Matthew Shipp takes an introspective turn on this solo piano album, continuing to discover new territory for his singular cosmic pianism. Codebreaker encrypts rich harmonies, cloud-like clusters, and the unlikely confluence of Bill Evans and Bud Powell.
Within the voluminous catalogue that pianist Matthew Shipp has created over the last three and a half decades, his solo piano work has charted a unique and compelling pathway for the evolution of the instrument's vocabulary. On 'Codebreaker', that path finds Shipp in an uncharacteristically meditative state of mind. Though the language is unmistakably his own, the usual attacks, dense clusters and insistent circularity are more often replaced by harmonic nebulae that luxuriate in the mysterious resonances which Shipp conjures from the keyboard.
Given that investigative impulse, Shipp himself could be viewed as the Codebreaker of the album's evocative title. There's a wry humor to the name, as Shipp imagines a parallel between a World War II secret agent doggedly racing to crack an enemy cypher and himself sitting at the piano, puzzling over the music's infinite enigmas. But the idea seems profoundly serious when considering the singular sonic vernacular he's coined, making him one of the most distinctive pianists of his generation.
Shipp concedes that his recent landmark birthday may have something to do with the more introspective bent of the album ("60's not old, but it's definitely not young," he jokes), but it also continues a career-long investigation into the ways that his subversive approach to the piano connects with the instrument's storied lineage. While the likes of Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra have been constant touchstones in critical writings on his work, one name that emerges when listening to 'Codebreaker', perhaps for the first time in Shipp's discography, is that of Bill Evans.
