The pianist Matthew Shipp and the saxophonist Ivo Perelman have steadily and somewhat stealthily managed to hammer out a catalogue of music which makes theirs one of the greatest partnerships in the history of jazz. From their first collaboration on Cama de Terra in 1996 where they formed a trio with William Parker and their subsequent duo album Bendito of Santa Cruz, over the course of the past three decades they have played alongside one another on almost fifty recordings, the most recent of which was a Magical Incantation which Shipp loftily but with learned assurance described as:
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.
On some of his recent output, Shipp seems to have completed a long-gestating arc towards classicism with his New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz alongside the bassist Michael Bisio and percussionist Newman Taylor Baker stamping refrains redolent of Pachelbel’s Canon into the otherwise roiling textures of ‘Non Circle’ or steering in the direction of baroque counterpoint.
Perelman meanwhile has tempered his incendiary tenor and embraced a more overt lyricism, on Embracing the Unknown for instance, where astride Chad Fowler on the stritch and saxello and the legendary rhythm section of Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille his ensemble forewent the raucous and uncharted for something surprisingly tentative and spare, like a meditation on their practice or the nooks and crannies of the everyday. Then on Truth Seeker with new partners in Mark Helias and Tom Rainey the Brazilian returned to a samba-licked spiritualism between mellower grooves, before the reedman and bandleader offered up a couple of exceedingly rare vocal albums as Vox Popoli Vox Dei with Michael Bisio and Iva BittovĆ” found a common thread between Brazilian and Czech folk melodies while Messa Di Voce with Fay Victor proved more discordant, abounding in rubbery textures, short phrases and squibs of horn yet still finding time for submerged arias and a steep evocation of the blues.
Their latest collaboration finds Shipp once more at the head of his string trio, where his piano is accompanied by Mat Maneri on the viola and William Parker on the double bass. This formidable trio recorded a couple of acclaimed third-stream albums in the late nineties – with By the Law of Music a twelve-part suite appended by a take on the Duke Ellington standard ‘(In My) Solitude’ while Expansion, Power, Release beguiled through its profusion of shorter forms – then lay dormant for more than twenty years until Symbolic Reality arrived with a flourish in 2019.
The return of the Matthew Shipp String Trio plus some of the recent tendencies in Shipp and Perelman’s collaborative oeuvre might suggest Armageddon Flower as another attempt to recast or finely calibrate the third stream, that piquant admixture of jazz and classical music. For his part the pianist heralds the commingling, saying that:
William and Mat are as close to my natural soul brothers as you can get – and by soul I mean the soul. Ivo is another layer of that same soul.
But while all of the elements are present within a familiar chamber setting, at the same time the title of the record seems to posit something quite different, a cruel or deferred juxtaposition or else something of that fiery tenor which has long been Perelman’s forte.
What we get on Armageddon Flower is something in between, often oblique yet deeply absorbing, beginning with the opening track ‘Pillar of Light’ and its murky, mottled yet thematically rich take on third stream. ‘Tree of Life’ features some deft opening interplay between the saxophone and viola before shifting between baroque sensitivities, emphasised by the plaintive tone of Maneri’s strings, and more dense or menacing contemporary passages as the musicians seem to inhabit a world of tension and strife, falling in with one another harmonically while resolutely or even heedlessly charting their own course. On these opening couple of pieces the altissimo of Perelman screeches and wails or carves out shafts of light, rending holes and illuminating the compositions, while Shipp’s whole tones offer an air of at times wistful ambiguity and his cluster chords add an ominous emotional charge.
Parker ties the threads and provides that bit of buoyancy, keeping an otherwise submerged or sunken affair just about afloat. After the long and encompassing ‘Tree of Life’, the title piece feels relatively brisk yet emotionally and psychically laden, as scratches from the tenor and a swampy middle section which serves as a kind of ode to roots give way to the mournful atmosphere of keening or threnody (or even the drowning of one’s sorrows in a music hall or bar) before a muted, brooding and whirring close.
Finally the anticipated ‘Restoration’ moves through a turbulent opening to offer a bit of down-home or homespun wisdom as Shipp and Perelman – turning from the pulsing keys and insistent horn spurts of the title – offer more leeway and levity to Maneri and Parker’s strings. The concluding piano passage carries some of the preceding anguish but finds a sense of resolution as Shipp holds onto one last key. Extolling the results, Perelman says:
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.
