piano lessons before becoming interested in the jazz spectrum as a teenager, and tagged along with his father to gigs in the Wilmington-Philadelphia area. From youth he also had deep religious dedication, to an almost fanatical and psychedelic level, and spiritual research has imbued his entire output – Coltrane, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman are granted equal billing in Shipp’s lexicon. Lessons in Philly with Dennis Sandole (a guitarist and one of Coltrane’s teachers), a two-year matriculation at the University of Delaware, and more involved studies at Boston’s New England Conservatory with pianist Ran Blake and reedist Joe Maneri catapulted him into the burgeoning New York music scene in 1983-1984, where he quickly linked up with like-minded musicians and artists including Parker, Dickey, Ware, alto saxophonist Rob Brown (whom he had known in Boston), guitarist-bassist Joe Morris, poets Steve Dalachinsky, Lester Afflick, John Farris, and Steve Cannon, and visual artist David Hammons, all of whom are central to the City’s more experimental environments beginning in the 1980s and 1990s.
But Shipp didn’t land without a bedding of hard work and conceptual heft. Supported by promoters like Bruce Morris and a tightly-knit improvised music scene in Lower Manhattan, Shipp was able to create situations in which his music would flower and be heard without encumbrance. His early discography bears out a revolving dialectic of energetic pulses, with chamber explorations occupying one part and Downtown hardcore free music the other. As we’ll tease out in this book, such a dialectic is much more complex than it’s often given credit for. The chamber aspects were first realized in the (sadly unrecorded) Convection, a variable small group that was the kernel for his strings-focused and drummerless small units from the mid-1990s forward. Somewhat boldly, Shipp debuted on record in 1988 not with a trio or quartet, but with Brown in a program of duets titled Sonic Explorations, which was released on LP and CD by Cadence Jazz Records and features an auspicious program of six spiky improvisations as well as renditions of jazz standards “Oleo” and “Blue In Green.” At that time the lineage of Shipp’s pianism seemed relatively clear; Anton Webern, Bill Evans, Waldron, and aspects of McCoy Tyner and Taylor were crystallizing, though the Shipp of the new millennium hadn’t yet emerged. Sonic Explorations was followed two years later by Circular Temple, a trio disc with Parker and Dickey released on the band’s cooperative Quinton imprint with notes written by John Farris, and Points (Silkheart), a quartet with Brown, Parker, and Dickey, featuring notes by Dalachinsky and artwork from Yuko Otomo.
As a milieu from which players like Shipp emerged, the 1990s is a curious and difficult one. On a superficial level, and if one is to follow the narrative put forth by Ken Burns’ 2001 documentary Jazz or the mainstream music press, free music and creative improvisation largely fizzled out after the deaths of Coltrane and Ayler, its torch carried on by a few “eccentrics” like Taylor and Ornette Coleman. The prevailing context in the 1980s and 1990s as laid out by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, critic Stanley Crouch, and their ilk highlighted new traditionalism, conservatism, and a buttoned-up reliance on narrow ideas of swing, blues feeling, and improvising within the lines. Certainly there’s room in jazz for traditionalism, but the traditions as offered up by conservative critics had already been supplanted by new approaches in the 1940s if not earlier. Marsalis and Crouch and their blindly anachronistic polemics tried to keep opportunities for the vanguard well below the surface. And to continue the narrative of obscuring vital activity, the emergence (or re-emergence) of free jazz in the early 1990s and its subsequent popularity among younger, rock-oriented listeners appeared to come out of nowhere – except that the practice of unfettered creative invention was the bedrock of communities in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn for decades, even if it hadn’t been obvious to the broader culture. What to some looked like a lightning bolt really was and is a long-term simmer.
Loft spaces, small concert venues, and art galleries afforded numerous opportunities to make music under the noses of the mainstream for many years and even as rents rose and performance possibilities changed over the decades, the heart and spirit of the music remained close to these geographical hot spots. Shipp and his peers ascended to wider visibility in a fascinating era of change for the music, somewhat post-loft but rooted in a similarly underground ethos. Diverse in model and vibe, among the Lower Manhattan spaces that gestated it in the ‘90s and early ‘00s were ABC No Rio, CBGB Gallery, Context Studios, The Cooler, The Knitting Factory, The Local 269, Roulette, Tonic, and 5C. A major part of this environment has been the presenting organization Arts for Art and the Vision Festival, which emerged from the Sound Unity Festival (1984/89) and The Improvisers Collective (1994-1995). Founded in 1996, Arts for Art is rooted in the presenting acumen and organizational bulwark of choreographer/poet Patricia Nicholson Parker, longtime personal and artistic partner of William Parker. The indefatigable sonic ethic and relentless audible pulse of the latter are perhaps granted more of a hearing internationally via recordings and performances, but both Parkers define a large part of how freedom is represented in Manhattan and beyond. This underground, which sometimes seems to be boiling over into near-garish visibility, is what drew Shipp to move to New York in the early 1980s, knuckle down and work on his craft for several years until he was ready to release his music into the world.
A charter member of the David S. Ware Quartet once it emerged in the early 1990s, Shipp became synonymous with the new jazz – the Ware Quartet with Shipp, Parker, and a revolving cast of drummers was a versatile and powerful entity for 16 years and 19 albums beginning in 1991. Touring frequently, as a band they were massively well-received, even releasing discs on Columbia/DIW (curiously, two were produced by saxophonist Branford Marsalis), and the Ware Quartet garnered crossover appeal among college radio audiences. Though on its own Shipp’s career was ascendant in the final decade of the 20th Century, membership in Ware’s group unequivocally shaped the dynamic in which his music was received and that presented both a boon and some challenges. As the pianist put it in an interview to me in 2013:
“About the end of the group, Ware didn’t want to break up the quartet but I was starting to feel like my career couldn’t go any further if I was still seen as David S. Ware’s pianist. He was getting weird towards the group’s end, and we had a very complex relationship. We were very close and we had a deep abiding connection. He understood me and I understood him on a very profound level, but there was that sense that – not that he was a parent to me – but there was that sense where you need to leave and establish your own thing, and I had an identity but I had to make clear that this was what I am about. I didn’t want to be seen as someone else’s pianist. It became clear without me saying anything to him and he did try to really strong-arm me to not leave, because he felt good that he had a group together that really understood him and were there for him. That was a big deal, and his whole thing was about commitment and having like-minded people together. The commitment and trust would generate whatever was generated.” [1]
Notably hard on drummers – the Quartet went through four in its lifetime – Ware’s music was steeped in tradition as dense and complex as those realizations might be. The saxophonist’s entire discography speaks to hurtling singularity, a gestalt that’s constantly in motion, sublime and driving, but also beautifully rendered and full of melodic and rhythmic materials that speak to the broader arc of Black music history.
Shipp’s recording and performing arc outside of the Ware Quartet is massive and wide-ranging. Even if this music is perhaps known only to the cognoscenti, it’s hard to deny the output and visibility of Shipp’s art, whether performed in small community spaces or Jazz at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. In addition to solo work and a long-running trio, which currently joins him with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker, Shipp has a duo with tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman (often expanded into a trio or quartet), the Matthew Shipp String Trio with Parker and Mat Maneri, and a host of small groups and duos with a cast of players who run the global gamut of contemporary improvisation, both acoustic and electronic. The only setting in which he hasn’t really been heard is an orchestra. To give a taste of his pursuits, Shipp’s collaborations have reached into hip hop and downtempo sound as well as contemporary jazz and free improvisation, and, as of this printing, his piano appears on just shy of 300 discs on a plenitude of independent/obscure labels beyond RogueArt including AUM Fidelity, Brinkman, ESP-Disk’, Fataka, FMP, hatART/hatOLOGY, Homestead, Leo, Mahakala Music, No More Records, Northern Spy, Not Two, Relative Pitch, TAO Forms, Thirsty Ear, Treader, and 2.13.61.
Significant a pursuit as it may be, the purpose of this volume is not to catalog each of Shipp’s numerous appearances thus far. While a discography can tell part of the story of an individual’s work and certainly whets the appetite for sounds unheard, it would almost immediately be out of date and, in truth, only skim the surface of what makes Shipp’s music vital and interesting. But to the latter point, this volume is also hardly a biographical tell-all, though none of the recordings discussed would have occurred without the humanity and philosophy of the artist(s) coalescing in profound ways. So, what is this book? Its purpose is to take a 25-disc (and one printed volume) slice of Shipp’s universe as a microcosm of the larger world of creative music and explore the mutable interactions between history, current practices, and ideas through the lens of one pianist, his various playing partners, and others who have helped realize this work.
The albums on RogueArt cut a wide swath through Shipp’s approach and groups and are therefore in turns both representative and unique. For example, there’s one piano trio CD, albeit in homage to Ellington rather than presenting Shipp’s own compositional book, per se. There’s a quartet disc with Perelman, although the bassist and drummer (Mark Helias and Tom Rainey) are uncommon collaborators in the co-leaders’ orbits. There are electronics, but they’re Thomas Lehn’s and operate in a gnarled analog fashion quite different from the glitchy soundscapes and crotchety beats produced by El-P or Spring Heel Jack. Familiar duo partnerships with Brown, Parker, Maneri, and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell appear alongside less regular foils like trumpeter Nate Wooley, trombonist Steve Swell, and cornetist Kirk Knuffke. There’s one duo with Dalachinsky, but rather than an audio work it’s presented as a book – Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue. There are three sets of solos (one, a double LP issue) and a host of curious bands (Night Logic, with Morris and nonagenarian reedist Marshall Allen, as one example) as well as groups one could expect to see (Right Hemisphere – Shipp, Brown, Morris, Dickey) playing in circumstances that feel both updated and rarefied.
Chronologically beginning in 1999 with Magnetism, originally released via Bleu Regard and reissued in an expanded, plural version on RogueArt, the series began in earnest in 2006 with Declared Enemy – Shipp, Parker, reedist Sabir Mateen, and drummer Gerald Cleaver – joined by actor Denis Lavant reading the work of Jean Genet on Salute to 100001 Stars. A curiosity in the pianist’s discography, this album was a harbinger of special things to come. With the final few Shipp RogueArt CDs emerging in 2023-24, the project certainly has an end point, though the consummation of such an arc is not the result of any difficulties on the business side. As Shipp puts it, “the RogueArt albums are a complete body of work” and this printed volume serves to neatly tie together his output on the label. But it should be noted that even with a cap and frond, this music and the accompanying text provide more questions than answers, and decades from now it’s hoped that listeners will continue to have their own experiences with the recordings, some of which may be different from the reflections and meditations laid out here. After all, as Billy Bang once titled a composition, “Nobody Hear The Music The Same Way” [sic]. Other significant collections in Shipp’s oeuvre – the hatART/hatOLOGY CDs, the Thirsty Ear CDs (a label for which he acted as producer and A&R director in addition to releasing his records), albums with the Ware Quartet – are similarly closed chapters, and the books on those have yet to be written. One folio has been published on the duos and groups with Perelman, a CD-DVD-book set, the latter component authored by Jean-Michel van Schouwburg (“Embrace of the Souls”) and included in Special Edition Box (SMP, 2020), though that formation is still ongoing, reflecting on and sharpening its shared language. Shipp’s working trio/s and solo piano universe haven’t truly been digested but again, that music is still being recorded, released, and re-envisioned. RogueArt shows no sign of slowing down either – though the label will no longer be releasing Shipp’s music now that the arc is complete – its uniform white, black, and red covers unfolding to reveal the next generation of musicians and the next long-running block of exploration. Who will it be? Mary Halvorson? Jeff Parker? Ingrid Laubrock? Lemuel Marc? Only time will tell.
[1] Parts of this interview appeared in the September 2013 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, p. 9. Full text available at https://www.cliffordallen.me/interviews/the-rites-and-rituals-of-matthew-shipp-an-interview-2013