New releases from the piano trios of Marta Sánchez and Matthew Shipp carve out unique sonic territories.

Marta Sánchez
Perpetual Void (Intakt Records)
A review
Dense and intense, the 11 original tracks on Marta Sánchez’s new trio release, Perpetual Void, with Chris Tordini (bass) and Savannah Harris (drums), is driven by deep questioning and even deeper feeling, chronicling the pianist’s emotional and intellectual struggle to find her center. She emerges with a rare gift—an artistic voice of her own. It’s not always an easy voice to hear—it can be spikey, turbulent, angry, panicked, frustrated, demanding—but it possesses an emotional eloquence and an intellectual rigor that demands attention, delivered with a ferocious pianism that’s matched by her colleagues’ intensity. The anxious counterpoint of “I Don’t Want to Live the Wrong Life and Then Die” is balanced by the diaphanous solo piano’s acceptance of grief on “Prelude to Grief,” improvised in the studio. The emotional cascade of “This Is the Last One about You” performs a muscular exorcism (note the unison between the bass and Sánchez’s left hand, which drives the point home). On the other side of that coin, the improvised solo piano piece “Prelude to a Heartbreak” hopes against hope for a different outcome, moving through anticipated loss with a heightened sensitivity. Sánchez communicates an insomniac’s delirious insight on “3:30 a.m.” On “The End of That Period,” Sánchez’s right hand shapes the contour of relief, and she brightens “The Absence of the People You Love” with happier memories. In the end, on “29B,” Sánchez moves toward affirmation and commitment. On Perpetual Void, Sánchez invites you to jump into the ring and wrestle with big, agonizing questions. It’s a tag team undertaking, and you’ll be grateful to have her on your side.

Matthew Shipp Trio
New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (ESP-Disk)
A review
If you do nothing else for yourself this week, check out “The Function” on the Matthew Shipp Trio’s latest release New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (see below). This track delivers an exhilarating demonstration of how spacious, elastic, and lowdown the blues can be. Shipp takes the blues out for a ride on his sui generis musical language that is as idiosyncratic as Monk’s. In fact, you could argue that Shipp blasted off from Launchpad Monk some time ago and has soared to a stratospheric level all his own. In “The Function” and elsewhere, note how Shipp uses small whirlpools of repeating patterns that pull you willingly deeper into the moment and inevitably eject you onto a different but magically connected plane. Shipp gets significant support from his telepathic and fearless colleagues, Michael Bisio (bass), whose insistent walking bass on “The Function” digs deeper and deeper into the blues, and Newman Taylor Baker (drums), an architect of rhythm and a master of punctuation. The sonic variety on the album ranges from “Sea Song,” a kind of baroque jazz that features an almost stiff sense of formality, but in the service of looseness, to “Coherent System,” with its pounding sea of chords, a crushing, symphonic wave of sound that is almost too exquisitely intense to bear. Listen to Shipp wring sound out the instrument on “Brain System,” which circles new music territory, and deliver translucent tones in “Tone IQ,” a track as abstract as “Coherent System” is visceral. No one writes or plays like Matthew Shipp. His music has a mind of its own—and what a mind—and Shipp deserves to have the title Sui Generis precede his name or maybe follow it thusly: Matthew Shipp, S.G. New Concepts takes modern jazz to invigorating levels of excitement, intensity, and joy.

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