Editor's Info
Recording in the Merkin Concert Hall on a Steinway Grand Piano, New York pianist Matthew Shipp's seventeen numbered tracks of "The Data" takes listeners through a virtual history of jazz and contemporary improvisation, from beautifully lyrical moments to rapidly complex matrices of expression, balancing his approaches into an absorbing and rewarding album.
freejazzblog.org
Matthew Shipp has been such a prolific recording artist that it is not always easy to keep track of everything he puts out, let alone determine which albums are the real gems - the ones deserving to go down in history as essential. In fact, we are bound to wonder whether a work-based approach is at all appropriate to assess his creative output: shouldn’t we rather adopt, as Brian Morton has suggested regarding Ivo Perelman’s enormous discography, a process -based one? (That is, to look at Shipp’s output not as a collection of individual works, but as an organically evolving whole.) I’d say yes and no. For, as I see it, music criticism should seek to integrate both approaches: on the one hand, even in the case of someone like Craig Taborn, of whom I can confidently pick Avenging Angel as a definitive masterpiece, a process-based approach is nonetheless required; and, on the other, Perelman himself has made records which ought to stand out somehow - take, for instance, all-time classics such as Seeds, Vision and Counterpoint or Suite For Helen F.
Anyway, I’m happy to report that, like his recent New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz and Magical Incantation, this new solo album is among the real gems. A couple of years ago, The Piano Equation struck me as being possibly the ultimate Matthew Shipp solo piano statement, but I’m now inclined to think The Data might even surpass it.
First of all, for a rather straightforward reason: the album’s sheer sound, vastly different from - and, in my mind, superior to - t....... więcej