Things we like: Matthew Shipp, Carnage Asada

In a month full of free floating anxiety over political churn, now leavened with hope, it's been good to have Matthew Shipp's The Data to live with. A double CD of solo piano improvisations and a capstone to Shipp's body of work for the French label RogueArt, The Data is an impressive late-career statement from a master improvising composer whom I'll confess I still think of as "David S. Ware's piano player," although his career as an artist in his own right now spans five decades. I blame my ignorance on the fact that some of his most productive periods coincided with moments when I was preoccupied with other things. Time, energy, and attention are finite; my loss. So now I'm playing catch-up, aided by my buddy Mike Webber's generous loan of Clifford Allen's thin 2023 study Singularity Codex: Matthew Shipp on RogueArt, published by the label. 

I remember enjoying Allen's scrawl in Signal To Noise (RIP), and in this, his first book, he does a good job of putting Shipp's work for RogueArt in the context of his entire career, starting with the '80s Lower East Side NYC axis that coalesced around Jemeel Moondoc (a name I recall from my NMDS catalogs) and Cecil Taylor, and the artist's interest in spirituality, mysticism, and poetry. (It makes sense that a creative person's work should reflect all of their concerns.) Most valuable are interviews with Shipp's collaborators William Parker, Rob Brown, Whit Dickey, and Joe Morris, as well as Yuko Otomo -- partner of the late poet Steve Dalachinsky, a friend and influence of Shipp's -- label boss Michel Dorbon, and recording engineer Jim Clouse. Then Allen gives a rundown on each of Shipp's RogueArt albums, including the as-yet unreleased Sonic Lust (which finds Shipp and longtime collaborator, tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman, in a quartet with Mark Helias and Tom Rainey).

Now I'm looking forward to hearing that recording, as well as one that Shipp teased in a recent Facebook post that will add Perelman to the pianist's long-running trio with Michael Bisio and Newman Taylor Baker. There's a lot of Shipp to hear: solo, trio, with Perelman, with his String Trio (William Parker and Mat Maneri), in one-off collabs with icons like Marshall Allen, Roscoe Mitchell, and Nicole Mitchell, among others. Shipp's a towering figure in the jazz piano continuum, still doing world historical work. Dig him now.

Carnage Asada is an L.A. punk band, formed in 1993, that included Dave Travis's electrified cello in their instrumental mix from the get-go, backing George Murillo's gruff-voiced poetics and street life narratives. Hardly your typical punkeroos, but then again, SoCal punk has long had an interface with poetry and jazz, best exemplified by the Minutemen and especially Saccharine Trust (whose guitarist Joe Baiza I saw open for free jazz eminence Peter Brotzmann in 2019). Over the years, Carnage Asada lineups have  included ex-Black Flag frontman-guitarist Dez Cadena, Desert Rock godfather Mario Lalli, and Joe Baiza himself. Intermittently active since the early Aughts, with a couple of unreleased albums in the can, Carnage Asada regrouped for a 25th anniversary blow-out in 2018. 

The band's current lineup teams original members Murillo, Travis, and bassist David O. Jones (who engineered their new album with his son Sebastian Jones) with drummer Steve Reed and ex-Bellrays guitarist Tony Fate. That new full-length, Head on a Platter, their first since 1999's Permanent Trails, contains a dozen tracks of distilled fury that cement the band's legacy and show Murillo to be a perceptive observer of the passing scene -- thankfully recorded and mixed for maximum audibility here, as he roars into his band's maelstrom of sound. The singer says the album's title refers to the normalization of violent images in today's society. The music is suitably hard-edged and rhythmically insistent, with riffs that groove like Stooges-meets-Hawkwind, and touches of psychedelia in the jams that flesh out the stories. 

"Chinese Lady Aluminum Foil," the band's post-pandemic single, conjures a hallucinatory vision of Requiem for a Dream-level psychosis, while its B-side, "Little Fat Princess," makes a convincing argument for not having children that has nothing to do with climate apocalypse. The title track gets a boost from some Latin percussion that propels it forward with a deceptive lightness. "Psychedelic Experiment" describes an encounter with an urban brujo and the resultant psychic journey. "Germs Reborn" tips its hat to the L.A. punk originators, while "Come On Baby" starts out sounding like a Ted Nugent "Stranglehold" burlesque, before morphing into a Beefheartian maze of non-repeating riffs. 

"Norteno" and "Septiembre," both sung in Spanish (with trumpeter Dan Clucas adding mariachi spice to the former), exist at the intersection of Chicano and punk culture -- similar to the one inhabited by Tejano punks Pinata Protest -- while "Two Brothers from East L.A." is a bittersweet recounting of a barrio kid's perilous existence. "Blood of Thorns" takes us all the way to the precipice of despair and back -- if just barely. Murillo sings like he's lived all of these songs, and the music behind him is every bit as gritty and real. No streaming or preorder link so far, but presumably such will appear by the August 23 release date. As my "lapsed" Catholic wife says, "We live in hope because to live in despair would be a sin." Amen.