Artist: Matthew Shipp
Album: Before the World
Genre: Free Improvisation, Avant-Garde Jazz
Label: FMP Records
Released: 1997
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
- Before #1 - 32:44
- Before #2 - 5:42
- Before #3 - 3:42
- Before #4 - 4:09
- Before #5 - 22:07
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This solo recital, recorded live at a festival in Berlin in 1995, truly illuminates Shipp not only as a pianist and improviser, but as a composer too. Over these 67 minutes he introduces one idea after the next, following them down the rabbit hole to emerge with something else. Many of these ideas are revisited with one or more other notions in combination. Each phrase is longer, creating intervals that are almost unbearable in their tension, yet makes the listener want to nearly shout with glee. Many of the themes and schematics here reveal themselves as fundamentals of or "bases" for later works. There is an eight-minute section where "By the Law of Music" was probably conceived -- a work he recorded with a string group! Likewise, his duet with William Parker, "Zo," is touched upon no less than six times to introduce a new harmonic element into this dense mixology. As a solo recording, Before the World, as its title suggests, showcases origins, or pre-origins. Undoubtedly Shipp was influenced at least ideologically here by Cecil Taylor, whose "before the previous" ideas are musically well-known as a vein of his inspiration. But that's where comparison should stop. As a pianist, Shipp is of a different character set than Taylor. Also, Shipp engages classical form, embracing technique and nuance as a compositional method as well as an improvisational force. And that's what makes this recording, though not as emotionally powerful as some of Shipp's later works, so satisfying: the willingness to be wrong, to look at everything that comes into his line of vision and let it speak through the particular referential laws that musical language dictates, placing it -- slightly or radically altered -- as new territories for form and improvisation to occupy.
~ Thom Jurek