The Solo Music Of Matthew Shipp

A decade of cosmic piano journeys

Pianist Matthew Shipp has recorded in about every context you can imagine. He’s led multiple trios with some of the most eminent bassists and drummers in the world of avant-garde jazz; has made quartet albums with trumpeters Wadada Leo Smith and Roy Campbell, saxophonist Daniel Carter and Ivo Perelman, and others; has joined horn players, bassists, and drummers in duos; has accompanied poets; and has worked with electronic musicians. And that’s not even counting his work as a member of the David S. Ware Quartet or Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory. But no matter the circumstance, his style is identifiable in seconds. He has developed one of the most unique voices in modern jazz and improvised music.

Matthew Shipp’s solo music, like that of his nemesis Keith Jarrett or the late Cecil Taylor, offers the clearest, most unobstructed path to a genuine understanding of his art. He’ll tell you so himself; last year he released a solo album called The Intrinsic Nature Of Shipp. In just the last decade, he has released six solo studio recordings, with one more coming out next week. I believe that while these albums exist as individual statements, they also represent a collective body of work and can be considered together. (He has also released two live solo albums in that time: Invisible Touch at Taktlos Zurich, recorded in 2016 and released in 2017 and Ao Vivo Jazz Na Fábrica, recorded in 2016, released in 2018, and reissued as Invisible Light: Live São Paulo in 2019. They’re worth hearing, too, but they will not be discussed in this piece.)

The chronology goes like this: Zero was released on ESP-Disk’ in March 2018. (The first physical edition was a 2CD set that included a lecture Shipp delivered at The Stone in July 2017.) The Piano Equation, on drummer Whit Dickey’s AUM Fidelity-affiliated label Tao Forms, followed in May 2020, and the vinyl-only The Reward: Solo Piano Suite In Four Movements appeared on RogueArt a month later. Codebreaker was released by Tao Forms in November 2021, and RogueArt put out The Data in June 2024. The Intrinsic Nature Of Shipp was released on Mahakala Music in September of that year, and The Cosmic Piano is being released on Cantaloupe Music next Friday, June 20. Most of these were tracked a year or so before they came out, except for The Reward, which was recorded in 2015, and The Data, which was recorded in 2021.

At the beginning of Neil Young’s 1997 live album Year Of The Horse, an audience member shouts, “They all sound the same!” Young shouts back, “It’s all one song!” The 92 pieces on these seven albums, which range in length from 1:43 (“Ghost Pattern”, from Zero) to 10:27 (“The Data #3”, from The Data), may at first seem to be, if not one song, variations on three or four songs. As with our recent discussion of Robin Trower, Shipp has a very strong individual style that he hones from one album to the next, without seeming to make any radical changes. And four of the seven — Zero, The Piano Equation, Codebreaker, and The Reward — were made on the same instrument, a Kawai grand piano housed at Jim Clouse’s ParkWest Studios in Brooklyn, where Shipp also records with Ivo Perelman. But there are all sorts of subtle differences between each of these albums.

Zero offers 11 tracks in 45 minutes, and the opening title piece sets the tone. (Full disclosure: Burning Ambulance co-founder I.A. Freeman has designed several album covers for Shipp, and Zero is one of them.) Shipp moves smoothly through a small group of related ideas, with heavy left-hand rumbles so deep at times that they’re like rockslides or underwater explosions countered by melodic figures that have the romanticism of classical music; they enter the room like shafts of sunlight. The second piece, “Abyss Before Zero”, has a similar feel, but adds some rhythmic passages that remind me of early ’70s Ahmad Jamal. As the album goes on, the pieces, most of which are short, build on each other to create the impression of investigation, of introspection, finally ending with the gorgeous ballad “After Zero”.

This is deliberate. Shipp, like his frequent creative partner Perelman, is very serious about album sequencing. “I grew up in the era of rock albums that were concept albums and that shaped my way of thinking completely and utterly, so I’m extremely involved with sequencing and I think it makes an album”, he told me recently by phone. “I mean it’s art in and of itself, and apart from the playing, a big part of sculpting an album experience to me is the drama of the sequence, because you know, the album’s like a play — you have different characters come in at different times and stuff, and it’s — yeah, it’s a huge part of my methodology.”

The Piano Equation is a less moody, somewhat more rhythmic album. Shipp’s fingers dance across the keys on “Void Equation”, grabbing onto a small melodic figure and repeating it multiple times until he seems to bounce out of the groove he’s carved for himself and move on to a new variation. Codebreaker might be the lightest of all these albums, though. His playing there is fast and precise, like a typist; the notes spill everywhere, and gleam where they fall.

The Data, a two-CD set adding up to almost 90 minutes of music, was recorded at Merkin Concert Hall (part of the Kaufman Music Center), and Shipp played a Steinway grand piano. He’s done this a few times, because as he told me, “Not only is every brand [of piano] slightly different, but every piano even within a brand, I mean, you’re at the mercy of the workmen that day that put it together… there’s a certain elegance a Steinway has that works for me in some ways, there’s a certain kind of action in the bass register a Yamaha has that really works for me sometimes. So, you know, I’m into the intrigue of all the brands and trying to find what works.”

The difference is immediately audible. ParkWest Studios is a small space, and the albums Shipp makes there have an extraordinary intimacy; you can hear the bench creaking, and sometimes you can hear his forceful exhalations as he plays. The Data is very different; it sounds like a recital being performed in a large and reverberant hall, as if you’re hearing it from a seat in the middle of the room. Although their styles are completely different and a direct comparison honors neither man, The Data is the closest Shipp has ever come to the romantic grandiosity of a Cecil Taylor album like Air Above Mountains.

His latest album, The Cosmic Piano, was recorded at EastSide Sound in September of last year, and again the reason was the instrument — and the room. “I wanted a concert hall sound for this, not a jazz sound, and I go to Jim [Clouse] for a jazz sound; he has that down perfectly with my trio and stuff, and I went elsewhere for a different type of sound that I thought would work better for this label.”

The label, Cantaloupe Music, is run by composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, the founders of Bang On A Can. They’re heavy hitters in the contemporary classical world, but their relationship to jazz is somewhat tangential. Shipp has worked with them in the past: “I’ve been on their programs for years, I’ve been doing stuff with them, as far as their festivals and stuff, and I actually composed a piece once for them that they performed, a thoroughly composed piece, but that was years ago.”

The Cosmic Piano is not an album of composed music. “They didn’t ask me to do any classical thing, you know, they want to present it to their audience but they want to present me as me… they wanted me to be the regular Matt Shipp that I always am.” While that may be true, the music is inevitably contextualized by the label it’s on, and it is possible to imagine that one is hearing nods to modern composition on some of these tracks, as Shipp pounds out repetitive phrases like Philip Glass crossed with Frederic Rzewski. At the same time, a piece like “Cosmic Junk Jazz DNA” offers what sound like hints of stride and boogie-woogie, and “Blues Orgasm” somewhat ironically feels more like a five-minute exercise in edging, with blues phrases hinted at and even launched but never allowed to truly resolve.

What makes Matthew Shipp’s solo music endlessly fascinating to me is the way it feels like one endless piece. In live performance, he blends melodies together into hour-long suites, transitioning seamlessly from one of his own compositions to a standard to a passage of brand-new improvisation and on and on, but it all holds together because of his unique voice at the keyboard. His actual playing and his musical concept have a mysterious quality that he sometimes attempts to describe using terms drawn from astrophysics or religious mysticism, but it’s difficult to say how much of that comes with a wink; I mean, there’s a track on the new album called “Suburban Outerspace”. But the way he actually strikes the keys, his sense of time and tempo, is unlike any other pianist I’ve ever heard.

He doesn’t play fast; he doesn’t play slow; he plays in a way that seems to suspend time, to remove the concept of rhythm from the equation entirely. “It’s hard for me to speak about tempo”, he told me, “because I’m also trying to, in a dimensionless state, I’m trying to cover all tempos in various forms, but… if I’m playing slow I could actually be hearing fast and if I’m hearing fast, I can actually be playing slow against that. So I’m looking for where all that relates in the middle somehow.”

Most musicians play in breath-bursts, even those who don’t play wind instruments. You can imagine an inhalation at the beginning of a phrase. Not Shipp. The notes just appear, each phrase coherent but somehow existing as though they were vibrating there all the time and you, the listener, just noticed now. And while there is something fundamentally jazz about his approach — he swings hard — there’s also something else going on, a kind of embodied cognition (you’re hearing the sound of him thinking) that takes questions of genre completely off the table.

“I’m definitely, at this point in my life, not interested in showing off technique”, he told me. “I mean, I’m of the Bruce Lee school — when he was asked once in a martial arts school what technically was he trying to accomplish and he said he’s trying to have no technique, and that’s where I’m at. I want the music to be purely generated by the concept, and any technique you have comes from having the concept so entrenched inside of you, but not any technical musical thing.” And indeed, as with Robin Trower, Shipp’s music never seems to make a show of its difficulty. You couldn’t do it; I certainly couldn’t do it; but it seems to flow from him without effort. And because of that Zenlike grace and its incontestable individuality, his is some of the purest music around.

That’s it for now. See you on Friday, when I will be telling you which albums from the Burning Ambulance Music back catalog will make the best summertime soundtrack. In the meantime, why not pre-order one of our new releases? The Ava Mendoza/gabby fluke-mogul/Carolina Pérez album Mama Killa and the Cecil Taylor/Tony Oxley duo album Flashing Spirits will both be released July 11, but I’ve got CDs ready to ship right now, today!