lunedì 3 maggio 2010

Intervista a Matthew Shipp

Il sito At Lenght ha pubblicato una intervista al pianista Matthew Shipp, in occasione della pubblicazione del suo ultimo album intitolato 4D.
At the age of 49, pianist Matthew Shipp – who has recorded more than thirty records as a leader or soloist – is one of the most influential figures in modern jazz. As a musician, his occasionally forceful style of play, his dynamic use of the lower octaves, and his keen sense of negative space give him an instantly recognizable sound. His compositional style is deeply rooted in his extensive experience as a free jazz improviser and the idiosyncratic blues of Thelonious Monk, and it has more recently begun to incorporate elements of modern classical music, electronica, and hip-hop.
By the end of the millenium, based solely on the strength of his studio recordings and live performances, Shipp had already become a major figure in the jazz world. But in 2000, Thirsty Ear Recordings invited Shipp to curate their new Blue Series, where he proceeded to not only highlight some of the best and most interesting jazz artists working today, but also to tear down the boundaries within the genre. Artists like hip-hop sound collagist DJ Spooky, rappers Antipop Consortium, rock guitarist Vernon Reid, and electronica duo Spring Heel Jack were brought in to produce adventurous works, both on their own and in collaboration with jazz musicians, to create a daringly open blueprint for the future of jazz. This approach drew rave reviews and generated some much-needed excitement in a genre that suffers from a stuffy and forbidding reputation. But Shipp’s iconoclasm sometimes draws controversy instead of praise, as it did this winter when his remarks questioning the pre-eminence of elder statesmen like Herbie Hancock in the jazz world drew fire in the press.....

The first thing I read about this record from Thirsty Ear’s web site was that this new record would be a “synthesis and culmination” of all your work with the label.
Right.
And 4D, the title of the record, sounds like it refers to the fourth dimension, which to a physicist is the dimension of time. But there’s also a strong mystical tradition concerned with the fourth dimension, which had an impact on the Cubists. Jazz has a strong tradition of science fiction and mysticism. Were you trying to tap into that with this title?
Yeah, that’s definitely a component and a product of a way of looking at the jazz universe. I mean, if you look at mysticism within jazz, there are a few known approaches. First, there’s the Coltrane approach, which is kind of a circular universe with a resonance not unlike Indian classical music, taking jazz and making it a very ecclesiastic music, not in a Christian way, but kind of in a universal consciousness way. And in Sun Ra a persona is created. He was taking aspects of Egyptian mythology, and Greek thought like Pythagoras and things like that to create a figure. And the generation of the musical universe comes about because of that mystery religion world view in sound. So I’m definitely coming out of that tradition – a mixture of both the Sun Ra and the Coltrane ways of using mysticism within the jazz universe. And the other thing about jazz, I mean actually when I play, I’m talking about the actual linear content of my playing. I mean, I sit down on the piano and I create lines in the same way Bud Powell or Bill Evans would, but I am actually always trying to get a universal equation when I do that. And I can’t define that, but I’m always aiming for the line that has some sort of elegance and for it to actually say something that is an equation of being of sorts. Mysticism is a huge aspect of my whole thing within jazz.
In John Szwed’s biography of Sun Ra, he talked about how he came out of a pre-jazz tradition in African American culture based on African Zionism and Egyptian mythology, and how that adapted itself very well to sort of a science fiction.
Right. You can take something like the Emerald Tablet and the idea of aliens coming to earth and get the idea that a lot of our so-called religions might be kind of mistranslations of some other text, which really does lend itself to science fiction very much even though it’s a mystical concept. If you deal with infinity, and if you deal with the fact that a mind is within the pool of infinity, and anything finite is connected to infinity, then if we have human beings, there can therefore be levels of mind infinitely above that. So what maybe religion calls angels were actually aliens? I’m not trying to get like… I’m not into flying saucers and stuff per se, but I’m just saying there is a mythology that goes with the music that Sun Ra did really tap into definitely and informs the whole idea of when you sit at the instrument. It’s almost like you are a mathematician from another planet. And you have the system of math in your head and that system of math allows you to generate an elegant language of sorts, and that’s the whole thought form that feeds the mythology of the music....
Potete leggere il resto dell'intervista a questo link.

Ecco un video per piano solo di Shipp, registrato a Budapest nel settembre del 2008.

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