There are no short cuts. There are no clichés here. Free improvisation is the ultimate and there are few who can scale the summit as expertly as Matthew Shipp. Minutes spent with Shipp may be the most meaningful thing you can hope to do today if you want to improve your listening chops. His method involves placing tonality in a blender but the knack is that he does not swerve away from melody as some hardcore improvisers in all validity do. He instead makes however distant ''the melodic'' sound as if it is present in the dashboard as he steers to a new location. Harnessing a chordal dimension that works from the middle of the chord often not from its root or rinsing the effect through over-saturated chromaticism which can be in lesser hands a coasting, on this track you can hear part of what he has been developing along these lines over many years on 'Spiderweb'. Shipp also uses his own internal rubato in the metrical sub-division of internal rhythms that he employs in the ''current'' of his sweep that amounts to a version of pulse. It's Ellingtonian at heart that is updating itself everytime he sits down to improvise and listening to 'Spiderweb' is the next best thing to being in a small club watching his hands and letting the sound wash all over you like the warmest, purest, most invigorating water this side of euphoria. Codebreaker is out in November
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