Upon encountering the opening moments of "Pulsar, " the opening cut from
Sorcerer Sessions, the listener may feel as if she had purchased the wrong recording. Pianist
Matthew Shipp's pronounced chord voicings sound as if they might be lost compositions from
Erik Satie's "Rosicrucian" series. When clarinetist
Evan Ziporyn and violinist
Daniel Bernard Roumain enter in a gorgeously entwining series of harmonies and slippery, nearly Hungarian-styled melodic statements, the illusion will seem convincingly complete. Only upon the typing sounds of "Keystroke" countered by electronically manipulated clarinet and piano lines does the feel of the sonic encounter feel like the music of
Matthew Shipp. Add to this set bassist
William Parker, drummer
Gerald Cleaver, and electronica whiz
FLAM, and you have a new collective, one not so much interested in the jazz-conversant compositions of
Shipp's
Equilibrium album, but a collective turning
Shipp's compositions into extrapolations of form, content, and Muse-like utterances. As the album continues, through "Light forms," "Urban Shadows," "reformation," "Last Chamber," and other selections, it becomes clear that this is no mere fusion of classical ,jazz, and electronic aesthetics, but a new ethereal body of music that exists outside genre, and attempts to exist outside time and space. Indeed, while it references a past that has indeed passed into ghostly revisionist memory, it also references not so much a future, but an eternally shape-shifting present that cancels out the need for a future simply because everything that is possible or that can be dreamed of musically, can also be -- and is -- written, executed, and performed. Structural content has been
Shipp's muse for a while now, since 1996's
By The Law Of Music, where he first collaborated and wrote for a string trio's accompaniment. For those who were put off by
Nu Bop or
New Orbit, this might come as a pleasant surprise; for those who have followed
Shipp's career this collaborative effort -- this music -- could not have been executed in this manner without this particular group of musicians seeking to forge -- from the composer's music -- an entirely new evolutionary sound that exists not only outside genre, but reconsiders the time and space continuum as inclusionary, inseparable, and limitless. The Blue Series Continuum has given us a recording worth considering for years to come. Along with
David S. Ware's
Threads, the Thirsty Ear label has given us, in 2003, two recordings that marry composition to improvisation in new ways, with new dictates and concerns. They are a pair of the most profound albums to come out of the jazz idiom in a very long time. This is aural dynamite and will challenge your accepted notions about not only jazz and classical music, but about the role of music in your life. ~ Thom Jurek