(ESP Disk’ CD/DL)
The first jazz piano trio was probably Jess Stacy’s, a side event at Benny Goodman dates while the boss told the others how useless they were. Scroll forward from there, through Art Tatum with Tiny Grimes and Slam Stewart, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea, Cecil Taylor, Keith Jarrett, plus revisionists like EST and The Bad Plus, and a wilderness of epigoni, and you might think the form was exhausted. You then turn to Matthew Shipp’s current band and it’s as if no one had ever thought of working in this format before.
Shipp isn’t so much a musician as a creative algorithm. Given a sound, he will show in which direction it was moving and offer seven more that belong with it. Or perhaps botany is a better analogy, each sound akin to a seed, with all the biotic information already inside it for the production of a flower or a tree. He’s both deeply imbued in the jazz piano tradition, channeling Monk on the opening “Tangible”, and completely beyond it. Listening to the softly tumbling, free associating line of “Mysterious State” is to leave the existing literature far behind and move into a whole new idiom. Likewise, the possibly tongue in cheek “Jazz Posture” and the almost ritualistic opening to “Beyond Understanding” where he plays a bare minimum of notes (contrast the rapid transitions of “Talk Power” right after it) but manages to suggest whole areas of musical possibility.
Arguably Shipp’s best work before now has been with drummer Whit Dickey and bassist/force of nature William Parker. But in Newman Taylor Barker and the sonorous Michael Bisio he has musicians who urge and complement his vision rather than merely accompanying it. Many of the tracks seem to emerge out of cymbal tizz or a couple of big bass intervals. It remains a hopelessly crowded market, but Shipp’s is now unquestionably the most important piano trio of its time, not so much extending the literature as starting a whole new volume. It really is that good.
— Brian Morton, The Wire