Customer Reviews

Pastoral Composure

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

THE best young pianist around has developed even more. This aptly titled CD offers lush music and intense but understated playing from everyone. Campbell is particularly fresh and will be a revelation for most. Parker is his usual gigantic self creating an enormous backdrop. The real stunning aspect of this is how fresh and accessible Shipp's compositions are. Catchy and memorable, without being deriviative or simplistic. The group fleshes each song out beautifully, either speaking out in solo statements or creating sumputuous collective music. A nice mix of improv and composition. Not a classic, but HIGHLY recommended and an especially good place to start if you have been curious about Shipp.

Pastoral Composure for Matthew Shipp represents both his inaugural "Blue Series" recording, for which he serves as executive producer, for Thirsty Ear Records and his clearest statement to date that he is no longer just an avant-garde jazz underling. For the rest of us, it represents a modern jazz that is a tangible new sound, which while distancing itself a bit from the highly arrhythmic avant-garde, never once compromises its own art. In other words, Matthew Shipp has set his feet down and created something new, fresh, radical, and yet remains wholly accessible.

The rhythm section here, Shipp on piano, William Parker on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums return on many of Matthew Shipp?s subsequent "Blue Series" recordings, which there are now many. Featured on Pastoral Composure, is New York trumpet player, Roy Campbell (who has his own "Blue Series" recording, It's Krunch Time). The album opener, "Gesture," is a cold, stormy, landscape filled with swirling arco bass from Parker, a repetitive piano line from Shipp and a static, march-like beat from Cleaver. Campbell's solo is futuristic and Iberian-sounding, standing above the murky backdrop. After the storm clears, the album takes an unexpected turn with an upbeat, swinging tune called, "Visions." Everybody solos, and while it swings hard, the vibe is still bop filtered through a 21st century lens. Shipp then dips into his Ellington bag on the third cut, "Prelude to a Kiss." Unlike the fantastic Ellington deconstructions heard on the 1997, Multiplication Table, (www.hathut.com) Shipp's interpretation in 2000 is personal, introspective; He?s going beyond the Andrew Hill/Thelonious Monk via Cecil Taylor road and finding his own path to travel. The rest of Pastoral Composure has more swinging tunes, and more deep introspective ones as well (and an out-there version of Frére Jacques). Shipp's lines are angular, sometimes minimal, sometimes cold and furious, oftentimes thorny, but he has come quite a ways from his beginnings with David S. Ware. Get to know William Parker too -- he is a monster on the bass. And that's both bowed and pizzicato.

This album will satisfy several people: The new listener, interested in jazz more exciting and challenging that the latest Joshua Redman fare. The older listener, tired of Albert Ayler rehashed, and looking for new and fresh jazz ideas. And even the casual listener, such as your friend the underground hip-hop head, looking for something fresh and challenging, or at least that guy that made the album with Anti-Pop Consortium. Wherever you're coming from, Matthew Shipp has something very new and very original to say.

If I could dance a chicken like a spoon through jello, I might lick the salt from Shipp's wounds. Shipp's songs, wonderous melodies of harmonious cacophonous assualt, assuage and soothe the spirits. Like a ship come home from stoooooormy seas, Shipp's newest CD proves to be one his most mature, revealing in its complicated aural offerings a picture of his growth. As I said, If I could light a kettle of fish with a worm grape I might find the pock marks on my uncle's head. Lifting riffs of music man come from Shipp.

Here's what ya do: Get a nice bottle of wine, call yr lady on the phone, get her to yr pad, light the candles, and settle back on the plushest stretch of furniture ya got. Cue this disc, settle back, and get yr mojo working. The Spanish tinge aspects of the opening track, featuring the awesome trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr., will soothe yr jelly roll soul, daddy. Shipp swings on this enterprise, with a champagne evanescence heretofore rendered more, ah, subliminal in his dense and churning ouevre. Finally, our man accedes to da plezure principle, and the rewards -- dare I say, bootay -- can be yrs if yr hep enough to slap this disc o' delight under the ole laser beam. Life is too full of struggle and strife to settle for one iota less, got me?