Matthew Shipp and William Parker: Furious Consonance

In the spectrum of the jazz avant-garde, Matthew Shipp and William Parker represent vintage free-jazz skronk. Bassist Parker is an alumnus of the bands of Cecil Taylor, arguably the father of free jazz. Together, Parker and pianist Shipp often work with another former Taylor bandmate, tenor-saxist Davis S. Ware. And Shipp is Taylor's foremost young disciple on the keyboard. When Shipp and Parker held forth at the ICA Theatre (presented by the Boston Creative Music Alliance) a week ago Thursday, their performance was alternately brilliant and tedious.

Unlike other hues of the avant-garde, Taylor jazz offers few signposts for the listener: no regular beat or key or chord patterns, not even the static, grounding harmonies of modal jazz. Improvisation may be based on a simple recurring leitmotif, free pulse-like rhythms, or nothing more than a particular feeling. Along those lines, Shipp can unleash delicate filigree in the piano's upper register, or his fingers can scatter rapid flurries of notes, or he can hammer away with both hands at the bottom end of the keyboard, sending up a vast, roaring shout. You can sense the deliberation and technique in Shipp's marksmanship. But this music is not about linear development, the narrative of melodic line, or even the vertical forms of stacked harmonies and scales. It's about texture and mass (one of Shipp's album titles is Critical Mass), even the push and pull of negative and positive space.

Last Thursday night, Shipp and Parker played two sets of about 45 minutes each, plus a five-minute encore. The first set included "Autumn Leaves" and the second "Summertime." But those standards were mere way stations in the overall musical assault. As Shipp ascended and descended the keyboard, thinning the textures out to a lacy transparency or whipping them into dense, seismic clusters, Parker often followed him with a regular pattern of evenly spaced quarter-notes sounded in a thick, blunt tone. I call them quarter-notes, but this was not the "walking" of jazz in 4/4. Parker's time is his own, and if that sounds like a metaphor, then maybe Parker intends it that way. With that massive tone and the single-minded urgency of notes leaning first into the beat and then away from it, Parker doesn't so much keep time as carve a path for himself out of the air. It's a furious, joyful, liberated conception of his instrument.

Shipp and Parker walked roughly the same path, converging when Parker mimicked Shipp's high notes with trebly buzzing strings (and his thicker textures, with droning double stops) or the two landed on a repeated unison of slamming chords, like a chant. I'd say Parker had several of the more memorable moments. He began the second set with some dissonant bowing that conjured a distant train whistle, and he kept repeating a bluesy three- or four-note fragment that became a kind of call and response, answering busy double stops and left-hand pizzicato flourishes. The melodic fragment grew louder, softened, moved into the distance and returned, then dissolved again in another burst of aural scribbles.

Rock strongman Henry Rollins's 2.13.61 label is releasing a lot of Shipp material, old and new. You can hear him with Parker on Zo, with the legendary Chicago saxophonist/composer Roscoe Mitchell on 2-Z, and on the reissued Critical Mass with Parker, violinist Mat Maneri, and drummer Whit Dickey. A recently released trio album with Parker and Dickey, Prism (Brinkman), recorded in 1993, features just two tunes, Prism I and Prism II, both nearly a half-hour each. The addition of Dickey is welcome. He helps fill out this music's propulsive, trance-like, tidal force.

-- Jon Garelick