There may be nothing Matthew Shipp writes about in Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings that he hasn’t expressed or somehow meditated upon through his music. Yet, reading his words are clarifying and rejuvenating in exactly the complementary way you’d want a set of essays to lift up, not exactly unveiling, the author’s music. If this seems abstruse, in practice it is, like Shipp’s music when you spend real time with it, the opposite.
Right now, I’m listening to Shipp’s circa 2000 String Trio album, Expansion, Power, Release, with William Parker and Mat Maneri.Where Parker was born in 1952 (just after David S. Ware, born 1949), Maneri was born in late 1969, the cusp of a new decade. Shipp (and, for what it’s worth, his perennial collaborator Ivo Perelman) were born just between the two in 1960 (and 1961, respectively). Situating Shipp in time-space, for me at least, helps anchor how he emerged, a young man moving to New York City in the 1980s, and how he has been shaped by and continues to shape the practice of playing jazz piano. But then, what’s in a year, or an age, of any human’s lived experience? Shipp writes about himself being a spiritual being, channeling and expressing something deep and universal. This is something one gets from opening up to the music he’s recorded: the probing of time, his expert explorations of sound signifying space, physical manifested as aural and sonic structures. In the essays that fill Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings , he reflects on boxing, on New York City, on poetry, and David S. Ware and Sun Ra and, yes of course, un piano.
The opening essay, something of a centerpiece despite its placement up front, titled “Black Mystery School Pianists” lays out a lineage of piano players that somewhat echoes one I myself explored wading into last year’s stream of piano trio recordings, which for me started with Shipp’s trio and ended with variations on the concept. It’s worth naming the players here, Ran Blake, Andrew Hill, Hasaan Ibn Ali, Herbie Nichols, Sun Ra, Horace Tapscott, Cecil Taylor, Mal Waldron, Randy Weston, and sometimes Dave Burrell—neither Thelonious Monk nor Duke Ellington, directly, but they influence and cast a long shadow over the Black Mystery School. Once the thesis is laid out, echoes throughout the book. Sun Ra reappears later in a brief, moving tribute, and whether by name or not, Monk’s variations seem to inspire Shipp revisiting moments and themes, inviting recurrences in page after page should draw readers back time and again.
I’d highly recommend this book for two kinds of readers, without hesitation: first, fans of Shipp’s vast universe of recordings will find much of the same here, thoughtful rumination, sly humor, and numerous references to influences and mentors; the second kind of reader would be anyone, regardless of familiarity with Shipp specifically, who is interested in the history of jazz and its contemporary players.
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