Carl Watson

I should start out this review by admitting that I know nothing about jazz. There are, of course, musicians I appreciate but in terms of the genre I am, sadly, ignorant. I have heard Matt play and I have a few of his solo recordings and I have made my own subjective notes about them, but that is not what I’ll be doing in this book review. I can’t add very much to Yuko Otomo’s in-depth introduction, but I will try to address some of the themes Matt brings up as he discusses the work of various musicians and how it applies to his own.

In general, Matt’s thoughts send me back to many earlier interests including particle physics and information theory, as well as various spiritualist and occult thinkers I have encountered, some of them coming out of the theosophical tradition that includes Madama Blavatsky. Books like Annie Besant’s Thought Forms, and Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, address ideas about vibration, thought and manifestation that are similar to those Matt speaks about. He also references Taoism and there are even echoes of Alan Watts’ esoteric writings on Christian Mysticism. So there’s a lot to think about in this slim volume.

The Mystery School

The book’s title, Black Mystery School Pianists, points us toward both historical and esoteric reflections on African-American piano playing, jazz, and improvisation. The title essay establishes a category which, like all categories, is somewhat porous, or as Matt says “illusionary.” He focuses on Black musicians but adds that non-Black musicians can be entered this category. However, he is following a specific lineage here, one that is very important to him personally, and he uses the metaphor of a branching tree to illustrate the pathways this coded mystery school language takes across the field of influence and the generations: “…there is a definitive tree-like formation that has seemed more often than not to go down a certain path.”

The common bond between these Black Mystery School musicians is their defiance of standard jazz tropes, academic or otherwise. The names will be familiar to most: Thelonious Monk (the father of the Mystery School), Mal Waldron, Randy Weston, Hassan Ibn Ali, Horace Silver, Andrew Hill, Horace Tapscott, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor. The title essay discusses why these players in particular belong to the Mystery School, but the book also discusses players who are not necessarily of this school, such as David Ware, Roscoe Mitchell, Wayne Shorter, Paul Bley, Dennis Sandole.

The Mystery of the Mystery School

For the purposes of this review, I will differentiate “mystery” from “mysticism,” only because it helps me organize my thoughts concerning the ideas presented in this book. Mystery, for me, implies the maintenance of a secret (intended or otherwise), while Mysticism is an active process, or to put it another way, mystery is an occultation of knowledge while mysticism is a process of spiritual and psychic integration. In most cases, they serve one another, as when mystery protects the mystical process from the unserious or uninitiated.

Why Mystery? Matt writes that the word ‘mystery’:

“implies a secret code, passed through an underground way of passage, a language outside the mainstream of jazz….” (21)

and which is resistant to “academic codification.” This coded language includes both phrasing and notation, but also the construction of a form of expression that fulfills the musician himself, but also communicates non-verbally to the uninitiated, or at least those willing to open themselves up to what is being transmitted. Unlike the languages of secret societies these codes are highly individual, iconoclastic, and they are transmitted via the player’s own invented techniques.

The audience for this music does not need to have technical knowledge or even understand the symbolism, such as it is, in order to be affected or to appreciate the artistry. I would call attention to when you hear a language that you do not understand—you can appreciate the musicality and the emotion of it without knowing the grammar or syntax or even exactly what is being said. This type of experience might even feel superior to one that is burdened with specific technical knowledge or meaning.

As a personal example, a lot of Western opera is sung in Italian, French or German and there are well-known Eastern forms such as Chinese and Natya Sangeet of the Indian tradition. I don’t understand what is being said when I hear these, but in some way that lack of understanding enhances my appreciation. In fact, I never liked opera that was sung in English, it took away the “mystery” of the experience and even distracted from the dynamism of the work. I also find opera lyrics to be cliched and corny. Another example might be the art of Alchemy, which is highly symbolic. I can appreciate its strangeness as an aesthetic value without needing to know what the symbolism means. In fact, it might be better not to know. The same goes for music, you don’t need to know the names of the notes played or the key signature in order to feel its emotional power.

Zero, Tao and the Void

More than half of the book discusses particular musicians, but quite a bit of it gets into Matt’s esoteric thoughts about his own playing and improvisation. And here we move from the “mystery” of the coded transmission to the “mysticism” of practice, which for Matt, has much to do with the duality of the void. In the chapter “Zero Lecture,” Matt writes about the void in Taoist terms:

“When I talk about zero, I am talking about my relationship to the void.”

Later, he says:

“Well, I like the void. I like Lao Tzu. Voidness is emptiness. Emptiness is fullness. Improvisation, to me, is voidness.” (77)

How does this relate to his playing? He immerses himself in the dialectic between form and formlessness, which has a generative nature. The universe is vibrational and vibration generates form. “Vibration in a vacuum generates an eternal pulse.” He adds that for such a pulse to communicate, it must be shaped into phrases.

“For the pulse is a continuum and must be broken (into) phrases if it will transmit a discursive meaning to listeners.” (77)

He adds that, despite the psychic fulfillment this can give, it can also produce a sense of religious dread, and he wonders as to the cause of this feeling. Here he takes the interesting additional step of extending this analogy, by relating Taoism to Christian Mysticism: The Word is vibration within the Void. The Word made Flesh results in the Incarnation of Christ.

“The logos. Greek word, for word. I assume some of you have a Christian background, so you are familiar with the phrase in John 1 about the incarnation of Christ, and the word was made flesh, and the word dwelled among us. Is that communicating a very similar feeling that the Tao Te Ching does? Vibration to form, non-form to form”

Sounds like it to me. And the word was made flesh.

In a similar transitional process, the vibrational universe is made physical in the act of playing the piano. Matt describes himself as both a conduit for these vibrations and an interpreter of them, facilitating the move from void to vibration to the physical act of pushing down piano keys to produce his “language.” He believes all pianists, and all improvisational musicians in general, are drawing from this same cosmic pool of vibrations, generating their own language from this primordial meta-language.

Void and Improvisation

If we define mystical practice as that by which one finds a path of merging with a greater truth, we can include various spiritual processes—e.g., Qawwali singing, Gregorian or Tibetan chanting, ecstatic Sufi dancing, or any other physical activity specifically meant to lift the mind out of the physical. For Matt Shipp this activity is “pressing the keys on the piano,” specifically improvisation, where he feels not only that he is channeling the LOGOS, and vibrational language of the universe, but he becomes it — he leaves his limited human self and becomes an agent for something outside and beyond himself.

For Matt, opposites are interdependent — the duality of silence and sound, vibration and stillness. Without Void as a contrast there can be no music, and without music there can be no Void. Thus, improvisation implies Voidness. For the silence of the Void is always there, behind the music. He even speaks of the notes he plays as building a temple for silence. As an improvisor he plays the oppositions inherent in creation, building a sacred architecture that shelters the highest form of music, which is silence.

Esoteric Origins

Here it is worth looking at the mythological origins of Matt Shipp as a piano player. He writes that, when he was a kid, he was instructed by an angel who taught him a complete system of mathematics, on which he would base his musical language, allowing him to improvise to infinity. This angel implants itself in his brain generating the rhythm and the notes he will play. When this happens, he becomes, effectively, one with an alternate 4th dimensional personality whom he calls Mr. Chromosome. This Mr. Chromosome, his muse and guardian angel grows inside him like a musical cancer, creating a pressure to be expressed in music. This all may sound a little far-out, (or as Yuko Otomo writes: Sci-Fi); the point being that he is drawing from a deeper source than logic or reason, something beyond or before our staid notions of cause and effect.

Another reference to his personal spiritual origins occurs in a short essay titled, “I Have No Influences,” in which Matt describes his relationship with God and the piano as beginning before time.

“I have no influences — I existed together with god and the piano before time began—my piano playing is the direct result of the fact that my mind and the cosmic mind that sustains the universe are in harmony ….” (41)

There he becomes attuned to the pool of vibrations whereby, in his human manifestation, he is able to intercept frequencies directly from the mind of God. In some sense all improvising pianists are resonating with this cosmic brain in their effort to construct who they are or want to be. Improvisation is prayer and meditation, a form of trance, wherein the LOGOS is made flesh through the process of playing, it is how the player finds or makes himself.

Jazz and Boxing

Throughout the book Matt emphasizes the physicality of playing, and how the impulse to push down the keys comes from a confrontation with the vibrational energy of the universe and the need to channel, it, to shape it. Nowhere is this physicality more explicit than in the comparison between jazz improvisation and boxing, a comparison that seemed at first, incongruous to me, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense as both activities are extremely physical improvisations.

“A kinetic chess game—signals being translated at the speed of light—what is the essence of jazz and what is the essence of the killer instinct as defined in Boxing? A text of the manipulation of signals in a dance of gestures, can both boxing and jazz be seen as a dance?” (27)

Fighting and playing a musical instrument are both a dance of gestures involving reflexes and rhythm, action and reaction, the ability to shape and reshape and explore new possibilities.

“The body becomes poetry in motion whether through the keyboard or in the ring.”

The esoteric meets the physicality of the nervous system and the motion of the body acting and reacting.

In jazz, this dialogue, this dance is most obvious in the jazz duet, but it is also apparent in the solo improvisation. You can hear it in the music—the delicacy mixed with the rumble, a base line stomping about beneath the often delicate flights of notes, the dialogue of action and reaction, approach and flight, offer and refusal or acceptance, but the fight, or dialogue if you will, is with his various selves, his own ideas.

Another thing that I think relates to boxing, although this is not expressly stated, is that there can no rest in the fight itself. Once in the thick of it, falling into a pattern or predictable cliché leaves the fighter vulnerable. The improvisor also has to keep the dance going until the bell ends the round, or the improvisation is ended. by the player. Predictable patterns or familiar cliches can be seen as a form of musical rope-a-dope, which can signal submission or even defeat of creativity.

Conclusion

A subject that comes up throughout the book is the question of what exactly is “jazz” and what is Matt Shipp’s relation to it. The concept itself is questionable. At one point he claims he has mutated out of jazz. At another time he says: “Jazz does not exist.” Elsewhere he writes:

“As far as jazz is, I personally don’t give a fuck about it. Jazz means nothing to me. It’s a word. It’s an alphabet. A set of symbols. A symbol system used to explore the psyche to get at something.” (76)

What the something is just might be the silence and eternity of the Void.

“I would not push one note down on the instrument if I could portray my position in the void in my head space without playing. When playing, I am aiming for that silence. I am aiming for that meditational space where formlessness becomes form, where nothingness becomes something.” (83)

In the essay, “The Algebra of Non Jazz,” he writes:

“I am an actor doing what universal energy calls me to do—pushing down certain vectors of piano poetics on the keyboard. It—(the act and process) and I exist for no reason, we do what we do because there seems to be a desire for it to be done.” (71)

Where does that desire come from? I don’t know. But I’ll end with a quote the Tao Te Ching:

(Lao Tzu, trans. Steven Mitchell)

–Carl Watson