Matthew Shipp | "The Intrinsic Nature of Shipp"

Over the course of his three-and-a-half decade career, Matthew Shipp has evolved from a radical outsider on the fringes of the NYC avant-garde to a position as, in the words of DownBeat magazine, “an elder statesman on the free-jazz scene.” He’s achieved such accolades without ever deviating from a single-minded exploration of his own inimitable sonic vocabulary, maintaining his own eccentric orbit around the jazz realm while steadfastly resisting its gravitational pull.

Two new releases bookending his storied career showcase both Shipp’s unflagging vision and the progressive maturation of his inimitable pianism. With his remarkable new solo album The Intrinsic Nature of Shipp, due out September 15th via Mahakala Music, the acclaimed pianist offers his most stunningly distilled statement to date, a compelling, intensely focused set of breathtaking improvisations that fastidiously refine Shipp’s prismatic language; meanwhile, ESP-Disk kicks off a new series of reissues also on September 15 with the 1990 trio outing Circular Temple, Shipp’s first album solely under his own name.

While these two albums provide a glimpse of the impressive consistency of Shipp’s voice across the span of his estimable career, the differences in the two albums spotlight the ways in which he has matured and defined his language over the decades.

“A personal style happens when it happens,” Shipp shrugs. “I believe everybody is capable of it, but the conditions that allow it to happen have to be in place. There is a pure generating principle within anybody, but that doesn't mean that there's not input from the outside world in my music. It does mean that everything is thoroughly digested into my system and then thrown back out as my central nervous system interacts with other parts of the universal hologram, which could be a lick from Monk or a Bud Powell solo. Just like water becomes steam becomes ice, there's a central principle to the whole thing that's pure Matt Shipp.”

Shipp made his recording debut in 1988 with Sonic Explorations, sharing top billing with his duo partner, alto saxophonist Rob Brown. Circular Temple offered fans of jazz’s outer limits the first true glimpse of Shipp’s idiosyncratic concept, however, leading a trio with lifelong collaborators William Parker (bass) and Whit Dickey (drums), with whom he famously worked in the legendary David S. Ware Quartet. The album was initially self-released on Shipp’s own Quinton imprint, then reissued in 1994 on Henry Rollins’ Infinite Zero label; both have since gone out of print.

Through ESP, Circular Temple will not only return to circulation on CD and digital formats but make its long-awaited vinyl debut. Over the next year, the label will follow that with a reissue of Zo, a 1994 duo with William Parker, on all three formats; and a vinyl-only issue of Shipp’s 2018 solo album Zero. All three will be available on vinyl for the first time ever.

“At the time that Circular Temple was released, I don't think people really knew what to make of me,” Shipp says. “By the time it was released on Infinite Zero, which was just a few years after its first incarnation, it was the lead review in Rolling Stone. Listening to it now, I hear that I had a very distinct voice even in the early 90s, when the neoconservative movement in jazz was at its peak. My language is transcendental and doesn't fit into any easy niche or category, so it's interesting looking back to see an album like that arrive in an environment that would not have been able to make sense of it.”

In the intervening years Shipp’s work has achieved its fair share of study and acclaim while still existing far outside the jazz mainstream. His solo recordings have charted a sweeping arc through his prolific discography since 1995, when he recorded both live (Before the World) and in the studio (Symbol Systems). In 2002 he returned with a rare standards date on the disruptive Songs. The further clarification of his voice can be traced from 20015’s One through 2018’s Zero, his mathematical precision revealed in his most recent offerings, The Piano Equation and Codebreaker.

If those latter titles hint at an investigatory process, then The Intrinsic Nature of Shipp suggests a profound discovery, one that turns the pianist’s expansive, often cosmic vision inwards to find an equally expansive universe in his own essential being. The album’s ten stark, exacting inventions seem to have shorn away any superfluous gestures to reveal Shipp’s unadulterated inner life.

“I believe a pianist's intrinsic nature comes out in the solo idiom,” the pianist asserts. If that is the case, then the solo work of an artist as singular and visionary as Shipp must be viewed as creation in its purest form.

“When you're playing solo, it's a pure prayer to the instrument and to the vibratory field that the music comes from,” Shipp explains. “You're laid out naked in your full glory, for everybody to see. So the deeper I get into my career, I'm drilling further down to the bare essence of the facilitator that generates this music.”