Codebreaker, by Matthew Shipp

Codebreaker

by Matthew Shipp

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Pre-order of Codebreaker. You get 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.

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releases November 5, 2021

$11 USD or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Deluxe heavyweight board stock / beautifully printed 6-panel digipak featuring extensive piece-by-piece poem response notes by Mia Hansford.

Includes digital pre-order of Codebreaker. You get 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.

digital album releases November 5, 2021

item ships out on or around November 4, 2021

Purchasable with gift card

$14 USD or more

	1.	Codebreaker
	2.	Spiderweb 05:12
	3.	Disc
	4.	Code Swing
	5.	Letter From the Galaxy
	6.	Green Man
	7.	Raygun
	8.	Suspended
	9.	Mystic Motion
	10.	Stomp To the Galaxy
	11.	The Tunnel

about

= NOTE: there is an LP edition of this work in progress, but we're not putting LP pre-orders up until we have a firm delivery date. =

[TAO07]

Matthew Shipp: piano

Matthew Shipp takes an introspective turn on his latest solo piano album, continuing to discover new territory for his singular cosmic pianism. Codebreaker encrypts rich harmonies, cloud-like clusters, and the unlikely confluence of Bill Evans and Bud Powell.

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. On his latest album, that path finds Shipp in an uncharacteristically meditative state of mind. 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.

“I was actually shocked at how introspective the album was when I listened back to it,” Shipp admits. “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'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.”

Given that investigative impulse, Shipp himself could be viewed as the Codebreaker of the album’s evocative title. 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. 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.

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. 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.

“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. “That's not a line you usually draw, but essentially Bill Evans is a Bud Powell-influenced pianist. All people who push notes down on the piano share a language, even though they’re all extremely different. I’m trying to dip into that collective mind, but at the same time it's filtered through me and is distinctly my thing. 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.”

credits

releases November 5, 2021

All compositions by Matthew Shipp;
© MattShippMusic (ASCAP)

Recorded, Mixed & Mastered by Jim Clouse
at Park West Studios, Brooklyn, NY

Produced by Matthew Shipp & Whit Dickey

Liner notes by Mia Hansford

Design by Ming@AUM

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about

TAO Forms New York, New York

TAO Forms is a new recording label launched in May 2020 devoted to jazz of an enlightened nature.

Drummer–improviser-composer Whit Dickey is the creative director of this fresh endeavor, with management by AUM Fidelity.

Do Stay Tuned.. much of great power & beauty to come. ... more

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