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| June 20: Ivo Perelman + Matthew Shipp String Trio in epic 'Armageddon Flower' – June 20 via TAO Forms Armageddon Flower is an album that has been a long time coming. The players, tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman, pianist Matthew Shipp, violist Mat Maneri, and bassist William Parker, have worked together in various configurations going on 30 years (and even longer for Shipp and Parker). All four players have worked in drummer-less chamber settings, as well as units with the most significant drummers of our age. Each is a relentless searcher unpacking new ways of exemplifying tradition, language, physics, material, and energy in this art form, both as soloists and within broader collective, creative action. Armageddon Flower takes the Perelman-Shipp axis as a starting point – since January 1996 the pair have recorded 46 albums together in duo and small group settings. A fair amount of the Perelman-Shipp groups have eschewed percussion, and one, A Violent Dose of Anything, augments the core duo with Maneri's viola, a step in the direction of the present combination. But as Shipp is careful to point out, "there's only one Matthew Shipp String Trio." Ivo Perelman's copious studio dates – beginning in 1989 with his self-titled Ivo – are a continual refinement and study in process whether or not they share personnel, and countless gems reside in his vast body of work. The Perelman-Shipp duos are an even more distilled thread of that canvas, notches and progressions that birth constellations in sound and movement, ever refining the conversation. Parallel to the emergence of Perelman-Shipp in the mid-90s was the Matthew Shipp String Trio (with Maneri & Parker), which struck out on a path to redefine "Third Stream" chamber jazz via two very well-received Hat Hut CDs, By the Law of Music (1997) and Expansion, Power, Release (2001). Though the String Trio was a crucial component of Shipp's arc and set him apart from the post-Coltrane/post-Ayler musical continuum he occupied in the venerated David S. Ware Quartet, this unit became dormant until the 2019 RogueArt release Symbolic Reality and a subsequent Vision Festival performance. Eighteen years later, group dynamics and dialects had morphed, resulting in a set of somewhat more sprawling pieces that reconfigured the turn-on-a-dime energy of their earlier iteration. Even if the String Trio is a more texturally expansive gambit now than twenty years ago, it builds on personal history, and that is a large part of what also drives Armageddon Flower. For Shipp, "William and Mat are as close to my natural soul brothers as you can get––and by soul I don't mean Black, I mean the soul. Ivo is another layer of that same soul." Given their extensive work together, one might think that Shipp and Perelman are symbiotically joined but that would be an incomplete view––their outlooks on the creative gene or impulse are complementary, interwoven, and foundational within the linguistic matrix of jazz as it continues to develop. Shipp plays a chordal instrument spinning out from Ellington, Mal Waldron, Sal Mosca, Webern, and the Whitmanesque tessellations of his energy/electricity; Perelman's tenor saxophone, not being chordal, has a slightly different role to play in this unification, creating highlights of line and gesture as well as shapes that impact the music's speed and density. Perelman observes that, "When I am playing saxophone I am actually singing, and with Mat Maneri, when we meet it's like sparks fly. He's a singer playing the viola; he's not seduced by the bow or the idiosyncrasies of fingering or what the strings can do, he just wants to sing his own life. Matthew, Mat and William all know that what we are trying to represent as musicians is the vocal quality of the human body, of the human species." This is fundamentally a group music; while there are sections of duo and trio interaction, the onus is on a four-way conversation in which parallel streams become oceans of sound, only to be distilled into isolated rivulets once again. There is no dominant voice, though this music is billed both to the saxophonist and one of Shipp's cornerstone units. The dedifferentiated field of piano, viola, and contrabass is not a carpet over which Perelman soars, nor are breathy ululations and altissimo exhortations mere accents on the String Trio's bulwark. Without a drummer but with forward motion and bounce, the music on Armageddon Flower is sublimely striking and operates in continuous flow of both impulsion and idea. Shipp offers, "The music took over and we're all in a realm of accomplishment where we don't have anything to prove and there's nothing to prove on this album. It's all really just letting the gestalt of the group take over and shape the music." There is an incredible amount to unpack in the four collective pieces that make up this work. The music barely seems possible in its level of instrumental mastery and rich, emotional reality, and in fact begs the question of what it is exactly. These four musicians have spent decades together in various capacities so their language is on one level honed. What's surprising is that entirely new pathways are exploding into view, 28 years and 46 albums after Perelman and Shipp first began working together. It's unquestionable that this is music of necessity, of striving, and of possibility. Perelman had this to say about the album's title and what these four musicians share: "Listening to this music is akin to reading the Book of Revelations in the Bible. I called it Armageddon Flower as an attempt to instill some hope amidst the hysteria of the times and contemplating our own extinction as a human species. This music has drama but also has the light of being saved, of the savior, whoever or whatever that is." ### write your comments about the article :: © 2025 Jazz News :: home page |