Pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker, whose avant-garde musical relationship spans four decades, reunite for the fourth time in the duo format on their new Tao Forms release, Whole System Of. (Their first duo effort, 1994’s Zo, has been rereleased simultaneously on ESP-Disk. CD and vinyl are available for both titles via Bandcamp.) Also recently released is a fine live recording of the Cecil Taylor Unit’s memorable 1979 appearance in Albuquerque.
Matthew Shipp & William Parker
Whole System Of (Tao Forms)
A review
It goes by many names: free jazz, free music, spontaneous composition, open music. Whatever you want to call it, pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker, two renowned practitioners of this art form, can each be characterized by a single title: master. On Whole System Of, they offer performances balanced on a knife edge, delivering sounds that bypass thought and force open a door to a rewarding sphere. The opener, “Deeper Fields,” plunges into the tumult of prodigious energies let loose. If there were ears present at the Big Bang, this might be what they heard. Shipp, ever the student of J. S. Bach presents a recurring figure that suggests a fugue over the boiling bass of Parker, which can pierce the air with high, flutelike tones or impose a metal-crushing pressure of sound. The album also offers translucency—about three minutes into the title track, for example—and light, which comes marching in on the piano about two minutes into “The Essential Blue Note” and elsewhere. Shipp and Parker perform with an intensity devoted to turning feeling into sound that transports the spirit, and they draw from every musical source available from Bach to blues.
Zo delivers a somewhat more youthful, in-your-face proposition, a middle finger to the jazz establishment. For its part, Whole System Of reflects a self-possessed maturity—equally intense, but with nothing to defend or prove, just music to make.
Cecil Taylor Unit
Live at the KiMo Theater Albuquerque 1979 (Black Editions Group)
A review
On November 20, 1979, on a rare swing through the Southwest, the Cecil Taylor Unit—Taylor (piano, percussion), Jimmy Lyons (alto sax), Ramsey Ameen (violin), Alan Silva (bass, cello), Jerome Cooper (drum kit, balafon, shehnai, whistle)—appeared in concert at the KiMo Theater in Albuquerque, NM. Sponsored by the New Mexico Jazz Workshop and KUNM, the public radio station at the University of New Mexico, the concert was proposed for broadcast on the NPR program series Jazz Alive and was brilliantly recorded—this may be sonically the finest live recording you’ll ever hear—by Mike Wolfe, who faithfully captured every nuance and detail of the music. Unused by Jazz Alive, the tapes sat in the office of concert coproducer Tom Guralnick, then the ED of the Workshop, for more than 40 years before coming to the attention of Michael Ehlers of Black Editions Group, who coproduced this release with Peter Kolovos. The program includes two 45-minute sets. The first begins with a pianistic growl from Taylor, the iconic, classically trained, vocabulary-expanding avant-garde composer and advocate of free jazz, and a fanfare from longtime sidekick Lyons and descends into an anxious, dense, squabbling episodic performance, with notes of humor and panic, that ultimately finds resolution. In the second set, space and time expand, with the quintet moving more in sync rather than confrontation, in a sometimes trancelike atmosphere. In both sets, the astonishing pianism of Taylor is everywhere evident, as is the alert connection among the instrumentalists. Black Editions Group has produced an exceptional double-LP package, available both from Bandcamp and Black Editions Group, with remarkable fidelity and a 12-page listening guide with informative, well-written notes from jazz historian Ben Young. A digital download and CD are also available from Bandcamp.
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