That was how pianist Matthew Shipp was introduced at his Saturday morning solo show at the Guelph Jazz Festival.
Minutes after sitting down, he had the entire audience transported to a space of pluralities. Shipp was the architect of this space; each audience member’s experiences were the blueprint; and one hundred years of jazz and contemporary classical with a hint of hip-hop groove were the materials.The music moved forward and so did Shipp, his shoulders swinging back and forth as if trekking a mountain, his arms sliding to and fro as though swimming through a sea of notes, his fingers gently plunking down when the time was just right.
Shipp’s music often falls under the category of free jazz, yet while there were many moments of beautiful free improvisation in his performance, snapshots taken out of context could have been anything from post-bop to impressionist classical. He even threw in a couple hooks, which seemed as though they were asking for a subtle hip-hop beat beneath.
This reflects, in a way, the current direction of jazz, a genre that constantly aims to transcend itself. Many artists reject the term “jazz” completely, transcending old dogmas through redefining their musical space.
One can point out the kind of musical space that Shipp created on Saturday, but one can’t break it down. This notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts is called “emergence.”
In jazz, the number of parts is always growing, as more artists discover different sounds outside the vernacular and disassemble them through the act of musical improvisation. Today, almost all imaginable sounds have been absorbed by jazz, if one allows the term to include all modern creative improvised music (which the Guelph Jazz Festival certainly does).
These sonic expressions unfortunately have difficulty finding space as a subset of a relatively small, yet rich and interconnected contemporary jazz community. However, the beauty of human organization allows for such spaces as the Guelph Jazz Festival to be maintained, encouraging the making of radical new sounds both in the abstract and as a political voice.
This festival offers a space for the “fringes” of jazz, a place where sounds unconceived before performances vibrate from any kind of instrument.
Within these spaces, a magic can be born where the past, the present, and the future become one.
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A NOTE ON PHOTOS
Thomas King, author of The Inconvenient Indian and other noteworthy books, provided the photo seen here. King has been photographing the Guelph Jazz Festival for over 20 years. In 2015, his jazz photography was featured in “Sound Check,” an exhibit at what is now the Art Gallery of Guelph.
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Photo by Thomas King.