The Gong Show

I saw jazz pianist Matthew Shipp play at Columbia’s Miller Theatre this weekend. He was playing a style he called “Nu-Bop,” or… that was just what he named his quartet… I have heard of nu-jazz before, but never nu-bop, so it was cool to jump into something new.

The quartet played two sets, and each individual set was nonstop music. There were no jazz standards upon which the musicians were improvising, at least none that I recognized. Furthermore, there wasn’t a consistent thread or chorus that the musicians anchored there improvisations on… there was a theme, and everyone was in key, but at most times it sounded more like a wall of sound than a song.

There were two big highlights for me.

1) The tenor sax solo by sideman Daniel Carter was crazy. His solo was just him, no supporting beat or rhythm, so when he took a rest, the whole room echoed in silence. Then, when he would resume again, he evoked sounds from the Tenor that I never knew was possible. He could make it play 3 different notes at the same time, and all in harmony with each other. The mic also picked up a hum that emerged from the side of his mouth as he wailed away. Some parts were soft and intimate, while others were an absolute assault on the audience, and none of it was like anything I had heard before.

2) The duet between Guillermo Brown (drums, laptop) and Matthew Shipp was remarkable. Brown used a combination of a drum kit, sampler, and laptop to produce a electronic, yet earthy, sound that provided the perfect contrast to Shipp’s grand piano. He’d use the drum kit as a source for the sampler, which he would then reverse, echo, delay, etc and spit out on top of more drumming. It came as no surprise to me when I read that Brown has done significant work in techno with DJ Spooky. At times, it sounded more like 4 drummers playing at once. By that description alone, it seems like Brown should have overwhelmed Shipp’s piano, but Shipp was lightning fast, carrying 3 or 4 interesting improvisational threads at a time, so he kept up well.

I’ve been to 8 concerts at Columbia (excluding the PostCrypt shows I went to) and this concert was by far the best. It was both wildly original and audaciously beautiful. I’m eager to see Shipp live again, hopefully with the same line-up.

Here’s the best Shipp video I could find on YouTube (embedding is disabled on this video, so just click through the link), and it give you a good idea of Shipp’s sound. Daniel Carter’s in this video too. However, this video doesn’t hold a candle to the concert I attended.