Photo courtesy of Peter Gannushkin, downtownmusic.net
Pianist and composer Matthew Shipp turns 60 on December 7, 2020. A fixture in the international jazz vanguard since the late 1980s, Shipp has led or co-led many projects, his main working configuration being a trio that has included bassists William Parker, Joe Morris, and Michael Bisio and drummers Whit Dickey and Newman Taylor Baker. A constant in the lauded David S. Ware Quartet, he has also worked extensively with reedists Sabir Mateen and Daniel Carter; saxophonists Rob Brown, Ivo Perelman, John Butcher, and Matt Walerian; trumpeters Roy Campbell, Jr., Wadada Leo Smith, and Nate Wooley; and poet Steve Dalachinsky. Shipp’s discography is lengthy and varied, from free improvisation to collaborations with electronic musicians. Personally, I’ve often been struck by the intensity of his chordal architecture, which often feels like it’s bending the piano to the edge of splintering, but those clusters are offset by an innate lyricism and at times a bubbling groove. I have had the experience of interviewing Shipp several times, the deepest of which is readable here. We sat down for a recap on a balmy weekday in the Lower East Side, where he has lived for many years, in advance of his birthday and the release of several new albums in 2021.
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You’ve said things about retiring before; is it different now?
Yeah, I mean, you hit sixty and a lot of people, their instinct is they want to do as much before they leave the planet as possible, just be active. I understand that but at the same time, you’ve been pushing for years and years and it just gets tiresome. So — the music will always keep going on, that’s not… in a sense I’m retired now. Many people are kind of retired unless you truly can work your job from your house. For instance, Keith Jarrett is one of the most demanding performers as far as what he wants and the conditions of his gigs, but I bet in this moment, if you got him a gig at this deli over here, if he could do it he would do it.
That’s a big if.
Yeah, but everything is so relative. I’ve been out in this a long time. What I’m trying to figure out is how to have the optimal performing situation where I can do the best gigs at the best rate of return for the least amount of work. I’ve been on the road thirty-something years and your body just gets tired of that. At the same time I love playing music and getting out, but it has to be right moving forward.
I’ve seen you do door gigs and I’ve seen you play Lincoln Center and it seems like it’s not just about — part of it’s compensation of course, because you have to live and pay bills, but historically it seems like you’ll do things for a variety of reasons and in a variety of contexts for a variety of people.
Exactly, there’s all kinds of things and reasons and different situations that benefit you – maybe in this way but not in that way, and so forth. You can do a lot of stuff and right now [laughs] I don’t want to do a lot of stuff!
Physically how has your relationship to the piano and to sound changed, especially in the last five years?
Well, since COVID I’ve been practicing a lot — your music can develop on the road in some ways and if you’re performing constantly that’s the best situation. I’m not out playing so people don’t hear it, but I’m on a level with what I’m doing now that’s just growing leaps and bounds by the hour. I really — I don’t mind me being the only recipient of it. Of course I want to play with people but I’m more into the development anyway, rather than what people think — I could give a fuck [laughs]. In this period — there was one part towards the beginning of COVID where I actually had a pretty bad fall so I was not able to move for a couple weeks, and that took me a while to recover from, but otherwise I’ve just been hunkered down practicing really heavily.
Is there a way that you could quantify what you’ve noticed in your playing?
I don’t know how to put it into words but my playing has changed a lot. I’m getting deeper and deeper into my own structure.
Physically do you find it harder, or any different, as far as the act of playing itself?
Not while I do it. I can’t play as long, like for instance when I was a kid I could practice for hours and hours and hours, and I guess if I was pushed and had to I would be able to, but I would probably get tired earlier and easier. Physically I don’t think I could practice the amount of hours I could back then. I just couldn’t do it.
You were probably practicing all day when you were young.
Yeah, I was one of those types — I couldn’t do that now.
There aren’t things you’re noticing with your wrists or arms?
No, and I’ve talked to some classical pianists, pretty accomplished musicians who know my playing, and they all have physical problems. They’re all astounded that I don’t have any wrist or hand problems at all. But I don’t.
My dad will be 76 next month, right around your birthday, and he’s been getting heavily back into playing in his retirement from his day job as a psychologist. He’s been concerned because he’s been getting various finger and hand and wrist numbness, stuff like that. Jarrett obviously has a different situation with the stroke, but what do you do as a pianist if you can’t do the thing — it’s frightening.
Yeah, I don’t even want to think about it. The two and a half weeks I was in bed after the fall I was thinking about that a lot, because if something happens and you can’t do your shit any longer, it’s just —
Yeah, I think about things, even as a listener, if I was struck deaf or something, how would my life be different? But you just can’t conceive of things like that until they happen.
We talked a lot over the years about this spiritual weight that you have connected with in your music; do you think of it differently now or do you have a different connection to the beyond or the other or the ineffable now?
It’s the same connection; the connection can never be quantified.
Do you react to it differently, though?
Yeah, I’m looking for the silence and that’s — I’m really looking for the sound, I’m not trying to sound like death or anything, but the matrix by its nature is infinite so once you really delve into it and try to get into the energy that’s behind forms, the stillness or the still point as T.S. Eliot would call it is really deep and profound. Since so much free jazz is based on a New York type of energy, it just gets deeper when you are looking for how the forms are generated – not so much the generation but the actual silent still point. You’re looking at the void the same way but maybe from a slightly different angle. The abyss is deep [laughs].
Never ending — I pick up things in your playing that over time they seem, not reticent, but it does seem more relaxed. That’s maybe not even the right word —
Maybe meditative.
Yeah, that’s a good word.
I think I’ve always had those meditative qualities but you just impose that on a New York free jazz sensibility. Historically there’s a lot of energy and the music can’t help but reflect the urban, or whatever environment you’re in. There’s other things to explore.
As a listener too, I got into it in the ‘90s coming out of punk so the heaviest stuff, the Albert Ayler, the David Ware, the Coltrane, Brötzmann, that was the music that really affected me. Of course I still love to hear heavy, raging free jazz and it’s fun, I enjoy it, I enjoy hearing people really blow, but there’s so much more to grasp in the music. I am able to also listen to some of the early jazz that Allen Lowe has turned me onto, prewar swing, traditional forms, and it’s all really interesting. It all has something to it, but similarly I like to listen to recordings — what made me think of this is the sirens going by, but there’s an interview with John Cage from Chicago in the 80s and he’s on the pier, and you hear the horns of the ships over the interview in these repeating patterns. I like that diffusion.
I think in my case, maybe deferring to elliptical phrasing, because I’m also — it’s cool to be a renegade against free jazz like Andrew Hill is. He kind of carved out a figure that in some ways was antithetical to free jazz, and it’s his own little corner over here. The thing about not blowing is that phrasing can cover every nook and corner of the universe if you really start delving deeply into it, and having silences between the phrases — there’s just a lot to be said with exploring brain rhythms that are not just a constant orgasmic rush. There’s nothing wrong with the constant orgasmic rush, either. But I mean there’s many ways to go about it, and if you have a long enough career hopefully you get to explore most of them.
The one time I was lucky enough to see Andrew Hill was with Nasheet Waits, John Hébert, and Greg Tardy, and I remember at the time I’d mostly heard his Blue Notes and was not as familiar with his later stuff, but I was struck by — there wasn’t a lot of piano in the traditional sense, he was laying out a lot, and he would stab or do these quiet eddies on the keyboard while the rest of the band was going at it. I loved it but I didn’t quite get it at the same time.
Well, Andrew was a complete rebel and contrarian; once you think you have your hand on something he’ll just go the opposite direction — he would just not let you settle on any cliched idea of who he was or what he was about. It’s like actually kind of within the realm of jazz as continual or instant action painting — if you think he’s supposed to do this, he’s going to do that. He’s always interesting — I knew him a little bit, not well, but I think he organized his life that way too. I’m not interested in being a contrarian, even though some people might look at me that way, I’m just interested in getting deeper and deeper into whatever it is that I’ve got to offer. Sometimes people bring their own baggage to it and sometimes you’ve got to clean their baggage out.
Do you think in terms of — now it’s a little different in terms of COVID and performing with other people, but are there partnerships or playing situations you’re hoping to do that might reflect that baggage cleaning?
Solo is my main thing now; my trio is my trio, with [Michael] Bisio and Newman [Taylor Baker], and that’s a solid structure. If the right festival gigs came up I would bring them. I’m playing with Ivo [Perelman] and that is a commitment, and playing duos with Rob Brown will probably be explored somewhat more because that was my original project when I moved to New York, and on its own it has deepened. But other than that I’m not really interested in doing anything. [laughs]
Back to retirement, though — like, my dad, when he retired he would still go into work, teach classes and write a ton.
If I retired I’d practice more than ever; I’d never retire from the music, I’d just — if people want to hear it they would have to pay a lot of fucking money to get me to come out. It’s basically like Alice Coltrane, when she stopped playing and she went up into her Sai Anantam Ashram, her music was still alive in her and once in a while she came out to perform. Of course I assume she had Coltrane royalties that helped finance being up in the ashram and I don’t have that, but it’s just a matter of — there’s a lot to be said of the silence. People take shit for granted too, you know — I’m completely happy with where I am in some ways and what is there not to be happy about? You’re alive, you get to eat, practice, do your thing, and if you get paid for it — there’s nothing to not be thankful about but at the same time I do feel that I’m taken for granted a little bit in certain ways and in certain corners. Once you get to that point it’s me and the angels, I play my music for the angels. I get up and it’s a meditation process. So why put it into the marketplace of society unless, you know — my music is out there and available so that people who need it can get it. At this point maybe I just want to pray and practice.
When we met up earlier in the summer you said you would not consider living anywhere else; are you still kind of on that page?
Other than New York? If somebody offered me a monastery where my wife and I could move in and I carried rent and could practice all day I don’t care where it is, I’d move there. Other than that, no, I’m staying in New York.
Yeah, it’s funny — I get frustrated a bit with Morton Feldman and some of the New York school composers, but one thing I will say is that’s interesting is being in New York can also push you towards silence in music. Feldman and Cage, Christian Wolff, a lot of their lives they were in one of the loudest cities in the world making this extremely spacious music, intense but very open, and I wonder if there’s something to that, being surrounded by all of this noise.
I think a dense urban space definitely generates a reaction that is the creation of your own meditational space which exists in a parallel universe with all the noise. I definitely see dense urban spaces generating their own parallel universes that, if your will is strong enough to enter it, you find a way into that space. It’s a meditational space.
Each urban space is going to be different and we think this is intense but you go to Mumbai or whatever and it’s like —
I remember the first time I was in China, in Shanghai I was walking around the city and I was like oh my god, this is like New York on steroids! I never saw anything like it, it was just about passing money, in the air that’s kind of —
I grew up in Kansas but the first time I went overseas as a kid I went to Tangier, and it was totally disorienting. Fascinating, but incomprehensible. If I were dropped into that environment now — this isn’t too pell mell today, New York has been quiet in comparison to February, but it would be strange. I’m moving upstate early next year and at first I thought I didn’t want to lose the vibrancy of the city in the day to day, but at the same time the quiet and being in the outdoors every day, going hiking…
Fuck the vibrancy of New York; I could see saying that in the ‘80s, but that shit is over.
Certainly; something I’m clawing at in the back of my mind is what I experienced here in the ‘90s and that’s never coming back either. The prevalence of DIY spaces now is pretty minimal.
So what can we look forward to as far as recordings as you head into your next decade?
I have another solo CD coming up on Whit [Dickey]’s label Tao Forms, as well as a trio with Whit and Ivo [Perelman]. We’re also doing a relook at Circular Temple, the first trio CD I ever released, but this will be under Whit’s name and is also going to be released on Tao Forms. I’m on another forthcoming Ivo Perelman album, which is a trio with Joe Morris on guitar, and Ivo and I will probably end up doing a few more duos. I also have a few Rogue Art albums being released — a duo with [saxophonist] Evan Parker, a duo with William Parker, a duo with [bassist] Mark Helias, and a quartet with [saxophonist] Paul Dunmall, Joe Morris on bass, and Gerald Cleaver on drums. There is also a recording of East Axis with [saxophonist] Allen Lowe, [bassist] Kevin Ray, and Gerald Cleaver on ESP — that’s coming out soon. What I really want to do is a boxed set of solos on four or five of my favorite pianos in New York City, and I’m trying to get the funding for that right now. I also want to self-produce a quartet with Ivo, [drummer Bobby] Kapp and William [Parker] that we own. We’d put it out on a label, just for posterity’s sake, but we would collectively be the owners of the master recordings, which hasn’t happened with other CDs from that band.
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SIX BY SHIPP:
The Piano Equation (Tao Forms 001, 2020) is the pianist’s latest unaccompanied release, consisting of eleven original pieces, and the first CD to be issued earlier this year on Dickey’s imprint. Beautifully rendered by Jim Clouse at Park West Studios, these solos are brisk, layered bagatelles that, amid their complex refractions and rivulets, allow for the emergence of romantic melodies and powerful, stick-in-your-synapses anthems. The speed at which Shipp’s mind operates, translating wispy mood architecture into jutting tessellations that relate back to the original form, is something to behold. Without other players present, it’s just him and the piano, and sometimes that’s absolutely enough.
It’s interesting but perhaps not surprising that Shipp would have a fair amount in common with British saxophonist John Butcher, considering the fact that both can bend their instruments — and sound, and space — in pretty striking ways. The pair have released two discs on Fataka, one duo as well as a trio with German electronics artist Thomas Lehn. The Clawed Stone (RogueArt 0099, 2020) finds the latter configuration in a program of open improvisations that hew closer to breathability and grace than this configuration might’ve been privy to on prior releases. Lehn’s glitches and live sampling, however, add a touch of instability to keep everyone on their toes.
The Unidentifiable (ESP 5039, 2020) is the Matthew Shipp Trio’s second disc on venerable avant-garde imprint ESP-Disk’, following several releases with Matt Walerian and alongside a recent date with Ivo Perelman for the label. As of this writing, this particular version of the trio has been together six years, enough time that the music fits like a glove but not long enough that new discoveries aren’t around every corner. “Trance Frame” is a feature for drummer Newman Taylor Baker, whose hands work the toms in resonant, pattering movements that go back into the music’s prehistory and serve as a deep introduction to the glassy rejoinders and allover rhythmic dance of “Phantom Journey,” with Michael Bisio’s bass a rippling undercurrent. A gorgeous array of pieces are on offer here, proof that the trio just keeps growing.
Though Shipp has recorded quite a number of duet albums in his career, What If? (RogueArt 0097, 2019) is the first to present piano-trumpet duos, the latter chair occupied by brass wizard and composer Nate Wooley. Wooley is a bit like John Butcher in that he thinks about architecture, space, and the experience of sound in a way that allows him to bend or shape the sonic environment, which makes him and Shipp’s conversations quite rich. As with The Piano Equation, the improvisations are all relatively short and bagatelle-like, although Wooley’s energy is a crackling hum of brass, air, and spittle, and filled with heat. That said, there are numerous pastoral moments that stretch time and deepen their level of interaction.
Alto saxophonist Rob Brown is Shipp’s longest working partner, going back to Sonic Explorations (Cadence Jazz 1037, 1988), an LP set of duo recordings that was both musicians’ debut. Then Now (RogueArt 0101) is a revisitation of sorts, though absent the first album’s inclusion of two modern jazz standards. Brown’s astringent tone has thickened over the years and his Parkerian flywheels have found a more patient intensity; coupled with Shipp’s deft volumes, their outlay of creative information feels as though it is applied in swells, a washing over that gleams with barbed trills. That said, the familiarity Shipp and Brown have with one another allows them to pull no punches and leads them into passages of sublimely physical intensity, as on the eleven-minute second track (all eight cuts are titled “Then Now”).
Shipp and Brazilian tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman (who turns 60 on Jan. 12) have been playing and recording together for 25 years, and their relationship began similarly in the duo realm with Bendito of Santa Cruz (Cadence Jazz 1076). Shamanism adds guitarist Joe Morris to the proceedings, and is the second Perelman-Shipp album on Arkansas-based Mahakala Music (MAHA-009, 2020). As with a lot of longtime partnerships, and one that collaborates as frequently as they do, the feeling of a new document of this work is akin to looking with fresh lenses on the same kind of polished jewel. The structure might be comparable, but the way the light illuminates part of a surface might be completely different. Adding Morris’ scumbled runs and intervallic twists is just savory icing on this substantial improvised cake.