Shipp, Matthew String Trio – “By the Law of Music” – [Hat Hut]

First Note: Matthew Shipp (His piano gets grumpy.) With violin, my favorite. Jazz with no drummer, I love it. Caution abstruse pianist at work. I thought that maybe William Parker (everybody’s favorite) could have done more, in fact Mat Maneri is more than enough to flesh out some of Shipp’s melodic ideas except that Parker fleshes out Maneri’s ideas while Shipp fleshes out Parker’s ideas while Maneri fleshes out Shipp’s ideas, and then it switches or the melody is exposed enough to have trio clarity on the whole thing. Occasionally one of the players gets left out on a limb playing by themself and this tends to deaden the
progressions being explored, or leads into a kind of sub- level of listening to melody in movement; some take the main roads, others use the alternate and ugly routes. Maybe sometimes a player doesn’t know how to approach a track or session and doesn’t help much at developing material live. This release might occasionally seem like this, but fares well. So, does the string trio make something satisfiably of each member and together a unique sound to the disc, I would say so.
-Eveningly Infinitely Wipes Scrub Sonny Atoms Grizzly Adam