He began playing piano at five years old.[5] Shipp was strongly attracted to jazz, but also played in rock groups while in high school.
Shipp attended the University of Delaware for "a couple years" before dropping out.[6] He opted instead to live with his parents and focus on practicing, though he frequently traveled to Philadelphia to pick up gigs as a cocktail pianist and to study with Dennis Sandole, who Shipp has cited as playing an important role in his development.[6]
Shipp moved to New York in 1984 and has been very active since the early 1990s, appearing on dozens of albums as a leader, sideman, or producer.[7] (Before making a living playing music, Shipp worked in a bookshop as an assistant manager. He was fired, he threw some books at his boss, and he decided he would not look for a day job anymore.[8])
He was initially most active in free jazz but has since branched out, particularly exploring music that touches on contemporary classical, hip hop, and electronica.[9] Earlier in his career Shipp was compared to some of his predecessors in the jazz piano pantheon, but has since been recognized as a complete stylistic innovator on the piano, with AllMusic referring to his "unique, instantly recognizable style",[10] and Larry Blumenfeld in Jazziz magazine referring to Shipp as "stunning in originality" and to his album 4D as "further proof of his idiosyncratic genius".
Shipp has also been celebrated by a wide range of artists: David Bowie has praised his work (specifically "Rocket Shipp" from the album Nu Bop),[11] and Thurston Moore, who first saw him perform in 1990, has complimented his cross-genre appeal: "I see the same people showing up for Matthew's gigs as for Merzbow".[1] (As a member of the David S. Ware Quartet, Shipp has opened for Sonic Youth.)[9] Shipp has also been noted for his association with punk-rock icon Henry Rollins, who released several of Shipp's records on his 213 imprint.[1] In 2010, Rollins wrote, "Matthew Shipp and his work have fascinated me since I first heard him many years ago. His originality and approach sometimes stretches the limits of what is considered Jazz music yet at the same time, describes perfectly the fierce freedom of it. ... Matthew is not only a brilliant Jazz pianist, he is a true artist and visionary."[12] In the early 1990s Shipp also befriended Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), then his next-door neighbor.[6]
In addition, the rhythm section of Shipp, Parker, and Brown recorded Ware compositions without Ware in 2003, released by Splasc(H) Records as The Trio Plays Ware, and Shipp and Ware performed as a duo, recorded in concert and released by AUM Fidelity as Live in Sant'Anna Arresi, 2004.[13] In 2001, Gary Giddens wrote for The Village Voice that "The David S. Ware Quartet is the best small band in jazz today".[14] After Ware's death, Shipp wrote, "Some have compared our unit to the classic Coltrane quartet, but the members of our group all brought something to the table that only someone playing now could bring—resulting in a gestalt that is of its time and does not look back. When free jazz seemed like a spent force, he brought something new—and greatly beautiful—to it."[15]
Shipp was also a member of Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory, which Shipp said "could be seen as an extension of some post-Coltrane concepts, but in Roscoe's hands it is extended technique with multiple pulses", noting "[Mitchell's] insistence at all times of transcending cliché".[16]
The New York Times has noted Shipp's curatorial work for Thirsty Ear Records as "one of the label's chief consultants and most prolific artists".[17] Shipp's own releases on the label include 2011's double-disc album, entitled Art of the Improviser; AllMusic called the work a "testament to Shipp's achievements, yet it is also a continuation of the discovery in his developmental musical language"[18] and the Chicago Tribune called the project "monumental" and "galvanic as ever".[19] Thirsty Ear also released Shipp's 2013 solo record Piano Sutras, which PopMatters described as "the kind of record we talk about and play for each other decades later ... music that frames up a whole history: of an artist, of listeners, of the artists who formed the history of the art form, of the culture and time that allowed this art to flourish".[20] This was followed by 2015's The Conduct of Jazz, the first album by Shipp's trio with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker.
Shipp's work with the France-based RogueArt imprint began with the 2006 album Salute to 100001 Stars: A Tribute to Jean Genet by the group Declared Enemy (Sabir Mateen, Shipp, William Parker, and Gerald Cleaver). From 2006 to 2013, Shipp appeared on five albums released through RogueArt, one of which (Un Piano) billed Shipp as leader; from 2015 to 2022, the label put out six more albums with Shipp as leader, and another nine on which he was co-billed with, among others, Mark Helias, Nate Wooley, William Parker, Mat Maneri, John Butcher, and Evan Parker.[21] Shipp's work on RogueArt, along with biographical material and placement of Shipp's artistic evolution within the context of the downtown Manhattan avant-garde jazz scene, is the subject of music journalist Clifford Allen's 2023 book Singularity Codex: Matthew Shipp on RogueArt; the Burning Ambulance review by Todd Manning declares that "Singularity Codex examines so many aspects of [Shipp's] life and the scene around him that it is not only indispensable to anyone trying to come to a deeper understanding of his work but also for those wanting to study the avant-garde jazz scene of New York City’s Lower East Side."[22]
Shipp began working with ESP-Disk with the Shipp/Mat Walerian duo album Live at Okuden, billed as The Uppercut. Issued in 2015, it was the last new release approved by ESP-Disk's founder Bernard Stollman.[23] All four of Walerian's albums with Shipp have been released on ESP-Disk’. Shipp's first ESP albums as leader were a quartet album, Sonic Fiction, and a solo album, Zer0, both issued in 2018. After that, he released several albums by his trio with Michael Bisio and Newman Taylor Baker: Signature, The Unidentifiable, World Construct, and New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz.[24]World Construct was called "a career-defining album" and awarded five stars by critic Mike Hobart in the Financial Times,[25] while New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz was called by Tony Dudley Evans (London Jazz Times) "an album of great beauty that is state of the art in terms of the possibilities of the jazz piano trio."[26] In 2022 a duo album by Shipp and Ivo Perelman, Fruition, was released by ESP, with NPR's Nate Chinen stating in his review, "The freeform alchemy between Brazilian saxophonist Ivo Perelman and American pianist Matthew Shipp is by now a proven fact: rarely do two musicians achieve a higher flow state in real time."[27]
In 2020, longtime Shipp collaborator Whit Dickey started a label called Tao Forms; as of January 2023, the label had released two Shipp albums, The Piano Equation and Codebreaker, both solo releases, and four further albums on which he collaborates.[28]
With Roy Campbell (trumpet), Alex Lodico, Josh Roseman (trombone), Miso (turntables), William Parker (bass), Danny Blume (drums, guitar, programming), Chris Kelly (drums, programming)
2003
The Sorcerer Sessions
Thirsty Ear
With Evan Ziporyn (clarinets), William Parker (bass), Gerald Cleaver (drums), FLAM (synths, programming), Daniel Bernard Roumain (violin)
