Codebreaker

Codebreaker is pianist Matthew Shipps 16th solo piano album in a discography that contains many dozens of albums documenting many configurations. (Up to this point in 2021 alone, he played on three duo outings, two trio sets, and a quartet date.) This is also a real outlier in Shipps catalog. These 11 improvised pieces are startling in their brevity, interiority, and intimacy as part of a session quest to bask in harmony. The pianist himself sees this work as a kind of extended through line between the historic intricacies of Bud Powells complex, dynamic musical system and Bill Evans elegant, advanced approach to chromaticism and modalism. No single piece illustrates this better than Spiderweb, the sets second track. It commences with lush, assonant chord voicings. The pianist begins to dissect them even as he states them, breaking them down through knotty applications of blues, projective pedal work, and brief, almost ephemeral quotes from Powell (Parisian Thoroughfare) and Monk (Round Midnight). He carries the harmony and rhythm into freshly carved spaces, emerging in a completely different place. In Letter from the Galaxy, Shipp commences in a near whisper. He combines and contrasts ethereally constructed chord voicings with restrained, sharp single lines and forceful pedal work. Together, they create harmonic cadences whose inspirational traces lie in everyone from Evans and Ellington to Bartok and Milhaud, yet they refract in a vocabulary that traverses darkness, mystery, and aesthetic suggestion in a complex, individually architected system of inquiry. Raygun, offers striated piano polyphony with angular clusters of notes and scales linked by a wholly interior -- yet perfectly sensible -- application of rhythmic phrasing. The very brief Suspended is rendered with profound restraint along a spectrum that combines inquisitive lyric harmony with dynamic space. Mystic Motion is almost its mirror image. Alternating between seemingly circular yet syncopated chords and cadences that cascade across an interlocking scalar line, Shipp folds them into his wonderfully elastic combination of rhythm and space with knotty note clusters that project the tunes dominant theme. Stomp to the Galaxy directly nods at Powells love of boogie-woogie and stride piano --albeit in a deftly chromatic application of counterpoint, reflexive harmony, and rhythmic interplay between registers. Closer The Tunnel is aptly titled. The entire feel of Shipps ever-widening circle of inquiry emerges from the depths of Evans idiosyncratic yet luxuriant modalism, modern classical music, and the tradition of jazz balladry as initially articulated by Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson through their resolution first in Powell and, by extension, in Shipp. Since releasing the Symbol Systems in 1995, Shipps solo recordings have been fascinated by and rife with the discovery, development, disassemblage, and re-creation of musical codes. On Codebreaker he digs into elements of the tradition as part of improvisation. Using a highly developed creative unconscious, Shipp interrogates the tradition and musics it has often intersected with -- blues, classical, pop, avant-garde -- and emerges with a secret history that extends the jazz piano vocabulary. ~ Thom Jurek