Listening to Matthew Shipp, one is always conscious that in between
visceral feeling and a genuine transcendence there is a complex
negotiation of language. It occurs between the musician and the music
(whether it is his own conception or that of Duke Ellington), between
the musician and his collaborators, between the musician and his
audience, and between the musician and himself. For, like many piano
players, Shipp has the option of playing with others or in apparent
isolation, though pianists – who often favour the solo performance route
– inevitably find themselves in dialogue with the great logarithm of
equal temperament. Shipp’s unaccompanied performances are invariably
crowded with company. His ability to reference a whole spectrum of
pianism – and of great pianists – without losing the integrity of his
own conception is without peer on the present scene. But perhaps the way
to start listening to him, if oversight or youth or a shift in penal
servitude mean that this is your first experience of a player who has
been on the recording scene for some thirty years now, is in the company
of like-minded and responsive colleagues. That circle is, of
course, always wider than the three men (in this case) in studio or on
stage. A further level of conversation, and possible contention, comes
into play during a long association with a record label. Matthew Shipp
began his association with Thirsty Ear in 1999, with a sensitively
varied set of duets with bassist William Parker, pieces that ranged from
free-form explorations to songlike forms. Since that time, he has
curated the influential “Blue Series”, which has included some of the
most vital recordings in contemporary creative music. But it is of the
essence of human conversation that at some point it has to change
direction or to end. Shipp has announced that Piano Song, with Michael
Bisio and Newman Taylor Baker, will be his last for Thirsty Ear, though
he will continue to curate the “Blue Series”. It has been, in the
familiar cliché, a journey. The network of players involved has little
of the blandly collegial or flatly pragmatic feel of the usual recording
“stable”. Instead, it has been a dynamic and at moments almost
confrontational process, with powerful personalities Bisio and Baker,
whose interlocking contributions don’t simply mark them down as Mr
Reliable and Mr Reliable, but as full sharers in a conception of music
that is defined by question and answer, challenge, foresight and
retrospect in confident balance. Whatever your take on the piano trio as
an improvising form, and whatever your point of entry to it, whether
that is Jess Stacy, Oscar Peterson, Paul Bley, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett
or one of the younger “name” bands who do Radiohead and Bjork covers as
well as jazz warhorses, this is a group that celebrates the ongoing
vitality of the language and the philosophical subtlety of Shipp’s
personal project. It is relatively commonplace for artists to say
that every brushstroke, every danced gesture, every touch on the piano,
and of course every turn of plot in a novel, is a moral act. This is
both commonplace and something of a truism. What’s more often overlooked
is that each of these things, including the most apparently abstract of
them, which is probably music, is also an ethical act. If, like me, you
don’t much enjoy being told what to listen up for in a record, let me
restrict myself to this one suggestion: that you hear Piano Song as the
work of a man at the centre of a great and shifting constellation of
relationships, some of them actively present in the sound, some of them
more indirectly responsible for its safe registration and preservation,
some of them implicit in its language, but all of them part of the
conversation. No excluded middle here. Brian Morton
