Matthew Shipp, Piano Vortex (Thirsty Ear). Nearly twenty years ago, Shipp chose the jazz avant garde over the classical career he had prepared for at the New England Conservatory. For the most part, he has applied his formal technique to music that observes few traditional boundaries and guidelines. Keeping company with such intrepid explorers as David S. Ware, Roscoe Mitchell, Daniel Carter and Joe Morris, he has left the impression with some listeners that he is a Cecil Taylor disciple. I have not heard his playing that way and hear it even less so in Piano Vortex. Shipp hews closer to the jazz piano trio tradition than in anything else I have heard from him. That is hardly to say that you will mistake him for Tommy Flanagan, Oscar Peterson or Bill Evans. His work here is closer to the stylistic center of jazz than much of his recent recording, certainly closer than his electronic ventures, but he is still wild, unpredictable and often startling.
Pieces titled “Sliding Through Space,” “Quivering With Speed” and “Slips Through The Fingers” proceed with wild bursts, salvos of repetition, explosions in the lower regions of the piano and plenty of dissonance. Yet, in “Sliding Through Space,” he ends with a passage that has the delicacy of Delius or a French impressionist. “Keyswing,” urged along by Morris’s walking bass and the drumming of Whit Dickey — on this track as locked into bebop as Philly Joe Jones or Shelly Manne — becomes a free jazz riff, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Much the same can be said of “To Vitalize,” which has an impressive solo from Morris. Morris is better known as a guitarist, but his pizzicato bass work here is fine. Elsewhere, his bowing is considerably less successful. Although at a couple of junctures, “Quivering With Speed” suggests John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” its primary characteristics are not harmonic interest but velocity and Shipp’s flurries of notes.
In previous recordings, Shipp’s music has often made me nervous. There are moments in Piano Vortex where it makes me smile.