The Unidentifiable

Though it’s far from the only trio that pianist Matthew Shipp has led over the years, the lineup with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker is a special one, as the albums *The Conduct of Jazz*, *Piano Song*, and *Signature* have made clear. *The Unidentifiable*, the trio’s second for ESP-Disk’, has a certain stark and transparent beauty, with episodes morphing from abstract groove and swing (“The Dimension,” “The Unidentifiable”) to the elusive Afro-Latin vibe of “Regeneration” to the closing chamber epic, “New Heaven and New Earth.” Baker’s attention to texture and tone color, most clearly on “Dark Sea Negative Charge” and the short solo prelude “Virgin Psych Space 1,” is consistently striking—indeed, there’s an inner clarity to his interaction with Bisio even when Shipp is going at maximum tilt. Soon after this album’s release, Shipp published an essay on what he calls the Black Mystery School Pianists: players such as Monk, Mal Waldron, Andrew Hill, and a select other few—exponents of “an underground language,” one with “a certain geometry and architecture,” a mode of “generating sound…grounded in a technique they invented…that cannot be taught in school.” While Shipp does not consciously emulate any one Mystery School figure, he draws on their historical examples, here and throughout his catalog, in pursuit of *The Unidentifiable*.

Starting in the bebop era, the piano-bass-drums lineup has been the most classic jazz format in which the piano is featured, accumulating the weight of history and critical expectations. In this setting, a non-mainstream player such as Shipp can infiltrate Newport Jazz Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and other Establishment bastions in a familiar format and then unleash his ideas on audiences that might not normally be exposed to his style. Thanks to hearing it in the communal language of the piano trio, they can better understand the message the Matthew Shipp Trio has to deliver – “Mr. Shipp’s predilection for finding fertile ground between accessibility and abstraction,” as Larry Blumenfeld wrote in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Shipp says, "The piano trio is such a basic configuration in jazz, and it is an honor to take a well-explored area and apply my imagination to it to see where we can go—it helps that my trio mates are great." Shipp, Bisio, and Baker convened at Shipp's favorite recording venue last year looking to pursue a new direction. The result is both distinctively Shippian yet a further evolution of the group’s sound.