The Piano Equation

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Cat No: TAO01

Release Date: 22 May 2020

Label: Tao Forms

Packaging Type: Digipak

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 642623800126

Genres: Jazz Avant-garde

Description
Further honing a singular cosmic musical language, Matthew Shipp begins celebrating his landmark 60th year with this solo piano recording. 'The Piano Equation' is also the inaugural release from Tao Forms, a new label founded by drummer-improviser-composer - and longtime Shipp collaborator - Whit Dickey.

Over more than half of his lifespan, Shipp has built up an unparalleled body of work and a wholly original musical language that only becomes more hyper-focused and distinctive with the passage of time. Shipp's abstract eloquence is on vivid display throughout 'The Piano Equation', which presents Shipp alone at the piano, brilliantly solving his higher-order musical mathematics, approaching each new unknown from unexpected vantage points as in some form of cubist algebra. Shipp builds his solo music in a cellular fashion, formed like the building blocks of human life out of disparate elements that combine and evolve in novel and fascinating forms.

Eruptive Cecil Taylor clusters are mutated by the interstellar rays of Sun Ra's philosophising, then spiral earthward in taut, obsessive figures. Stride, swing and the avant-garde collide like so many elemental particles, the aftereffects radiating outward in increasingly complex and intricate formations. The scientific, the personal, the political and the fantastic co-exist throughout Shipp's work, melding in the radical vocabulary that the pianist employs on the album, which speaks with its own alien yet familiar logic. Fragments of melody coalesce and transform, dissolve or shatter into kaleidoscopic reveries.

While some may have used the arrival of such a landmark occasion as their 60th birthday to look backwards, Shipp will spend the year continuing to move resolutely forward, further evolving a voice that is as intimately personal as it is cosmically adventurous.

Press:

"There is a thorniness and sweetness in Shipp's sound world that reflects a deeply creative mind." - **** Jazzwise
Tracklisting