Rich Halley, Matthew Shipp, Michael Bisio, Newman Taylor Baker

This group evolves in leaps and bounds. We guarantee you've never heard a jazz piano trio sound like this album–not even this band on its previous album, the much-praised World Construct. That said, there is a through line from the first Matthew Shipp Trio album, 1990's Circular Temple (reissued in 2023 on ESP). The adventure continues!

Starting in the bebop era, the piano-bass-drums lineup has been the most classic jazz format in which the piano is featured, accumulating the weight of history and critical expectations. In this setting, a non-mainstream player such as Shipp can infiltrate Newport Jazz Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and other Establishment bastions in a familiar format and then unleash his ideas on audiences that might not normally be exposed to his style. Thanks to hearing it in the communal language of the piano trio, they can better understand the message the Matthew Shipp Trio has to deliver – “Mr. Shipp’s predilection for finding fertile ground between accessibility and abstraction,” as Larry Blumenfeld wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

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…

Matthew Shipp (piano), John Butcher (saxophones) and Thomas Lehn (electronics) in a studio album recorded in France in 2017, a uniquely voiced collective trio of transformative improvisation, Lehn's additions and modifications blending perfectly with Shipp's solid foundations and Butcher's advanced technical expression, for an engrossing and expressive set of recordings.

This album was among the most acclaimed music releases of 2020. What was most certainly clear to us from jump, and then affirmed by countless others writing with intelligence & passion is that this recording of one fella massaging 88 keys pressing pads that strike metal string & cable toward resonance within a wooden chamber is one that you absolutely need to hear.

Cosmic Suite is an album by American jazz pianist Matthew Shipp recorded in 2008 and released on the Polish Not Two label. He leads a quartet with Daniel Carter on reeds, Joe Morris on bass and Whit Dickey on drums. This particular lineup has not recorded before, although all of the members have played together in other combinations.
Starting with "Cosmic Suite - Part One," Daniel is playing some lovely, laid-back, muted trumpet while the rest of the quartet swirls calmly around him. This has to be some of the most calm and enchanting music we've heard from Matt and his cohorts in recent memory. When Daniel switches to tenor sax, the quartet starts swirling more intensely, the waves building higher and higher…

This concert is a tour de force apart from their wonderful studio albums. It expresses the extraordinary generosity, simplicity, and complicity between these two musicians. The inventive continuity of their travels, over the course of ninety minutes, is the fruit of a rare and unusual capacity to improvise the content of their lives on the spot.