Multiplication Table

When The Multiplication Table was released in 1998, it once and for all threw down a gauntlet to the remaining critics who erroneously chose to see him as a direct spiritual descendent of Cecil Taylor. It was one they couldn't pick up. Shipp has always been a player who has taken the idea of music as a series of worlds and influences and made something entirely new not in response to, but because of them. The Multiplication Table is a kind of suite where Shipp's own compositions and those of his musical forbears such as Duke Ellington, ("C Jam Blues"), Billy Strayhorn ("Take the A Train"), and Joseph Kosma ("Autmun Leaves") are woven into a theory and practice of musical language that extends jazz beyond its known parameters in both traditional and so-called "free" worlds…