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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Matthew Shipp’s “Invisible Light: Live In Sao Paulo”

Matthew Shipp has often applied the word “cosmic” to his music. While there’s nothing at all spacey about his bold touch on the piano keys, his approach does tap into a deeply submerged logic. Invisible Light, a live recording made at a Brazilian jazz festival in 2016, allows the listener to follow Shipp’s associative processes as he threads through 11 themes in a little more than an hour. He moves between self-penned pieces like “Blue In Orion” and “Gamma Ray” (which display his boundary-dispelling combination of classically informed structure and jazz-wise melody) and jazz standards like a practiced meditator plumbing the collective unconscious.

Sometimes the shifts are as sudden as a slam on the keyboard, other times as gradual as a natural awakening from that nap you didn’t know you were going to take. But when you string them together, you can see how “On Green Dolphin Street” and “Symbol Systems” connect on a cosmic level. In Shipp’s hands, each opens up to the sublime. 

—Bill Meyer