Henry Rollins has been a fiery tongued advocate for independent music and creative culture since he was the frontman of seminal hardcore band Black Flag in the early 1980s. He has since released ...

Matthew Shipp has been making music at a relentless pace since the 1980s. On occasion, the Delaware-born, New York-based pianist has copped a David Bowie move and threatened to retire from recording.

When Matthew Shipp was a teenager, he had a job as a cocktail pianist. His motivation was to sound "like any old jazz pianist." He did "what any other jazz pianist would do, that is, study everything ...

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“Millions of choices” is an innocuous phrase. It doesn’t immediately stand out as a leitmotif of Matthew Shipp’s creative process; it doesn’t even come off as a default riff. Yet, over the course of a ...

Codebreaker is an excellent title for a Matthew Shipp album. When Shipp plays the piano, it sounds like he’s trying to solve a puzzle that only he, and maybe the ghost of Cecil Taylor, would ...

In view of the fact that he’s considered an avant gardist, Matthew Shipp’s been getting a great deal of publicity. His followers are alternative rock as well as jazz fans. In trying to explain Shipp’s ...

After developing an obsession with flutes and dipping into ambient spiritual jazz on 2023's New Blue Sun, a Grammy-nominated album created with some prominent figures in that corner of the music world ...

Free improvisation, as practiced by a band, requires musicians sufficiently egoless and blessed with ears such that satisfying patterns can emerge, uniting all musicians in a single, spontaneously ...

Sign up for City Lights, our twice-weekly guide to arts and nightlife in the D.C. area. It lands in your inbox every Sunday and Thursday. If jazz were a church ...