Thursday, February 21, 2013

Artist's Choice: Matthew Shipp on Third Stream Piano

By Matthew Shipp
Third Stream was an inevitable movement in jazz. All music is synthesis, including jazz, but it seems like an even more conscious attempt to combine European practices with Afro-American music had to occur sooner or later, hence the Third Stream movement. Whatever one’s take on Third Stream, it generated a lot of interesting plots and subplots and put the information out there that allows a more natural combination of the idioms to occur with improvisers today.

Matthew Shipp: Photo Peter Gannushkin
“Beresith”
Dennis Sandole Project
Michael Grossman, piano
A Sandole Trilogy (Cadence Jazz, 1995)
Dennis Sandole—a jazz guitarist, composer, theorist and teacher who taught John Coltrane, among others—never belonged to any school or movement. But he composed rigorous music, and this polytonal panharmonic solo piano piece has the ring of a 20th-century masterpiece.
“Chromatic Universe, Part 2”
George Russell and His Orchestra
Paul Bley, Bill Evans; piano
Jazz in the Space Age (Decca, 1960)
Composer George Russell was a cohort of Gunther Schuller, the composer and theorist credited with organizing the Third Stream movement, and the duo of Paul Bley and Bill Evans is a Third Stream piano dream.
“Variants on a Theme of John Lewis:
Variant 1”
Composed by Gunther Schuller
Bill Evans, piano
John Lewis Presents Contemporary Music: Jazz
Abstractions (Atlantic, 1960)
John Lewis Presents Contemporary Music: Jazz Abstractions, regarded as a quintessential Third Stream album, primarily features music composed by Gunther Schuller, performed by players including Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Jim Hall, Scott LaFaro and Bill Evans. “Variant 1” is here because of the overall effect, in which the piano just adds color.
“Off Minor”
Ran Blake
Epistrophy (Soul Note, 1992)
Ran Blake is another pianist indelibly connected to Third Stream. He studied with Gunther Schuller and went on to become founding chair of the Third Stream department at New England Conservatory. Here is Blake interpreting his major influence—Monk—in a pointillistic way.
Read more: http://jazztimes.com/articles/71865-artist-s-choice-matthew-shipp-on-third-stream-piano

0 Comments: