Matthew Shipp
- Issue #168 (February '98) | Interviews
- By: Howard Mandel | Featuring: Matthew Shipp
- Printable version
Of the all free spirits making up New York’s downtown artistic nexus, pianist Matthew Shipp has come closest to finding the superchord that will blast conventional harmonies wide open. By Howard Mandel.
Is this the face of New York avant jazz now? Pianist Matthew Shipp’s mug can be wide open, inquisitive, or guardedly blank, his expressions ranging from the distracted to the transcendent. Up close in conversation, he is by quick turns affordable, quirky, candid, committed and confident. Without wanting to burden him with heavyweight labels, he is a conceptualising musician, raging with ideas and impulses that emerge in his music as dense crosshatched brushstrokes, clashing timbres, misfit fragments, oblique voicings; lines that thrust, rumble, cluster, knot, wriggle like centipedes’ legs or flutter like fringes in the wind.
After 14 years in New York Shipp is no longer a recent arrival, but an implacable presence, an actor on a scene that is separated by both aesthetics and commerce from the high citadels of the city’s jazz world (the tourist clubs and big name halls, the major labels and conservatory-like institutions). The circle of East Village/Lower East Side players among whom Shipp has lived and worked since 1984, musicians so dedicated to flying the righteous flag of black free jazz that they find ‘transgressive’ venues like the Knitting Factory a little pretentious, is pretty well established as the heart and sound of New York’s downtown artistic nexus. And Shipp himself is restless; still young in his late 30s, poised on the brink of something, curious to nail down what then to push past it to get to somewhere else.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he says, referring to his neighbourhood’s grit and grunge. “I want to move to the other side of 14th street, just a few blocks away from the drug dealers on the corner and such situations that have nothing to do with my soundworld. There’s definitely a New York school, and I’m part of it.” Shipp shivers slightly. "There are conscious parts of city life in my music. But it has nothing to do with that."
“I consider myself an impressionist, and my impressions are sidewalks and big buildings,” he continues. “I mean, Walt Whitman talks about nature, but you know he walked around Manhattan, it’s in his writing. In the same way, a lot of jazz has come out of Manhattan over the years. It invades your sensory world somehow."
Matthew Shipp lives modestly with his wife of eight years, the singer Delia Scaife, who has worked with guitarist Elliott Sharp (“When we met I was trying to steal her umbrella,” says Shipp). He plays in mostly odd venues, and at ad hoc concerts produced from within his musical community. Already his albums would fill a bin in the Ultimate Record Store, with releases on hat Art, FMP, Henry Rollins’s Infinite Zero and 2.13.61 labels, as well as a host of smaller independent imprints. He finds the biggest challenge of living as a musician in New York “paying bills and trying to figure out how to get through the next couple of months”. But he accepts with no rancour than a hint of impatience that his sound is not yet hailed by the world at large.
“It’s not a matter of doing this versus that, it’s more like I’m in this because it’s what I do. It’s my personality. I’ve geared my life to do this, there’s really no out. I have to go with it.” Shipp almost stifles a laugh. “Once I got directed, I’ve never had any desire to do anything but my thing. I actually have a map in my head of my complete output, what it’s going to be. I have a plan, and I’m going to stick to it. The plan’s paying off, somehow. There have been a lot of sticky times, but I plow through them.”
After 14 years in New York Shipp is no longer a recent arrival, but an implacable presence, an actor on a scene that is separated by both aesthetics and commerce from the high citadels of the city’s jazz world (the tourist clubs and big name halls, the major labels and conservatory-like institutions). The circle of East Village/Lower East Side players among whom Shipp has lived and worked since 1984, musicians so dedicated to flying the righteous flag of black free jazz that they find ‘transgressive’ venues like the Knitting Factory a little pretentious, is pretty well established as the heart and sound of New York’s downtown artistic nexus. And Shipp himself is restless; still young in his late 30s, poised on the brink of something, curious to nail down what then to push past it to get to somewhere else.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he says, referring to his neighbourhood’s grit and grunge. “I want to move to the other side of 14th street, just a few blocks away from the drug dealers on the corner and such situations that have nothing to do with my soundworld. There’s definitely a New York school, and I’m part of it.” Shipp shivers slightly. "There are conscious parts of city life in my music. But it has nothing to do with that."
“I consider myself an impressionist, and my impressions are sidewalks and big buildings,” he continues. “I mean, Walt Whitman talks about nature, but you know he walked around Manhattan, it’s in his writing. In the same way, a lot of jazz has come out of Manhattan over the years. It invades your sensory world somehow."
Matthew Shipp lives modestly with his wife of eight years, the singer Delia Scaife, who has worked with guitarist Elliott Sharp (“When we met I was trying to steal her umbrella,” says Shipp). He plays in mostly odd venues, and at ad hoc concerts produced from within his musical community. Already his albums would fill a bin in the Ultimate Record Store, with releases on hat Art, FMP, Henry Rollins’s Infinite Zero and 2.13.61 labels, as well as a host of smaller independent imprints. He finds the biggest challenge of living as a musician in New York “paying bills and trying to figure out how to get through the next couple of months”. But he accepts with no rancour than a hint of impatience that his sound is not yet hailed by the world at large.
“It’s not a matter of doing this versus that, it’s more like I’m in this because it’s what I do. It’s my personality. I’ve geared my life to do this, there’s really no out. I have to go with it.” Shipp almost stifles a laugh. “Once I got directed, I’ve never had any desire to do anything but my thing. I actually have a map in my head of my complete output, what it’s going to be. I have a plan, and I’m going to stick to it. The plan’s paying off, somehow. There have been a lot of sticky times, but I plow through them.”