Jazz breaking news: Matthew Shipp Trio get the Vortex spinning
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
For the ‘beats’ generation of 1980s hip-hop rather than the beat generation of 1950s bebop, a new sound is generally not borne of acoustic instruments.
A piano trio is an old vehicle for a musician to drive. Yet in the hands of Matthew Shipp the keyboard on a Steinway grand, as well as what lies under its hood, assume something of the range of the MPC machines and audio software beloved of modern day producers. The tonal palette of the pianist, who, as he solemnly reminds us, was a dutiful sideman to the late David S. Ware for 16 years, is one of the most expressive to be heard in an ‘unplugged’ setting. In the course of two absorbing sets he produces ecstatic violence and needle sharp delicacy, unleashing volcanic overtones that are akin to the punishing sub-bass of techno as well as pizzicato curls that evoke the hisses and sighs of an analogue synthesizer. All the while, he, double bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Whit Dickey, the three bound by a heads down shoulders up stance similar to poker players at the climax of a hand, will take one of the central tenets of jazz – liberty of pulse; the skip across the bar-line; the looseness of the ‘one’ – and push it to a great extreme of fragmentation and suppleness.
Rhythmic and melodic lines are in constant seesaw motion during which phrase lengths contract and expand without warning, and without loss of élan, so that the swing is marked but bracingly jagged. The effect is a non-linearity that manages to skate right on the edge of rubato, not unlike the vision of the iconic drummer Beaver Harris, who posited ‘ragtime to no time’ as a way of collapsing historical borders in jazz to facilitate a dance in which steps are not easy to count. And yet the most intense moments of this performance are the ones in which apparently paradoxical forces cohere beyond any programmed contrivance. A Monkish groove sidles into ‘Frère Jacques’. A tumbling New Orleansian stomp steadies into a proto-house click before un-clicking into a beat that floats just as the bowings and pluckings of strings crackle like the glitches on a small dark computer.
– Kevin Le Gendre