On his recent album New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz the vaunted pianist Matthew Shipp seemed to a complete a long-gestating arc towards classical forms, hammering refrains like Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major into the roiling textures of ‘Non Circle’ and steering in the direction of baroque counterpoint as his tall and plangent lines tangled deftly with the bows and scrapes of Michael Bisio’s bass and Newman Taylor Baker’s dextrous percussion. Meanwhile the sometimes combustible free jazz saxophonist Ivo Perelman has taken a more reserved and lyrical bent on his latest works, eliding the labours of the day and tentatively Embracing the Unknown alongside Chad Fowler on the stritch and saxello with Reggie Workman on the double bass and Andrew Cyrille on drums comprising a legendary rhythm section, then slipping into a mellower groove alongside fresh collaborative partners Mark Helias and Tom Rainey for the samba-licked spiritualism of Truth Seeker.
Back together again for a Magical Incantation, here Shipp stretches out a hand to the listener and Perelman alike while the saxophonist readily dusts down his trusty old carpet, for a record which retains some of the languor and ardour of their most recent pieces of work with nods to a few old jazz standards. The opening ‘prayer’ for instance is redolent of the Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach wipeout ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, while elsewhere on tracks like ‘rituals’ and ‘lustihood’ Perelman’s tenor wafts, scampers or plays short vertical stabs as Shipp feeds more of the melody. On ‘sacred rituals’ slow drags of saxophone become sustained howls as Shipp hammers out his chords, their improvisatory flair carrying a self-contained eloquence on the two lengthier closing tracks ‘vibrational essence’ and the title.
This is their umpteenth collaboration, stretching by my count to more than forty records in all formats since Cama de Terra with William Parker and the duo album Bendito of Santa Cruz back in the mid-nineties. Shipp, who would know better than most, regards Magical Incantation as one of their best yet, adding:
This record is a major major statement in jazz history. It is the height of the work I’ve done with Ivo and the height of what can be done in a duo setting with piano.
