#7 - MATTHEW SHIPP - NU BOP
The Music Library Listening Series continues!
(in case anyone wonders what’s happening, I apologize (not really) for not posting very much at all, i find I have little to say these days, at least in public.
BUT I’ve been running an online listening series on a web radio I help to run, where I pick an album every month or two or so and stream the entire thing for people to listen to, sometimes with a tiny bit of commentary.)
Sunday 31/5/2026, 11pm (Singapore, GMT +8)
Sunday 31/5/2026, 10am (Eastern Standard Time)
Total program time: 40 minutes.
To listen: simply click this link or enter into your browser:
http://192.53.175.239:8000/musiclibrary
OR go to http://192.53.175.239:8000/ and click on ‘m3u’ to download an m3u file that allows most media players like VLC to tune in to the stream directly. (This is not an audio file, it just points your player to the stream.)
This time, we take a half step away from acoustic music to explore Matthew Shipp’s part-trip hop, part free-jazz album Nu Bop. Active since the 80s, Shipp is part of a generation of free jazz pianists emerging from the loft scene in New York - strains of free jazz that pushed the boundaries of aggression, wildness and formal experimentation. His playing bears witness to McCoy Tyner and Alice Coltrane as much as it does to Cecil Taylor, but from the first time I heard him I knew that it was something unprecedented. Shipp’s piano contains a great deal of deliberate, heavy simplicity organized into architectural blocks, and a sense of rhythm that floats over a deep, churning division of time.
Shipp’s largely acoustic oeuvre includes extensive recording with the David S. Ware Quartet, William Parker and other influential jazz and improv musicians. Nu Bop was a landmark departure from this, incorporating the sampled drums and synthesizers of hip hop, a genre he had long admired. Alongside electronic producer FLAM, instrumentalists William Parker (Bass), Guillermo E. Brown (drums), and Daniel Carter (winds) fill out the band, sometimes playing grooves and sometimes layering chaos across the beat. The result is miles away from the acid jazz or fusion album this might have become; it seems like there are two bands playing in parallel, and the piano playing is distinctly not trying its best to fit in, sticking out in all the hard-edged ways I have come to expect of Shipp. I find Nu Bop at its most engaging when both the acoustic band and electronics are allowed to co-exist equally in a productive chaos. The more beat-heavy tracks on the other hand don’t always showcase Shipp’s quick thinking, humour and capacity for force. All the same, something great is happening here - no moment of this allows the listener to treat the music simply as background texture, a trap I find waiting for many attempts at fusing jazz and hip-hop. It requires attention and rewards it with thorny structure.