Ivo Perelman and Matt Shipp - Duologues 7: Distillation (Squid Note, 2026)

By Sammy Stein

Pianist Matthew Shipp and tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman have developed a three-decade-long musical relationship where both musicians explore improvisation in a collaboration that continues to develop. Each of them plays with different musicians and continues on their individual musical journey, but when they come together, the distillation of the experience results in an ever-developing relationship and one where each allows the other to bring whatever new ideas they have to the table, no matter if these are predictable or unexpected, disruptive, and revelatory.

As they continually circle back to each other and record, the language of their music changes in subtle ways. Both musicians have played alongside and collaborated with many other musicians, while they remain powerfully individual; their shared knowledge shines through in their collaborations.

What comes of three decades or more of collaboration is an immediacy of reaction and interaction – a kind of musical telepathy that is difficult to capture but is apparent to the listener. Neither always leads nor always follows, but both revel in shifting emphasis, nuances that only come from playing with someone over time. This is reflected by the way one will introduce a new idea, or pathway, and the other will reflect the same idea, not as imitation but as recognition – a deep, intuitive echo.

Their playing has become not so much a conversation, as is often the case between improvising musicians listening intently to each other, but is more of a shared delivery, a unanimous development of ideas shared with the listener.

Both have worked in larger configurations, but the saxophone-piano duo reveals each at their most exposed and far from the prosaic. Their previous projects have shown their duo evolution from different perspectives, demonstrating how freely improvised music can acquire coherence not through predetermined structure but through accumulated trust, memory and intense listening.

Duologue 7: Distillation sees Perelman and Shipp back in the exposed, elemental setting of just piano and sax and one-take sessions of completely improvised recordings that give enough material for two CDs. There is no need to explain; there is just the music and the melodic fragments, insertions of traditional tunes alongside completely improvised phrases, silence (which is used so effectively), rhythmic pattern changes, sudden register switches, and a duologue that at times is expressed almost as voices rather than music, as both musicians find the full range of their instruments.

With Shipp and Perelman, there is no revisiting history, no repeating of anything that has gone before, but a new dialogue each time, bringing with it the familiar rhythmic intensity, changes, and multi-register expression, but also new ideas, perhaps picked up in the time they spend apart in other projects, and they challenge, support and improvise alone as feels right, communicating their deep and long-lasting collaboration but also offering the listener a new take on just how good music can be with no score.

The two-CD set comprises nine tracks on disc 1 and ten on disc two, numbered, as ever, track 1-9 (disc 1) and 10-19 (disc 2), and there is something for every Shipp or Perelman aficionado – or anyone with a love of freely improvised music. From the gentleness and conversational tone of track 1, where the music evolves from a to and fro to a gentle, swingy back and forth with fewer spaces between responses, to the classical-meets-improvised styles on track 3, or the intensity and depth of Track 4, the playfulness of track 5 or the divergent parts of Track 9, there is a lot to take in. On Disc 2, the explorative quality of the music is more evident, with Perelman setting up ideas more on this second part of the release. On Tracks 10 to 14, Perelman travels some unconventional roads on tenor sax with Shipp supporting, and then in Track 15 it is Shipp who dictates the atmosphere and thematic tone of the number.

Distillation is a CD set that invites exploration and several listens. You can hear the classical leanings of both musicians, but also the application of known musical concepts to create improvised music that comes not just from an idea in the brain but is coupled with a sound understanding of how tonality and relativity of the notes and parts affect the outcome.

This is improvised music in its truest form, not so much a musical relationship, but an ever-evolving force.