Lunch With Matthew Shipp & El-P

High Water turns 20

I’ve known pianist Matthew Shipp for more than 25 years. We first met at the Vision Festival in 1998, where he performed as part of the David S. Ware Quartet and in duo with William Parker. I interviewed him for my first book, 2001’s New York Is Now!: The New Wave of Free Jazz (no, I don’t have any more copies for sale, sorry), and then again and again for features in Jazziz, The Wire, the Village Voice, Burning Ambulance (the first issue of the print magazine, and the second episode of the podcast) and probably other places, too. And it was through him that I met El-P.

In the early 2000s, Shipp was the executive producer of the Blue Series, a line of modern jazz albums released on the Thirsty Ear label. Some of these were traditional acoustic sessions, but others allowed him to explore his interest in electronic music and production techniques. He collaborated with DJ Spooky and Antipop Consortium, and applied studio magic to albums by David S. Ware and others. And in 2003, he and a crew of his out-jazz peers — trumpeter Roy Campbell, trombonist Steve Swell, saxophonist Daniel Carter, bassist William Parker, and drummer Guillermo E. Brown — joined El-P in the studio for what became the album High Water, released in March 2004.

At this point, El-P was not the festival-headlining hip-hop legend he’s become, thanks to his solo albums and his work as half of Run The Jewels. He’d earned an underground rep with Company Flow, and his solo debut, Fantastic Damage, had won nearly universal praise from critics, but he was still climbing. I met him and Shipp at an Italian restaurant in Chelsea; we had lunch and talked for an hour or so about what would eventually become High Water. El-P struck me as a smart, friendly guy with a real humility about his own work and his place in the broader world of music, and his respect for Shipp, Parker, et al was obvious and sincere.

The piece you’ll read below ran in the November 2003 issue of Jazziz.

(Note: High Water seems to be out of print at the moment. Most Blue Series releases are available on streaming services, but this one isn’t. I suggest picking up a physical copy; it’s worth hearing.)

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The label side of this operation, Burning Ambulance Music, has eight full-length releases and a compilation of almost entirely exclusive music available. The albums are all pay-what-you-want for the digital versions, and the CDs come in beautiful heavy cardboard mini-LP style sleeves, printed on textured paper. Stop by our Bandcamp page and listen; I’m sure you’ll find something that speaks to you.

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Perfect Strangers

Somewhere between hip-hop and the jazz avant-garde, Matthew Shipp and El-P find common ground.

In one of 2003’s wildest musical confluences, pianist Matthew Shipp and rapper/producer El-P are collaborating on a still-untitled album that will be released under El-P’s name early next year. It’s a warm afternoon in August when I catch up with the pair, conversing about the project in the back room of Bottino, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.

“I think to do this and have it work you can’t be kowtowing to certain elements,” Shipp soon tells me. “You’ve got to be crazy and just do what you do. I don’t even want to use the word ‘crossover,’ because it’s not a crossover.”

“We’re not trying to make a hip-hop record,” El-P adds.

“Or a jazz album,” Shipp continues. “You can’t be kowtowing. You’ve got to have a free mind and not be kowtowing to whatever the pressures are in your world, be it the jazz establishment — whatever that is — or whatever else. You’ve just gotta be out there, doing your own music. I don’t see how you can attempt to do something like this — and I don’t know what I mean by ‘something like this,’ we’re just trying to make music — but it’s hard to do this unless you’re really independently motivated and doing your own thing. Once you’re caught in the trap of the major-label jazz world, you’re fucked.”

The pairing of Shipp — one of the jazz avant-garde’s brightest lights — with one of rap’s most defiant, underground figures might seem puzzling at first. But anyone who’s been following Shipp’s career arc during the last three years will see it as a logical, perhaps even inevitable, teaming.

Since 2001, the pianist has appeared on more than a dozen disparate CDs (some as a sideman, others under his own banner). All have been released on the Thirsty Ear label as part of its Blue Series, which lists Shipp as its artistic director. He picks the musicians, books the sessions, and even produces some of the records (assisted by engineer Chris Flam). On three of the Blue Series discs, he appears as a guest musician with the innovative British electronic producers Spring Heel Jack. On two others, he teams with the cerebral sound explorer DJ Spooky. Another CD, titled Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp, features the production and vocal talents of recently disbanded avant-rap crew Antipop Consortium. Nearly all of the Blue Series recordings feature electronics — everything from sampled keyboards to turntables and synthesizers — and up-to-the-minute production techniques, combined with traditional jazz instruments. The music Shipp and these artists are making represents a conscious, largely successful attempt to reach a younger, non-jazz audience, without caving to pop trends.

Onstage, Shipp is still the two-fisted free-jazz player who hit New York at the end of the 1980s. However, his technique has changed somewhat. Most notably, he’s tempered his trademark sweeping runs and percussive assaults on the keyboard. Nonetheless, a listener who only hears him once or twice a year during a live performance is likely to believe he’s just another acoustic pianist, working in the free tradition. In fact, though, he’s split his musical identity nearly in two. While his live performances haven’t changed much, Shipp has turned the recording studio into a laboratory of sorts, largely abandoning the thick clusters of sound that marked his 1990s recordings and opting instead to explore post-hip-hop rhythms and ambient atmospheres.

“It’s reacting to a whole different environment,” Shipp says. “If you’re having a conversation with your wife, or if you’re having a conversation with your boss at work, it’s gonna be different. You react to the environment. So that’s the difference. When I play live, I’m just presenting myself as the classic avant-garde jazz player that I’ve always been. When I go in the studio, I assume a whole other personality. But it’s all me; it’s all tied together with who I am. I’m just a schizophrenic.”

Shipp has always been keenly aware of jazz’s limited audience, yet he has never undertaken a blatantly commercial project in order to expand that audience. Still, as someone who enjoys hip-hop and pop music, he sees connections that he’d like to explore.

“As a kid, my favorite keyboard player was Stevie Wonder,” he says. “I was into the Headhunters and some of the Herbie Hancock projects as a kid. And when my identity as a free-jazz player grew, I always envisioned a place for that music in modern beat culture, for a lot of reasons. When I moved to New York in the 1980s, I used to go to dance clubs every night, mostly to pick up chicks. But I was a dancer — I’ve always been a dancer. And I used to walk out of discos at night hearing tracks by Salt-N-Pepa and Run-DMC and imagining what my piano style would sound like [in that context]. Because to me, that music is really cosmic, especially if you listen to how it was constructed. I always envisioned the sound of my piano playing within modern beat culture.”

El-P (real name: Jaime Meline) is a totemic figure in the hip-hop underground. In the mid-’90s, his trio, Company Flow, disdained funk in favor of beats that hit like subway doors crashing shut on listeners’ heads. He emerged as a solo visionary following Company Flow’s implosion, producing his own debut album — last year’s Fantastic Damage — and establishing an independent label, Definitive Jux, to record artists like Cannibal Ox, RJD2, and Mr. Lif. The Definitive Jux roster is so strong that hip-hop cognoscenti buy the imprint’s releases virtually on faith.

El-P’s solo music is just as oppressive, if slightly more complex, than his work with Company Flow. His lyrics are filled with images of paranoia, technology turned to evil purposes, and self-loathing. Offstage, though, he’s an easygoing guy with a self-deprecating sense of humor — much easier to talk with than one might expect from the writer of lines like “I’ll exfoliate your face with the acid inside my stomach.”

“All I ever wanted, essentially, was to be a working musician,” he says. “I wanted to be able to have some money, to be able to do what I liked doing, and not have to take shit from anybody. That being said, outside of that humble paradigm I’ve established for myself, I want to dominate the world.”

Instead of just producing the tracks during the recording sessions with Shipp and the other musicians, El-P decided to become an organic part of the ensemble. “I brought music, and sat in there with them,” he says. “We set my little technology stand up in the room where they were playing, and basically, I played music, and they went off based on that music. And then I would sort of take elements away in the hopes of guiding it and seeing what would happen. It seemed to work really well. These guys were like a powder keg, man. You just offer a little bit of something, and all of a sudden, it’s off and it’s becoming something you could never imagine. And it was really cool for me to see that evolve out of shit that I’d brought in. It made me feel like a little bit less of a hack to be a part of it, to actually have an effect on the melody, on the tune, on the structure of it. I certainly realize that it’s just a small element of what it is, but still.”

A one-track 10” record has been released in advance of the album. “Sunrise Over Bklyn” is neither jazz nor hip-hop. The music reflects its title perfectly, with instruments coming in slow and stately, like light filtering around the corners of buildings. Roy Campbell’s trumpet and Daniel Carter’s saxophone lead Shipp’s piano, William Parker’s bass, and Guillermo Brown’s drums through a deliberate, slinky groove, never bursting forth into full free-jazz madness, but instead creating a beautiful tone poem.

El-P’s touch is light. Far from chopping up the music (as Teo Macero did on Miles Davis’ electric albums), he edits inaudibly. He contributes primitive analog keyboard sounds that shadow Shipp’s piano lines. And he adds an effect to the drums that give them an electronic shimmer. But there is no scratching or rapping.

There will be vocals on the album, though. El-P brought his father, a pianist and singer who performs as Uncle Harry, into the mix — without telling him. “There was a little bit of trickery,” he says, laughing. “I told him I was gonna maybe ask the band to do a standard, and I asked him to help me pick one because that’s where he comes from. And then I asked him to send me the sheet music of a bunch of different standards that he thought would be interesting. And I asked him to record himself doing said standards on a cassette tape so I could hear them and see if I wanted the band to do one of them. So I picked one, and [the band] played the one I had picked. And I basically took my father’s vocals from the cassette tape, chopped it up and laid it over, and kinda created a new song out of it. My father still doesn’t know. I hinted at it, but he hasn’t heard it or anything.”

The Blue Series is radically reshaping what jazz is, and who it reaches. The next step (aside from the next wave of releases, which will last well into 2004) is replicating this heavily tech-dependent music during live performances. “We’re actually trying to figure out some ways to take what we’re doing in the studio and get it onstage,” Shipp says. “It’s been a slow process because it’s different. But we’re working on really bringing this whole thing live. And when it’s ready, it’ll be something.”

The project has filled El-P with a rare feeling of unfettered optimism. “I think [this album] is another grain of hope that I will get to be involved with exciting things that I didn’t think I’d be involved with. It didn’t change me, but it does excite me to try — in vain, as it may be — to come up with something that will do justice to what these guys do naturally. I’m really glad to be able to, still relatively early in my career, punch the borders on either side of me out a little.”

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Re-reading that piece for the first time in 20 years, do I love everything about it? Nope. I should have edited Shipp’s opening quotes so the word “kowtow” only appeared once instead of three times, and there are certain things that were just part of my music-journalist “voice” that I don’t really do anymore. But overall, I think it’s pretty good for an article in a mainstream jazz magazine. Jazziz has often been regarded as a step below DownBeat and the late, lamented JazzTimes, a magazine aimed more at, say, Chris Botti fans than listeners with a taste for abstruse composition or hardcore improv. But they let me interview Sonny Rollins and Derek Bailey; they sent me to review a Cecil Taylor big band concert; and they commissioned this piece. Hell, it was Jazziz that got me an interview with Tom Waits. (They eventually killed that piece, and I sold it to The Wire, kicking off a relationship of more than two decades’ standing.) So I’m proud of the work I did there, and it’s good to see them still out there when so many other magazines have long since fled the scene.

That’s it for now. See you next week!