I mean, now whenever I go back to playing live I can sort of mix it up onstage. I think this instrumental record is a nice addition to the catalogue. I look at my solo career as a vessel to put out all the other stuff I wouldn’t be able to do in Firewind. Whether it is me collaborating with different singers or musicians and making more like rock stuff or hard rock stuff, or whether I’m making classic metal or modern metal, or now, going instrumental. Gus: "I have my own style and my own sound, but obviously I’ve been experimenting quite a lot on my solo efforts. I’m glad I was able to write all this material.” I have enough material to kind of dig in now and do something.’ It really gave me something to do, it was not a planned album, it was like a thing just to help me occupy my time I guess.ĭuring the first lockdown I somehow felt very inspired and wrote a lot of stuff, which was kinda funny because on the second lockdown when I was finishing up the album, I had no inspiration at all (laughs). So I think around summer I was kinda going through the demos I had and I’m like ‘well, maybe I should just make an album. So it’s playing with the dichotomy between the universal and the personal in the context of this pyramid where Bud Powell, Bill Evans and, myself somehow, fit together in a modern way.So you know, I realised I was gonna be at home for a while and I just immediately started putting down ideas on my computer just for the fun of it, just to see what’s gonna happen and then I realised, well we’re gonna be here for a while. I’m trying to dip into that collective mind, but at the same time it's filtered through me and is distinctly my thing. All people who push notes down on the piano share a language, even though they’re all extremely different. “That's not a line you usually draw, but essentially Bill Evans is a Bud Powell-influenced pianist. “It's very abstract and I don't know if listeners will hear it, but I hear a line in my playing that's trying to get into the trajectory that links Bud Powell's piano playing to Bill Evans,” Shipp says. While the likes of Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra have been constant touchstones in critical writings on his work, one name that emerges when listening to Codebreaker, perhaps for the first time in Shipp’s discography, is that of Bill Evans. Shipp concedes that his recent landmark birthday may have something to do with the more introspective bent of the new album (“60’s not old, but it's definitely not young,” he jokes), but it also continues a career-long investigation into the ways that his subversive approach to the piano connects with the instrument’s storied lineage.
But the idea seems profoundly serious when considering the singular sonic vernacular he’s coined, making him one of the most distinctive pianists of his generation.
#LATEST ENIGMA ALBUM CRACK#
There’s a wry humor to the name, as Shipp imagines a parallel between a World War II secret agent doggedly racing to crack an enemy cypher and himself sitting at the piano, puzzling over the music’s infinite enigmas. Given that investigative impulse, Shipp himself could be viewed as the Codebreaker of the album’s evocative title. I'm interested in trying to wring all of the harmonics from the piano that I possibly can, and with that in mind, any set of harmonics has a set of melodic fragments that are implied.” “If I try to dissect my motivations, which are not always conscious and which just happen on their own, I see myself really basking in harmony. “I was actually shocked at how introspective the album was when I listened back to it,” Shipp admits. Though the language is unmistakably his own, the usual attacks, dense clusters and insistent circularity are more often replaced by harmonic nebulae that luxuriate in the mysterious resonances which Shipp conjures from the keyboard. On his latest album, that path finds Shipp in an uncharacteristically meditative state of mind. Within the voluminous catalogue that pianist Matthew Shipp has created over the last three and a half decades, his solo piano work has charted a unique and compelling pathway for the evolution of the instrument’s vocabulary. Codebreaker encrypts rich harmonies, cloud-like clusters, and the unlikely confluence of Bill Evans and Bud Powell. Matthew Shipp takes an introspective turn on his latest solo piano album, continuing to discover new territory for his singular cosmic pianism.
0 kommentar(er)
