“In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I thought rap was barbaric,” said Matthew Shipp, the Wilmington, Delaware-born, New York City-based pianist who is responsible for some of the most innovative and boundary-breaking jazz of the last decade. More than likely, this closed-minded opinion of hip-hop is still prominent amongst huge sects of traditional jazz elitists, many of whom are probably still fuming over John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman’s free-form experiments over 30 years ago.
Shipp, on the other hand, quickly came to his senses. “My first fascination with hip-hop was kind of negative, because I graduated from high school in 1978; then I started working in this record store in Wilmington … We used to make fun of early rap. I thought rap was going to be a fad that would come and go in a year or so. But then, one day, something clicked in that I really liked the stuff. Then, when I moved to New York, I was in a cab and heard ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash, and I was just hooked. I was a hip-hop fanatic.”
As expected, the reaction from traditionalists to Shipp’s imaginative blend of electro/jazz-fusion has been swift and brutal. “My whole career has been a backlash,” Shipp says. “I don’t think people are waiting out there to cut my throat, but I’ve been living in New York for 18 years now, trying to get my thing off the ground from day one. Over the years, I’ve had monumental resistance. From traditional heads, even some people from the avant-garde–they want to hold on to an old garde of the avant-garde. In jazz music, any new jazz artist with something fresh to say is going to encounter intense walls of resistance. A successful jazz career is basically breaking down those walls of resistance over a long period of time.”
Before getting hip to hip-hop and electronic styles, Shipp’s fascination with music had been evolving for practically his entire life. “I started playing when I was five,” he reminisced. “My parents were Episcopalian, and their church organist used to play this one anthem that was like a Gregorian chant. That one song really got to me, and I wanted to play it. I talked to the organist, and she said, ‘You shouldn’t play organ, you should learn to play piano first.’ So I started taking piano lessons with her. And that was it: I started playing classical piano, and when I was 12, I got into jazz when I saw [renowned jazz pianist] Ahmad Jamal on TV.”
While Shipp will be the first to tell you that he’s a jazz musician through and through, there’s no denying that the panoramic scope of his recordings is what separates his work from the rest of the pack. His latest album, Equilibrium, is perhaps the finest and most fluent example of Shipp’s decidedly non-traditional inspirations, incorporating heavy elements of instrumental hip-hop and electronica with spacey helpings of free and straight-ahead jazz. February 2003 saw the release of Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp, his collaboration with the now-defunct avant-rap group Antipop Consortium.
“We did an initial session where I brought the jazz group, and they [Antipop] brought in their drum machine and their beats,” said Shipp about the teaming. “They laid some beats down and we did our thing. We did a second session with just myself and [rapper] Beans, where we laid down some beats to his drum machine, and he did some live rapping there. After some more slicing and dicing, we had the record.”
Suffice it to say that Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp is not your typical jazz or hip-hop record. Devoid of the confines of form and structure, the 10 strange tracks fall very much into the art of the avant-garde, swimming in the stream of consciousness that ebbs and flows from the rappers and from Shipp’s group. While there are many interesting moments to be discovered, both musically and poetically, and the idea is inspiring and necessary for the growth of both art forms, the highly-regarded skills of Antipop Consortium are a bit suspect, and don’t contribute to the intended seamless whole. Rather, their random machine-gun declarations serve to overshadow the music instead of enriching it and letting it breathe freely. These faults are only more plain when listening to Equilibrium, a record that touches on many divergent styles and molds them into a sound that is richly-layered, culturally informed and chock full of soul.
Hearing Shipp talk about his contributions to jazz in his stereotypically cool, two-packs-a-day-inflected voice is exciting in itself, due to his obvious desires to explore uncharted musical territory and have it relate to the sounds of today. “It’s fertile, fresh ground, especially if you take elements of free jazz and combine it, ‘cause it seems that free jazz and hip-hop is completely incompatible, but it is if you look under the surface of the music. The challenge is not just to have beats and play blues licks over them–that’s definitely been done.”
Now that hip-hop has been a cultural phenomenon for over 20 years, it’s quite strange that the art form’s connections to jazz are still widely ignored, especially by jazz musicians themselves. Important rap artists like A Tribe Called Quest, Gang Starr and De La Soul have all scratched the surface of a jazz/hip-hop hybrid, resulting in some great rap records centered on dusty jazz loops. Those efforts, while brilliant in their own right, still never really made that leap into the record collection of the staunch jazz aficionado.
On the flip side, there are few, if any, jazz artists that have even attempted to accomplish a cohesive style that combines the two genres. Even Shipp, who is as humble as they come, can’t produce a list of artists who have explored this territory. “There are some Scandanavian artists out there who are doing it,” he says, “but it’s pretty much a new sound.” Equilibrium attempts to successfully make this jump, without sampling “Watermelon Man” and having people rap over it. In fact, there is no rapping whatsoever on the album. Instead, Shipp incorporates the often overlooked musicality of hip-hop and electronic music, inserting drum programming and samples beside the trap kit playing of drummer Gerald Cleaver, and spooky synths beside his own acoustic piano structures. The result is a record that blurs the lines between two very distinct and widely beloved forms of music, adding elements of other subgenres in the process. It’s the latest release from record label Thirsty Ear’s acclaimed “Blue Series,” an ever-growing collection of expansive, open-minded jazz records. Shipp has nothing but praise for the series:
“I think that the Blue Series has given us a whole new way of recording sonic possibilities. I think we’re starting to get recognized. We have opened up a fresh set of ways for jazz musicians to define themselves in the marketplace and in the current ways of being. I think what we’re doing is extremely important and vital for jazz to continue to exist.”
The freedom to explore these “sonic possibilities” is evident on Equilibrium. The song “Vamp To Vibe” is propelled by a low-register piano loop, fractured right-hand voicings and a loose, irresistible groove from Cleaver. “Nebula Theory” is a structureless free jazz mood piece, fleshed out by the eerie notes of vibe player Khan Jamal. “Cohesion” brings renowned bassist William Parker to the forefront; his punchy stand-up playing is the driving force behind this funky, epochal jazz workout. (Parker’s brilliant 2002 album Raining On The Moon was also released under the Blue Series label.)
Shipp’s music, while heady in its scope, doesn’t have a restricting appeal. In fact, it has an inviting headspace. You don’t have to be Rudy Van Gelder to let its rich layers wash over you. What you’ll get is a seamless work of passion, one that doesn’t just jump from genre to genre. Instead, Equilibrium weaves everything into its own distinct and original sound, mixing its elements so effectively that it’s difficult to pull them apart.
This obsession with the pursuit of new sounds has had its negative effects on Shipp, both mentally and physically. In the liner notes to Equilibrium, he writes, “I had put out a statement saying that I would retire from recording, and I planned on it, because I felt wasted as a recording artist. But when the idea of the Blue Series got formulated, I got a good night’s sleep and was rejuvenated.”
After talking with Shipp, listening to his albums and reading his descriptions of the toll it’s taken in the past, it became abundantly clear to me that this man doesn’t think of music as a hobby. It’s his livelihood, his purpose, and his most beloved form of expression. It’s unbelievably important for him to create, and these creations are bursting with a sense of energy, adventure and brave musicianship. In a music industry poisoned by money, where even the jazz world is responsible for plasticized fluff (i.e. Diana Krall), Shipp’s inspired discoveries are fairly amazing, and essential to the health of music as a whole.
To learn more about Matthew Shipp and other Blue Series artists, go to www.thirstyear.com.
Appeared in Issue Seven of Traffic East.