The Wire

Matthew Shipp

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.”
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Raised in Wilmington, Delaware, Shipp recalls, “My parents had the popular jazz records of the 50s, by Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck, and mother knew [trumpeter] Clifford Brown in high school. My father, back then a police captain, had a lawyer friend who represented Thelonious Monk when he got busted in Wilmington once, and also knew this vibes player, Lem Winchester, also on the police force, though he shot himself in the head playing Russian roulette. So there was some mythology about jazz around my house.”

He began playing piano aged five (“I was fascinated with anthems the church organist played that were like Gregorian chants,” he recalls) and became serious about it at 12: “I saw Ahmed Jamal on TV and decided I wanted to be a jazz musician. I can’t say why or tell you the exact quality of what it was - I just remember he played a blues, and a chill ran through me.”

He started practising intensely, as well as seeking out the music on record. “I learned jazz history through records. I started buying anything. The first was by Yusef Lateef, but whatever I could find on sale, if it looked interesting, I bought it.

“There were people I knew, like Erroll Garner, through my parents’ albums, but I also went to the library, checked out jazz history books and followed what they said with a completely open mind. Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, these were names in the books, so I looked for their albums. A Love Supreme was one of the first I bought, and that made complete sense to me. The first Charlie Parker album I got, with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band playing “Scrapple From The Apple”, I thought was weird”

His interests advanced through change purchases. He found Cecil Taylor’s ravishing 1974 solo album Silent Tongues in a department store’s cutout bin. Via a friend he discovered Anthony Braxton and Keith Jarrett. “Back then, I’d come home, take my albums upstairs, put them on the turntable and put my headphones on. Nobody knew what I was doing. My friends were all into pop music or soul, and I led a schizophrenic existence where I had my jazz thing, but hanging with my friends I’d talk about Stevie Wonder or Jimi Hendrix. I played in rock bands, too, on a Fender Rhodes piano, which really doesn’t fit into the music I do now.

“I probably thought that I was going to be a keyboard player for Grover Washington Jr’s band, because he lived in Philadelphia, 20 minutes away, and some guys from Wilmington had gotten into his band. At another point I was going to have a trio like the Bill Evans trio, playing standards it changed every week.”
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Self-styled if willing to learn from every and anyone, as warily diffident as most post-Sonic Youth, Shipp gradually came to abjure jazz as entertainment. His heroes and role models became what critic Francis Davis dubbed the ‘outcats,’ arch individualists on a mission, seekers who dug deep within themselves for music that’s startlingly original.

“I ran into people I could talk about things with,” says Shipp. “A Wilmington guy named Sunyata, spelled like ‘emptiness’ in Sanskrit, but he pronounced it ‘Shin’yata’. He was a pianist, a mathematician, a lover of books, a philosopher, all kinds of things, and he took me under his wing tutoring me in more than music, for about five years. I found him very influential. He worked as a janitor, and had studied with the same teacher I did for a while, Robert ‘Bolsey’ Lawrey, Clifford Brown’s teacher, who taught theory and improvisation. I had classical piano teachers too, and played bass clarinet in a school band, but that’s all long ago.”

After leaving school Shipp reluctantly went to university but dropped out after a year. “I hated school. I have people telling me what I had to do. I hate authority figures”. For a while he studied (or “messed around”, as he puts it) with Dennis Sandole, who some 30 years earlier had been John Coltrane’s music teacher. For 2 years he attended Boston’s New England Conservatory following in the footsteps of Cecil Taylor, and then in 1984 came the inevitable move to New York.

“By then I was completely into what I’m stylistically into,” he says. “I’d wanted to have a style that nobody else had, but I didn’t have one for a long time. There actually was one day when it happened. I’d been asleep, having all these bad dreams and headaches and seeing these mathematical equations. The next morning I had a jam session with this sax player and it was. . . I don’t know what. I was like, ‘What did we just do?’ Listening back – we’d taped it – I realised: Wow, I have style now!”

“I don’t know if confidence or arrogance is the word or what, but I always thought I was good enough at what I do to never consider not making it,” he continues. “I’ve never doubted my ability to go to the ultimate in this music. I’ve always known I’ll get my day. It’s not like I have a choice, anyway: what I do is what I do. But I honestly expected to get to New York and be discovered instantly. I thought I’d walk down the street and people would know what I was doing. I learned that’s not how it works. What happened was: nothing!”

Well, not quite. As Shipp says, he “found friends instantly”. Most significant of these early meetings was with bassist William Parker, whom Shipp says he came to New York to find, and did so in his first week in the city. Parker, a veteran of the city’s loft jazz scene and a member of Cecil Taylor’s group throughout the 1980s, is a crucial presence, linking Shipp and many other musicians of his generation with their forebears from New York’s avant jazz circles of the 60s and 80s. Shipp soon came into contact with musicians from these eras, too: drummer Dennis Charles, another Cecil Taylor sideman, but this time from the late 50s, a saxophonist Frank Lowe, an ex-member of Alice Coltrane’s group; Roscoe Mitchell, Steve McCall and Leo Smith, exiles from Chicago’s AACM; Butch Morris and violinist Billy Bang.
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“I wasn’t gigging with them immediately, though,” he says. “I met a guy who ended up producing some tapes of mine, but it took years to get the wheels running and CDs out I actually expected all that stuff to fall in place the week I got here.”

Then, as now, Shipp wore mufti in performance, seldom spoke to his audience, indulged in mystifying, discursive improvisations, didn’t fuss with bold melodies, regular chord changes or prototypical jazz swing. His music isn’t upbeat or joyful; instead it is emotionally abstracted, existential, even: dark meditations leavened by passages of rococo lyricism.

At the piano Shipp is multifarious. He’s often possessed of (or inspired to) sudden juxtapositions, sustaining high energy pulsating vamps with emphatic offbeat accents, creating vast harmonic fields of sound.

“The thing is, once I put my hands on the keyboard and close my eyes, it’s like an orgasm, the world’s great for a second,” he says. “Well, when I take my hands off the instrument, come off the stage, here are all those problems again. I’ve had times of doubt: Why did I get in this? What am I doing with my life? But I’ve made a definite commitment to a certain language. I think I realised what I was getting into when I made it, so despite moments of weakness, I’m committed. It’s that simple.

“And things have really turned around since 89,” he continues, “when I started playing with David.”

He is referring to saxophonist David S Ware, whose quartet with Shipp, Parker and drummer Whit Dickey has turned out to be one of the great jazz groups of the last decade. As heard on albums like Flight Of I, Third Ear Recitation, Earthquation, and The Great Bliss, the quartet with Shipp’s piano filling up the middle ground emerges as a freedom-and-ballads troupe, which pins the mystical hue and cry of Albert Ayler and John Coltrane to heart-on-sleeve African-American barroom romanticism, wailing through standards such as “Tenderly” and “Autumn Leaves”. These songs are ripe for deconstruction, and the pianist, fantastically busy or very spare, loud enough to hold his own, adds depth to Ware’s squeals and bellows, and fluidity to the pulse/throb established by Parker and Dickey.

“I was lucky enough to find horn players who were wrestling with certain questions,” Shipp notes, “like: where does the piano fit in with this music at this time, especially after what Cecil Taylor’s done? David S Ware and Roscoe Mitchell both decided to add a pianist to their band, both definitely wanted somebody who didn’t sound like Cecil, and I was the guy with the sound that they found.”

Why him?

“I have a concept of what I want to do. I consider myself a painter: I paint pictures with tones. Within my own nomenclature, I’m extremely analytical. However, the process of playing, to me, is not one of thought, rather of wanting to participate in a dance of rhythm.”

On his own albums (the first was 1989's Sonic Explorations, a collaboration with alto saxophonist Rob Brown), Shipp is masterly responsive, whether in his unconventional piano-bass-drums trio with Parker and either Susie Ibarra or Whit Dickey (Circular Temple, Prism); the similarly unusual ‘string trio’ with Parker and violinist Matt Mainieri (By The Law of Music); or in his duets with Brown, Parker (Zo), electric guitarist Joe Morris (Thesis) and Roscoe Mitchell (2-Z)
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“I don’t like to break down my style, I like the overall gestalt to make its impression, but I guess you could say I tend to think in masses of sound,” says Shipp. “My basic sense of jazz piano comes out of Bud Powell. Even at my most – whatever – abstract? – I think chord-line, very much like a bebop player. I transpose that whole thought process into what, for lack of a better example, I’ll say a Jackson Pollock painting. There’s always a continuum of lines, an infinity of lines, being developed, very logical and melodic but interweaving. . . My playing can be bare, just some logical, linear progression; or dense, millions of lines built on a bebop logic, intersecting in space. I don’t form 20th century classical music ‘clusters’ – I prefer the term ‘superchords’. I tend to form harmonic identities not as bebop changes progress, but through the intersection of millions of lines.”

If Shipp’s sense of jazz piano comes out of Bud Powell, then his approach to group interaction derives from John Coltrane’s quartet. “The way I accompany sax players, with harmonic clusters and an outgoing pulse is from Coltrane’s sheets of sound thing. I’m thinking of the superchord – some sort of harmony that points towards infinity, where somehow all the overtones are implied or the possibility of all the overtones exists. There’s a harmonic continuum, the impression of all the partials, all the overtones, but out of that density something distinctive arises. The continuum’s like the subconscious, where everything’s there, but something comes from it. That’s how I accompany David S Ware, and in fact, the Coltrane quartet is such a focal point for me that the challenge is more to avoid being directly influenced by McCoy Tyner than by Cecil Taylor.”

As he suggested earlier, Matthew Shipp thinks deeply about the processes that flood into his music, attempting to illuminate the realm of abstracted sound.

“Subconscious processes have always been an element I’m interested in, because I’m dealing with language, essentially, in jazz, and language springs from a very deep well. Nobody knows how we attach gruntal sounds to a phenomenon, why we call this a cup, or this black, this white. The way the brain processes information in a mysterious force, just as food, through some mysterious process, gets metabolised into the body. Musicians take in food, whatever their influences are, way beneath the surface which then emerges in this bizarre way, which is your playing. I’ve always been fascinated by that."

“When I’m playing clusters beneath David S Ware, there’s a very dense pulse field going on, made up of millions of lines intersecting, before they’re heard as dense harmonic clusters,” he continues. “I view my music as a city, and within that city events occur. I look at each chord as a personality, a person, and another chord as another personality, and the line that bridges those chords as an event – like people interacting in a metropolis – and all of musical space/time as some type of democratic structure in which these chords have to relate.
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Is my music modal?” He shakes his head. “Not particularly. Maybe ‘pan-tonal’. I used to have notebooks in which I’d play around with chord voicings, as technical exercises. I’d play around with a couple of notes from one chord-scale, a couple of notes from the other, come to some voicing, call it anything. I would write out three notes of one chord, three of another, and come up with some synthetic scale. So I got to thinking pan-harmonically – again, lacking a better term."

“I conceive melody as a core line that maybe you can sing. Like Coltrane would sometimes come up with a little riff, just a little fragment, but if you can sing it, internalise it, feel it with your body and it means something to you, I call that a melody. To somebody else it may sound like a disjointed fragment; to me it’s a rhythmic phrase with integrity. I feel it with my body, I sing it, it popped into my head – it’s a melody."

“I don’t talk to Wynton Marsalis, or players of that type, so I don’t know if they’d think my groups swing, but people get a certain type of rhythmic feeling from it. I look out and see people moving their bodies certain ways, so I think there’s a rhythmical liveliness, and I personally feel the parts jibe, so I think it swings."

Against this, Shipp says “I find myself trying to clear away obvious references in the physical world. If somebody asks me about a piece, I might tell them it has more to do with a conversation I had with an angel, than with a person or an event in the world. I deal with music for myself more in the realm of conversations with angels, having to do with that whole process of language. In fact, I’m obsessed with conversations with angels.”

He pauses. “A messenger is the obvious answer. Well, we all know that we have a personality, and there are millions of other possibilities for personalities. Something surfaces – one’s personality – even though it changes. Look at energy, and how it can form into a personality – to me, that’s what an angel is: something that’s taken on a life of its own, and is a form of energy. Energy that has a life of its own, that’s light. So an angel is a form of light.”

© The Wire 2008