The 60th birthday celebrations of Matthew Shipp have been marked by compelling recordings that reflect his state of prolonged youth as he enters his seventh decade. If The Piano Equation was a timely reminder of his ability in a solo setting then Code Breaker shows that he can also think outside the box as well as play a numbers game of his own making. The grid of figures, 64 double digits running from 01 to 99 in black and white on the front cover, remains deliciously cryptic yet Shipp’s music retains marks of distinction that will be familiar to those who have followed his work for any length of time. His ability to frequently change direction of travel so that tempo, harmony and phrasing shunt to stark new pathways without completely losing narrative drive is well to the fore, almost creating the effect of precise compositional micro-units within a larger construction. Shipp’s numerous dead-stops and turnarounds have their own sense of game within a game, circle in a circle daring.

In the liner notes he states that he is exploring connections between Bill Evans and Bud Powell, two figures not unusually mentioned in the same breath. If the impressionistic tenderness of the former and agitated thrust of the latter echo around the music then Shipp still manages to keep his structural fluidity and ambiguity intact, and there is a creative peak on the engrossing ‘Spiderweb’, which has such back and forth motion between aggression and tenderness it feels as if a salon recitalist and barrelhouse entertainer are taking turns in the chair. Significantly, these rapidly shifting arrangements do not unfold in epic pieces. There are several notable three-minute songs here that create not so much a link between the aforesaid giants as a continuum between the brevity of ‘early jazz’ and the complexity of its modernist outgrowth. Shipp’s music lies in an undesignated space, knitting past, present and future into a daring, inquisitive tapestry. His musical code is able to break its own new ground.