Matthew Shipp

The Vortex, London

07/09/2011, with Evan Parker

08/09/2011, with Paul Dunmall, John Edwards, Mark Sanders

The American pianist Matthew Shipp was last in London earlier in the year to promote his career-best double album ?Art of the Improviser’. Since then he’s renewed his association with alternative hip-hop trio Antipop Consortium on the ?Knives from Heaven’ release, but right now he has nothing specific to promote, leaving him free to play this two-night stand with his pick of London’s finest. Perhaps the biggest draw was his summit with saxophonist Evan Parker, which was recorded for future release, but a quartet gig with Paul Dunmall (saxophones), John Edwards (double bass) and Mark Sanders (drums), promised to be even more explosive.

Although one might think he’d need some tenor brawn to match Shipp’s brash stance at the keyboard, Evan Parker played soprano saxophone throughout the first night’s first set, and he needed to be on the lighter horn to match the dazzling speed at which Shipp developed his improvisations. At times, particularly early on, the sheer quantity of sound events generated by the duo was almost overwhelming. At first they proceeded not so much together as in counterpoint to one another. Parker responded to Shipp’s vivacity with his trademark pointillist flurries, filling one sudden vacuum created by Shipp’s laying out with helical flurries of soprano. Shipp was mercurial, at times reminiscent of Cecil Taylor but tighter, blockier in execution; it’s a tendency obviously related to his explorations of electronic and hip-hop rhythms. The fewer the notes Shipp plays, the more bodily he plays them, pivoting his torso like a boxer delivering one-two combinations. His style has a playful aspect that undercuts any severity of precision in his phrasing, and at statelier tempos a hint of coldness is offset by a hymnal aspect to the development of certain melodies. In its latter stages, this first set more than once switched between fluid improv passages and others that came close to stately sonata forms. The latter impression was reinforced by Shipp’s plucking of bold, harp-like notes direct from the piano’s wires, while Parker played with a poise that’s innate to his mature style though rare in free music; this is something that has characterized his playing since he formed his electro-acoustic ensemble, which has something of the dynamic of a chamber ensemble. As the set drew to its conclusion this poise became a less characteristic introversion, a mood that persisted even when Shipp became restless and insistently probing. Gradually, however, the duo slipped back into the sequencing of eruptive, rapid clusters, a mode in which they both excel.

I’m told Evan Parker switched to tenor saxophone for the second set on the 7th. Regretfully, I couldn’t stay for it. By all accounts (of course) it surpassed the first, though the atmosphere in the already uncomfortably crowded venue became “like a Turkish bath”. I may yet get to hear the music I missed, however, since as I say the evening was recorded for future release, although if the announcement was accurate we may have to wait until 2013 for the pleasure.

The second night of Shipp’s short residency featured him in a radically different context, partnered (as on a previous visit to London) by saxophonist Paul Dunmall and the explosive bass/drums partnership of John Edwards and Mark Sanders. Dunmall is roughly a decade younger than Parker, but his sound is much more readily evocative of the style and substance of John Coltrane. Dunmall has described a three-year visit to a Divine Light Mission ashram in America as a formative experience that gave him “a spiritual understanding through meditation, Coltrane’s music, and all the rest of it”. It also led to a short tenure in the mission’s big band, led by Alice Coltrane. Now, at the Vortex, Dunmall frequently locked into the kinetic energy whipped up by Edwards and Sanders and played in spirit of Coltrane and his immediate ?successors’, such as Pharaoh Sanders, Dewey Redman and Joe Henderson. And since Dunmall, notwithstanding the indebtedness to Coltrane, is just as strongly individual as those other great players, we were treated to a riveting set of high-energy improvised music from the quartet. The downside was that, for long stretches of time, Shipp, although tirelessly inventive, and never less than resourceful and attuned to the moment, effectively played in parallel to others, whose music did little to adapt to the specifics of his style. The collective effort was at its most inspired and/or original when the quartet broke down into duo or trio configurations. Towards the end of the first long improvisation, for instance, a wonderfully combative, percussive piano trio built up a mass of accumulated tension that was effectively exploded by Dunmall’s re-entry, only for Dunmall to drop out again as Shipp lowered the temperature for a dirge-like solo accompanied by bowed bass. A second improvisation began with Dunmall and Shipp engaged in an exchange that recalled the pianist’s earlier discourse with Evan Parker, but as bass and drums ripped into the dialogue the tempo increased, and Shipp dropped out and Dunmall built up to some acerbic, Dewey Redman-style declamations. Never shy of a bit of rough-and-tumble, on re-entry Shipp actually upped both the tempo and the heat of an exchange that never lost its intensity from that point on.

Shipp began the second set dramatic flicking notes from the keyboard with his thumbs, to the accompaniment of heavy bowing and skittering percussion. Dunmall, now on soprano, played with fluency comparable to Parker’s, albeit with more brawn and a touch of steel in his sound (as compared to Parker’s tensile wiriness). In the long up-tempo collective improvisation that followed Shipp meshed more effectively with the others, and particularly with Sanders. Set highlights now came thick and fast: a lovely piano/bass duet; an accompanied solo from Dunmall, extrapolating an extended melodic line from circular breathing techniques; a gob-smacking, percussive bass/drums exchange that inspired Dunmall, back on tenor, and Shipp to counter with their own exchange of percussive taps and strikes, taking the ensemble to a collective climax of thunderous intensity. Shipp took the temperature down again for an exchange with Sanders in which he demonstrated his versatility with relatively straightforward chording, playing through an idiosyncratic series of skittish repetitions that he built to pile-driving intensity before the bass’s re-entry. When Dunmall came back in the scene was set for a dramatic ?Sun Shipp’ finale. A final improvisation began in contrasting style, with elided abstractions, as Shipp and Edwards on bowed bass blended flurries of sound. When Dunmall tried to impose the clarity of a conventional melody the others kicked against it, and some of the fire went out of the group interaction. Shipp grabbed the opportunity for a boppish solo, leading to another group blow-out and then a slow diminuendo, with all involved finally seeming skittish and either burnt out or charged with enough nervous energy to keep searching for new peaks all night. Sadly, they decided the night was over.

 

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