Things we like: Matthew Shipp Trio, Caroline Davis & Wendy Eisenberg, Reeder/Seward/Weathers

It occurs to me that I have been insufficiently attentive to the work of the prolific piano master Matthew Shipp since the time iTunes took a dump and sent 70% of my digital music to the widow maker, including his Art of the Improviser and 4D collections. I was reminded of this while hearing him on 577's Welcome Adventure Vol. 1, with Daniel Carter, William Parker, and Gerald Cleaver, during the lockdown time. The appearance of his New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (somewhat retro title courtesy of producer Steve Holtje, whose reviews in The Big Takeover I've enjoyed reading) on venerable free jazz imprint ESP Disk this year prompted me to dive back into the Shipp stream. 

Shipp's led a trio with a revolving cast of bassists and drummers since 1990, the longest lived being the current edition, with Michael Bisio on bass and Newman Taylor Baker on drums. In his maturity, Shipp takes his time developing themes, leaving ample space for his long-standing bandmates to listen and respond. With almost a decade of working together under their collective belt, they know each other's playing well enough to sound as though they're playing a scored piece while they're really extemporizing. Shipp's creative imagination seems endless, and his ability to execute his ideas is flawless. Reminds me I also need to check out the latest fruit of Shipp's multi-decade duo with saxophonist Ivo Perelman, Magical Incantation on Soul City. 

I've written before (and will again) that Wendy Eisenberg is the most elegant noise guitarist I've heard, although my favorite records of hers are the "song" ones (Time Machine, the digital-only Dehiscence, my fave Auto, Bent Ring). Accept When, released by reliable Texas indie Astral Spirits, is a collaboration with saxophonist-synthesis-vocalist Caroline Davis that includes new co-written songs to scratch that itch, as well as skronky improv and other instrumental wonderment. 

Eisenberg's sung melodies continue to soar and surprise, her guitar accompaniments frame them sublimely, and Davis's synth interjections carry them off to otherworldly spaces (as Nick Zanca's did on Auto). Her guitar improvs show more of her hard, percussive attack and tension-building scrape and skitter, which Davis's alto meets with an acerbic tone, fluid facility, and free jazz glossolalia. On the title track, the two intertwine their voices on a tortuously twisting melody that evokes the spirit of Dagmar Krause before an instrumental section where Davis plays long tones in the trombone range over Eisenberg's reverb-drenched arpeggios, glisses, plucked harmonics, and crystalline chords. This meeting of simpatico minds is also, incidentally, a good way to hear most of the elements of Eisenberg's artistry (minus her rocking Editrix side) in one place.

Composer-improviser-educator Kory Reeder continues releasing his digital archives via Bandcamp (the most recent installment is Texas: Vol. XI - B Sides and C Sides). Last month, he spent a couple of weeks touring the Southwest and Great Plains in a trio with a pair of fellow polymaths, one from Colorado Springs and the other from Reeder's home base in Denton. 

Besides composing and performing music, Ryan Seward is also a photographer, videographer, and sculptor; on June 28, Reeder's label Sawyer Editions will release Seward's weathering. Outside of his own music making, Andrew Weathers runs Full Spectrum Records and Wind Tide recording studio. As it happens, I've been listening to a few sides he's worked on, including Wendy Eisenberg's recording of Morton Feldman's The Possibility of a New Work for Guitar, Patrick Shiroishi's I was too young to hear silence, Monte Espina's Pueblo Glortha, and Hayden Pedigo's Letting Go. On his own 2015 album Fuck Everybody, You Can Do Anything, he conjures haunting dreamscapes with a large ensemble.

Two Ballads from the High Plains is the document of the trio's collaboration, recorded last November in Weathers' studio and released on his "vanity label" Editions Glomar. The instrumentation is simple: Reeder plays double bass, electronics, and gongs; Seward plays psaltery (a dulcimer-like instrument that's plucked, not hammered) and electronics; Weathers plays lap steel and tenor sax. The two long pieces are named after archaeological landmarks in New Mexico. Maybe I've been baking my brain in post-climate change North Texas for too long, but these sound worlds -- replete with the pulsing drone of electronics, and layers of overlapping harmonics -- remind me of nothing so much as a long stretch of Texas highway, heat rising off the land in the distance, with events periodically occurring to either side as we travel along our way. Immersive listening at its finest.