Matthew Shipp: Nu Bop

Matthew Shipp has spent the past 15 years on an inspiring crusade to move jazz out of its coddled museum state. With a hand in nearly 40 albums, he's served as a lightning rod for jazz players orbiting downtown New York, while continually pushing his own piano skills into spaces where the unsolved equations of math and myth bleed into one. Not all of Shipp's experiments work, as evidenced by four radically different records released last year. But his uneven results tend to bolster his successes—a fate played out in extreme measures on Nu Bop, his most explicit attempt to fuse jazz and electronic music. The album offers a sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward vision of Shipp and his band wandering their way around dance beats programmed by DJ/engineer Flam. "Space Shipp" opens with a skittery rhythmic jolt, which Shipp proceeds to smooth out with a series of themes vaguely reminiscent of Thelonious Monk. The title track teeters on the brink of drum-and-bass, with inimitable bassist William Parker walking over a ramshackle beat before Shipp and saxophonist Daniel Carter bleat out a storm of low-end tenacity and searing melody. All of Nu Bop showcases a searching quality, a palpable sense of the players thinking out loud as they stumble and glide in their march toward new forms. In a bit of studio chatter following "Rocket Shipp," Parker even exclaims, "It took a minute for my brain to go get it, but once that happened, I was in it." The band's sense of purpose makes for some alchemic magic, but a good bit of Nu Bop gets dragged down by its rawness. Mixed in at confoundingly high levels, Flam's beat programming occasionally leans toward tinny dime-store disco, like a creaky screen door swinging on its hinges. And the players, especially drummer Guillermo E. Brown, often sound like they're reading different pages of the same manifesto. Shipp instigated better experiments on last year's brilliant quartet album Matthew Shipp's New Orbit, and on Masses, which paired Shipp & Co. with soundscapes courtesy of Spring Heel Jack. In spite of its faults, though, Nu Bop is an intriguing first step in an evolution worth fighting for.