After developing an obsession with flutes and dipping into ambient spiritual jazz on 2023's New Blue Sun, a Grammy-nominated album created with some prominent figures in that corner of the music world, André 3000 recently shared an EP of lo-fi piano improvisations titled 7 Piano Sketches. That project enraged Matthew Shipp, a jazz titan and a longtime friend of our Ugly Beauty columnist Phil Freeman, who wrote a scathing takedown on Facebook, dismissing Three Stacks as a piano dilettante and describing his improv piano recordings as "utter crap -horrific-god awful insipidly wretched nothing."
Now Shipp has announced an improvisational piano album of his own, The Cosmic Piano, which will be released next month. Presumably the album was already in the works before the André 3000 imbroglio, but either way, fair play to Shipp, who will now have a lot more ears on his own music after garnering attention with some good old-fashioned hating. He'll always be "the guy who trashed André 3000" to listeners from outside the jazz world, but he's also one of the only jazz pianists those people will be able to name. His profile is higher than ever now. I respect the hustle.
Shipp shared this statement about The Cosmic Piano:
I'm not really looking just to play piano music. I'm actually questioning existence, and I see improvising as a way to do that. On one level, the whole cosmos is an improvisation, and on another level, I consider these pieces to be organisms, in the same way that when you say cosmic, you think of the Big Bang — the universe coming into existence, planets coming into existence, and then organisms and people. Well, the compositions are organisms too.
Shipp also spoke at length about his viral diatribe in an interview on the RiotRiot Substack the other day. He acknowledged some people think he's a "jerk," but said overall the feedback to his post had been "vastly positive." The interview touched on many interesting subjects, including the music of Kendrick Lamar and billy woods, and ultimately Shipp concluded:
I would hope he doesn't have an attitude about me because I respect him as a historical artist. But at the same time, he was hanging in our scene. And, to me, this does smack of a little disrespect to us. Maybe not, intentionally, but he was around people where doing this type of thing is their life. And I’m sure there was nothing insidious in his thought process, but how it comes across to me is he has much more access to things than we do. For him to do a watered-down, horrible version of stuff that's in the vein of what he might've heard around us and then show up with... I mean, actually, I think it's disgusting. [Laughs.]
The The Cosmic Piano's opening title track is streaming now at Bandcamp, and you can hear it below.
The day after Shipp's Facebook rant, André received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College Of Music and, perhaps coincidentally, he shared advice for the graduating class about dealing with haters:
People will talk about what you do, good and bad. You will feel good and bad. But none of it matters. That's the work. Everything else is chatter, and it does not matter. It doesn't contribute to what you're doing. So always keep your original reason for doing music, that original feeling that you got when you were a kid, when you heard the song you wanted to get into music in the first place. Always keep that original feeling. If you're an artist, your job is to stay true to what you're feeling, stay true to your instincts. Stay true to what drives you. And so to do that, you have to have some thick skin. So don't worry about what people say, good and bad, because the praise can kind of — it can blind you in ways too. So stay on your path. Thank you.
For what it's worth, André is right that people should follow their muse and release whatever music they want, regardless of how critics receive it, and Shipp was right that 7 Piano Sketches is irredeemable garbage that no one would pretend to care about if it wasn't released by a visionary cultural icon like Three Stacks.
TRACKLIST:
01 "The Cosmic Piano"
02 "Cosmic Junk Jazz DNA"
03 "Orbit Light"
04 "Piano’s DNA Upgrade"
05 "The Other Dimensional Tone"
06 "Blues Orgasm"
07 "Radio Signals From Jazz Keys"
08 "Suburban Outerspace"
09 "Face To Face"
10 "Subconscious Piano"
11 "The Future Is In The Past"
12 "A Cosmic Thank You"
The Cosmic Piano is out 6/20 on Cantaloupe Music. Pre-order it here.
