The depth-defying duo, tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman and
pianist Matthew Shipp, attain their zenith with the new release Oneness (March
2 on Leo Records). This three-CD set, recorded over a five-day period, marks the
apotheosis of the Perelman-Shipp duo recording career -- at least for now.
While they will perform in concert, and may return to the studio at some point,
they have no immediate plans for follow-up albums in this most intimate of
formats.
"This is it," Perelman stated shortly after
completing work on this boxed set. "I can't see us making another duo
recording in the near future. The process was so intense. . . for now, there's
nothing more to say."
That seems unlikely in the long run, if only because these
two musicians have already said so much without repeating themselves. During an
artistic alliance that stretches back more than 20 years, Perelman and Shipp --
from Sao Paulo, Brazil and Wilmington, Delaware, and born only a few weeks
apart -- have released eight previous discs as a pair; they have also performed
together, in various formats with other musicians, on another 30-odd albums.
During the last decade especially, their interactions have achieved an uncanny
connection that compares with other sparkling examples of jazz telepathy, from
Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines to John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner -- a
"oneness" represented on the album cover by the Ouroboros, an ancient
depiction of a snake eating its own tail.
Found in many cultures, the Ouroboros symbolizes infinity
and the cyclical nature of life. But it also symbolizes unity, as in the
meeting of two minds -- a rare occurrence that Shipp recognized the first time
he and Perelman played together in 1996. "I can remember feeling a
connection at that very first session, like this was something that was meant
to be," the pianist recently told JAZZIZ Magazine. As further explanation
of this phenomenon, Shipp describes "the third mind," a term popularized
by William S. Burroughs and poet Brion Gysin to convey the idea "that
whenever you have two minds working together, there's a third, superior mind, a
gestalt between the two that arises." (Indeed, one suspects that if
technicians were to map Perelman's and Shipp's brainwaves during any given
performance, the areas of overlap would defy medical science.) "And that
really does seem to happen to us a lot of the time."
It happens often enough that, for Oneness, they sought to
distill this "third mind" into a single CD's worth of recordings, a
concept that had discussed for several years, and had even attempted on one or
two previous occasions. By digging ever more deeply into this "third mind"
during nearly a week devoted to nothing else, they hoped to make Oneness a
carefully selected culmination of their duet work up till now by. "The
idea was to get just one CD, the best of the very best," Perelman
explained. But they outdid themselves. As Perelman explains: "When we
listened back to the recordings we said, 'We can't choose.' So, we have to
release these three CDs."
The individual performances traverse the usual range of
emotions that arise when these two artists explore the shared space between
them, but even more so; in Perelman's words, "It's what it was, but at a
higher degree." There's the heart-racing thrill of their eddying flights
to the stratosphere, led by Perelman's preternatural command of the altissimo
register, and the heart-rending sweetness of soft, pure passages, buoyed by
liquidy ostinatos at the piano; the disruptive intoxication that results when
Shipp uses neo-baroque figures to inspire equally modern/ancient flurries from
the saxophone; the unexpected serenity of long lines that traverse several
octaves in a wink, and the galvanizing power that erupts when guttural tenor
blasts fuse with densely chorded piano pillars.
But relying on any one of these individual performances to
the exclusion of others fails to validate the album's concept -- or, for that
matter, the Duo's history and presence. And perhaps their wish to declare any
one set of performances as the pinnacle of its work is, at best, quixotic.
"Maybe one day we'll go and actually get the very best of the very
best," Perelman mused. "Other than that, I think we accomplished our
mission."
All good things must come to an end, and few phases conclude
as convincingly as Oneness, the Perelman-Shipp Duo's valedictory statement on
disc -- at least, for now.
Growing up in São Paulo, Ivo Perelman was a classical guitar
prodigy who sampled a series of other instruments before finally adopting the
tenor saxophone. At the Berklee College of Music, he concentrated on the
mainstream masters of the tenor sax, as opposed to such pioneering
avant-gardists as Albert Ayler, Peter Brötzmann, and John Coltrane (all of whom
would later be cited as precedents for his music). Perelman left Berklee in
1983 and moved to Los Angeles, where he discovered his penchant for
post-structure improvisation and, inspired by the freedom afforded by this
approach, he started investigating the free-jazz saxophonists who had come
before him; eventually, he began moving toward the goal of "complete
spontaneity," improvising music with no predetermined theme, structure, or
tempo. In the early 90s he moved to the more inviting artistic milieu of New
York, where he maintains an apartment while spending about half his time in São
Paulo; there he focuses on his separate career as a visual artist, producing a
steady stream of abstract drawings and paintings that have attracted admirers
worldwide. Many of these works show the same vivacious, kinetic expressionism
that animate his music, which he has documented on more than 80 recordings
under his own name.
Matthew Shipp, who has released close to 70 albums under his
own name -- in addition to those on which he shares co-billing with Perelman
(and the several dozen albums where he appears as a sideman) -- has played
piano since the age of 6. After a year at University of Delaware and another at
Berklee, he moved to New York in 1984, and in 1991 he joined the power
free-jazz quartet led by saxophonist David S. Ware, with whom he toured widely
and recorded more than 20 albums. In Ware's band, Shipp's early love of rock
music -- and his ability to infuse rock's energy into a free-jazz context --
stood him in good stead; also in Ware's band, he established a lasting bond
with the titanic bassist William Parker and drummer Whit Dickey, both of whom
have worked with him and Perelman on subsequent albums. A furiously eclectic
iconoclast, Shipp can careen from compositions rooted in his classical studies,
to the Great American Songbook, to hip-hop in a matter of measures, tying these
disparate idioms together with an overarching sense of the music's history and
its future. His openness to electronics and new idioms led him to become
curator for the Thirsty Ear label's "Blue Series" in the early 2000s.
