A quarter century of musical association between Matthew Shipp and Mat Maneri continues with this RogueArt release Conference of the Mat/ts. Recording together since Shipp’s 1994 LP Critical Mass, the pianist and violist first made a duo album with Gravitational Systems (2000) and have performed together in various settings from then on. We profiled one such meeting just last year, the Whit Dickey-led Vessel In Orbit.
But in spite of all the familiarity between them, something new comes out of the two every time they get together, and when it’s boiled down to the interaction between just the two as it is for Conference of the Mat/ts, that dynamic offers more opportunities for going for the jugular. Over thirteen improvised performances, the two probe, converse and chase each other using the slightest of cues and whims.
The first ‘conference,’ or track, is a blossom of fragile beauty; the two seemingly making every chord count. By contrast, they are in a whimsical mood on the very next song. Later on during the 5th performance, the two play with total freedom but remain very much in sync yet in the middle of the chaos still conjure up a motif that brings them to the second act of the song. For the penultimate track, they oscillate between the dense and diffused, moving tightly together through the disorder.
You can spell ‘Mat(t)’ with one ‘t’ or two, but there’s only one way to spell ‘brilliance,’ and a lot of it is on display within Matthew Shipp and Mat Maneri’s Conference of the Mat/ts.
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