My plan was to post three or four more short album reviews to lower the must-listen pile a little, as I did in the previous post. One of those albums was to be The Cosmic Piano, a solo release from pianist Matthew Shipp, S.G. Then, I had the opportunity to speak with His Sui Generisness, so the other albums will have to wait a bit longer.

Matthew Shipp
An Interview
The new solo release from Matthew Shipp, The Cosmic Piano (Cantaloupe Music), finds the pianist in fine, freewheeling form. Following a musical logic of his own that subsumes multiple genres—from baroque harpsichord sonatas to contemporary pop—and exercising a physical technique of his own imagining, Shipp composes arresting improvisations spiced with a secret rhythmic sauce. Speaking with Shipp was an intriguing journey into the manifold influences in his music, his tireless curiosity, and his preparation for the recording. (The interview has been edited for length.)

M Speaking: How are things on Planet Shipp?

M Shipp: Oh, they’re decent. Yeah, you know, the East Coast is hot, 100 degrees today.

M Speaking: Oh, yeah, and a lot more humid there than it is here. It’s been many years since you’ve been here, unfortunately. I seem to recall seeing you at the Outpost, but I couldn’t tell you what year it was.

M Shipp: That would have been in the ’90s, I think. Actually, I just looked this up—90 degrees today, so not quite a 100. But yeah, yeah, that was in, I think it was in the ’90s. It might have been in the early 2000s, but it was quite a while ago, yeah.

M Speaking: Well, you know, back at that point in my listening experience, I don’t think I could really hear you.

M Shipp: Right.

M Speaking: My ears have matured, maybe, or certainly they’ve stretched.

M Shipp: Right, right.

M Speaking: And people like you have something to do with that. Two, three albums ago, I think it was The Piano Equation. I just felt I stepped into another world, and it was beautiful.

M Shipp: Oh, thank you. I tried to make worlds able to step into, you know.

M Speaking: You know, for me, music’s fundamental function is to move us into a better space, into a spiritual space, into connection with something bigger than ourselves. And your music definitely does that for me.

M Shipp: Thank you. Yeah, William Parker, bass player, always says musicians are physicians of the muse. So I guess we’re like massage therapists trying to massage people’s brain cells into like some space where DMT or some type of hallucinogen is secreted in your brain, you travel places, yeah.

M Speaking: Yeah, definitely travel places with this music. One of the things that struck me about this Cosmic Piano album is, I kept thinking, have you been listening to a lot of Bach harpsichord sonatas recently?

M Shipp: Well, not recently, but when I was a teenager, Glenn Gould playing Bach was a massive part of my life, and it’s never left me. So, you know, I just think you can always make connections between Bach and jazz and especially bebop being so linear and involved with development, linear development of the line. But there’s just a lot of elements of Bach that relate very deeply to me. The Christian mysticism of it, because I kind of traffic in mystical ideas. I’m not a Christian per se, but I traffic in Christian mysticism and a lot of the kind of Christian, mystical background of Bach’s music really vibrates inside of me. It’s something that’s deeply embedded in me. I mean, I spent a lot of time with Bach as a teenager. Just because I love the music so much, not for any exact musical goals. It’s just that that way of dealing with language just resonates with me on a really deep level.

M Speaking: Yeah, you know, one of the notes I wrote listening to The Cosmic Piano was, if there were some way for J. S. Bach and Thelonious Monk to have a child together, you would be that child.

M Shipp: No, no, I mean that’s two different, like, universes that I traffic in a lot, that I really extremely relate to. So yeah, that’s one part of what I do. I would say that that’s accurate in a sense.

M Speaking: Monk did something with the piano that nobody had ever done before him, and you kind of picked up on that and have taken it to another level. I mean, there are places in this album where you you’ve got so much going on, especially in the left hand, that it creates a kind of cloud of sound that has its own kind of existence, its own separate existence, and it’s intense and beautiful, and that kind of physicality with the instrument is just, it works so well. It just struck me this time with this album, how prominent a place that plays in your music.

M Shipp: Right. Well, you just touched on a few things. First of all, Monk was a shapeshifter with a piano. I mean, you know, he’s playing a piano, but it’s more about the piano falling in line to his imagination than it is about the piano. And I’ve said before in print that when you hear Monk, you don’t even think, “Is it a great Steinway or an upright piano?” because he manages to make whatever the instrument is before him yield to the concept in his head. So, yeah, I mean, I’ve picked up from him. I picked up from Monk and Paul Bley the idea of being a shapeshifter with the piano, because Paul Bley’s different in the fact that he considered any piano and figured out the personality of that piano and entered into it. And that’s why often from album to album, he sounds so different, whereas Monk considered any piano and just kind of forced it by force of will to acquiesce to his imagination and sound world. But within both of those concepts, it is some type of shapeshifter sensibility, and I picked up different aspects from both of them. The other thing you picked up on is the field effect and the bass register and the physicality of it. I’ve developed something unique. I don’t know how I did it. There’s a prominent pianist that—I’m just not going to say his name now—but he told somebody I know, “I never— How does— I have no idea how somebody can make a piano resonate that way.” But that’s something, you know, that’s a field effect that I don’t know where I get it. I mean, I can guess at some of the sources, which would be possibly if you’re into Christian mysticism at all, Jakob Böhme, who’s a philosopher and a Christian mystic, has the whole idea of the Unground, which is kind of the abyss that’s infinite.

M Speaking: Sounds like the emptiness of Buddhism.

M Shipp: Yeah, yeah, and Hegel picked up on that concept in some ways from Jakob Böhme. But, I mean, that is a big part of what I do. Also, I’m a big fan of Mark Rothko, the painter. I just played the Rothco Chapel last weekend. You know, the color fields that he did were kind of a big influence on me, those dense, vibrating color fields. I don’t know where else. I guess field effects in modern physics. But I mean, not that I like study those things and then do this, but I’m just saying that, yeah, I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but I do know kind of how I resonate with the idea of being able to control the base register like that. Both have control and being able to let go also at the same time.

M Speaking: Yeah, it’s such an amazing effect because it seems to float above whatever else is going on at the moment. The other thing that struck me about your playing, and I’m not even quite sure how to say this yet, but I guess maybe the easiest way to explain it is Monk’s seconds and minor seconds that he used so much. You play in the cracks of harmony. You play in the spaces kind of between, you know, what people would consider normal harmonies.

M Shipp: Right.

M Speaking: You find stuff, Matthew, that I just, you know, had no idea existed. And you make it work.

M Shipp: I don’t either.

M Speaking: It’s like a whole new— It’s kind of beyond bitonality, you know? It’s something completely different.

M Shipp: Well, okay, but I mean, I’m a big fan Scriabin also. And, you know, he’s involved with a polytonality of sorts that’s not atonal like Schoenberg’s. It’s kind of a very romantic hyperextension there. But he was working, you know, trying to develop a system of polytonality, and I think I’m really obsessed with the continuum of chords. In another way, you were talking about me being the child of Bach and Monk. There’s another aspect where you could look at me as the child of Scriabin and Coltrane. Coltrane’s dealing with sheets of sound and harmony in kind of— Okay, he’s trying to climb the overtone series in a metaphorical way, and he’s trying to exhaust all the possibilities of harmony. And I studied with Dennis Sandole, who was Coltrane’s teacher also. Okay. He was a composition teacher of mine. So I’m really involved with trying to build a poetic world, and I’m trying to find that missing chord, I guess you could say. Bill Evans used to always talk about it, kind of the missing chord. I don’t remember if it was Bill Evans, I think, said that Coltrane told him that he found this organist once that actually found it. I think I might be remembering the story a little wrong. One of them, either Bill Evans said to Coltrane or Coltrane said to Bill Evans that he had heard some gig somewhere, and there one organist, I think—I think he played the organ—like, there was the missing chord. Well, I’m in a search for whatever that is.

And I’m trying to make harmony relative, kind of a theory of relativity of harmony. I get aspects of that from Scriabin, some from Schoenberg, and some Coltrane a lot. So, you know, harmony is a beautiful thing. It’s poetic, and it opens up a lot of poetic connections. I’m looking for a bunch of poetic connections, using harmony as a tool to try to get to some type of poetic world on the piano that renders traditional harmony at the service of kind of a poetic vision.

M Speaking: Well, it’s working.

M Shipp: I hope. There’s actually an essay I did for The Wire—and it’s online—about harmony. I think it’s called “Dropping a Piano from a Spaceship,” or something. Let me see if I could find it. But anyway, it’s online if you want to check it out.

M Speaking: And just by the way, I just yesterday read “Black Mystery School Pianists.” That piece that you wrote. I really enjoyed that, and it made a lot of sense to me.

M Shipp: Right, right. The other piece is called “A Piano Dropped from Space: Matthew Shipp on Harmony.”

M Speaking: OK, great. I’ll find that. I still have a couple of albums here that I haven’t heard yet. One of them is the duo album with Ivo Perelman, Magical Incantation. Another is Armageddon Flower, with your string trio with Matt Maneri and William Parker, plus Ivo. Every time I see something with your name on it, it’s like, you know, I’m looking forward to whatever the new communiqué is from Planet Shipp, you know?

M Shipp: From my spaceship. [laughs]

M Speaking: That’s right. And I love these titles on The Cosmic Piano. They’re a lot of fun. But, man, you cover a lot of ground on this album. A lot of the feeling runs from deep conflict to deep space. With this particular album, did you have anything—before you sat down at the piano—did you have anything written down or in your head that you were wanted to deal with? Or were you a blank slate?

M Shipp: Honest, both. I mean, I practice a lot. I do when I know something’s coming up that I’m working on—you know, stuff. But then I try to forget it. I don’t want to go in and do what I practiced. So, you know, the preparation might be more in the plane of tangents of language, whether it’s kind of a distillation of something I learned from Monk, something I learned from Andrew Hill or Cecil Taylor, something I learned from Bach, something I learned from Debussy or Scriabin. So I have a bunch of directions in my head and things, but then, I really try to forget it all. And I when I go in the studio, I try to be at blank slate, and I’m pretty successful with that. I mean, all the practicing to prepare for it definitely comes in handy. I mean, I wouldn’t be as successful at doing it if it wasn’t for the backlog of confidence I get. from the practicing, knowing that I’m prepared, knowing that, like, if inspiration runs dry, that there’s still something to buttress it up until an inspiration comes back. So I would say the answer is both. I do have some ideas in mind, some approaches I worked out and stuff I’ve worked out, and I do try to forget it all when I go in the studio. And I would say it usually is a mixture of the two that ends up coming to the front.

M Speaking: One thing that Bach didn’t have that you definitely have is the blues.

M Shipp: [Laughs] Oh, God.

M Speaking: I guess that comes from the Monk part of your parentage.

M Shipp: I’m trying to think, who is kind of a model for me for blues playing, and I can’t— I’m [thinking] more of horn players like Yusef Lateef. Deepest blues player I’ve ever heard in my life from a jazz musician standpoint. And I guess Charlie Parker also. But I’m trying to think if there’s any pianist. When I think of Monk, Monk is not just Monk, because I think there’s probably a whole paradigm of kind of unknown pianists that Monk probably heard. Might have been—I don’t want to use the word primitive—but might have been prebebop, and things probably got distilled in his plane, not just from Harlem’s stride, but I mean also from people like when he was on the circuit with the evangelist. You know, probably stuff we never know of the history that he heard and incorporated in his way. So, you know, when you connect to a historical figure like Monk, you’re not just connecting to him. You’re connecting to a continuum of unknown players that affected that person. So if I said—I’m not saying that Wynton Kelly is—but if I said Wynton Kelly was like a source for me to go into the blues, tons of people that helped shape him, tapping in to them, too. There’s so much unknown about how Monk’s style came together that in tapping into him, you’re tapping into primal forces that you don’t even know the contours of.

M Speaking: Well, I don’t know what all the sources are for you, and you probably don’t even know either, Matthew, but—

M Shipp: No, I don’t. [Laughs]

M Speaking: I can tell you that on your album New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz, there’s a track called “The Function.”

M Shipp: Right, right.

M Speaking: That is some deep blues.

M Shipp: Yeah, that is a blues. But I mean, you know, the bass player is actually playing a blues on it.

M Speaking: I mean, that is deep, and it’s roomy. You know, there’s a lot of space in there, and that’s the gift of the blues in a way that—

M Shipp: Right, right, right, right.

M Speaking: You know, it’s so expansive.

M Shipp: Exactly, exactly. That is a great way to put it, it’s the gift of the blues, you know. Because the blues is a field of resonance to me, not a form. And, I mean, Michael Bisio is walking so beautifully on that. That’s what really allows that to blossom, is the way he walks on that.

M Speaking: Yeah, yeah. It’s beautiful.

M Shipp: Thank God for Bisio.

M Speaking: Well, Matthew, we could talk for hours, but I think for what I need to do, this is more than enough, and I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.

M Shipp: Oh, no, I always like to talk about what I do. [laughs]

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