TAO Forms

13/12/2025

Great, in-depth, illuminating interview with Matthew Shipp Matt Shipp just published on The Ideas Letter, conducted by Leonard Benardo, senior vice president for the Open Society Foundations.
"The Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, are the world’s largest private funder of independent groups working for rights, equity, and justice."

[ If after you've read this piece, you'd like to read and/or gift more from the mind of Shipp, go to aumfidelity.com where Matthew's book Black Mystery School Pianists is currently on exceptional offer, together with a select choice of recent exceptional recordings. ]

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-pure-act-in-a-dirty-world/

The great and ferociously original jazz pianist Matthew Shipp riffs with Benardo on what it means for a musician to find a truly personal sound—something deeper than virtuosity, rooted in…

07/12/2025

Very Happy Birthday Wishes Today to the incomparable MATTHEW SHIPP !

He is a masterful cosmic synthesist & sonic accelerant in any situation, enacting a deep devotion to transcendence through sound.

I'm tripping that we've been friends & working together for over 30 years now. First with the David S. Ware Quartet at Homestead Records which work of course continued with AUM Fidelity, along with numerous other stellar projects. And, together with Whit Dickey, launching the TAO Forms label in 2020 w/ Matthew's The Piano Equation. On and upwards >>

1. photo by Anna Yatskevich
2. Codebreaker (2021)
3. Village Mothership (2021)
4. Armageddon Flower (2025)
5. The Piano Equation (2020)
6. Black Mystery School Pianists (Autonomedia Book, 2025)

Listen where you do. Go to Ahttps://aumfidelity.com/products/matthew-shipp-black-mystery-school-pianists-and-other-writings
to pick up a copy of his book in new mad-special bundle offers with one of above ❤️🔥💯

Matt Shipp Whit Dickey AUM Fidelity

06/11/2025

"Listen to Hikmah straight through, uninterrupted. Thomas’ talent is staggering, and his music is unequivocally transportive." –Jim Hynes, PostGenre

Releases tmrw November 7, 2025 on TAO Forms
Full review at PostGenre here:
https://postgenre.org/review-hikmah-pat-thomas/

Photo credit: David Laskowki .laskowski.photography


Fully Altered Media

https://www.instagram.com/p/DQuOzz2EfcS/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

08/08/2025

These perennially wonderfully glistening summer events for the young (and young-at-heart) folks to dance & sweat Body & Mind to at MoMA PS1 in Queens. TODAY late afternoon/evening >>
>> FRED MOTEN & BRANDON LOPEZ >> be of it! Very much looking forward!

Grip their enrapturing Duo album at our site:
https://aumfidelity.com/products/fred-moten-brandon-lopez-revision
or at our Bandcamp:
https://nevernotagravedigger.bandcamp.com/album/revision

https://www.momaps1.org/en/programs/609-warm-up-2025

08/08/2025

Armageddon Flower: "The project represents a testament to the evolving power of long-term partnerships, and to the art of improvisation not as chaos, but as communion" >> from yet another well-felt & elucidated review of this astonishing work; these responses have been non-stop since the albums release on June 20. Read full, pithy review at link.

Purchase the CD album direct from our site:
https://aumfidelity.com/products/ivo-perelman-matthew-shipp-string-trio-armageddon-flower
Or at our Bandcamp:
https://matthewshipptaoforms.bandcamp.com/album/armageddon-flower

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/armageddon-flower-ivo-perelman-tao-forms__21555

Ivo Perelman: Armageddon Flower album review by John Sharpe, published on August 8, 2025. Find thousands jazz reviews at All About Jazz!

20/06/2025

Kind greetings,

The epic, vital, and timely ARMAGEDDON FLOWER was released on TAO Forms today.
matthewshipptaoforms.bandcamp.com/album/armageddon-flower

It is also available in full-recorded-res 24bit/96kHz
matthewshipptaoforms.bandcamp.com/album/armageddon-flower-24bit-96khz-hi-res

And, CD Bundle specials with 'Garden of Jewels' are now available with both versions.

The press response to Armageddon Flower continues to be unprecedented.

Read the voluminous run-down/exhortation here: bit.ly/4n9gRza

17/06/2025

This Week on GGilles Petersons BBC-6 music programme (!!) >>

First time meeting, and at Maida Vale studio:
Fred Moten & BBrandon Lopez& PPat Thomas
A mighty bonus of Moten/Lopez ' recent UK visit to CCafé OTO

Of course you'll want to listen to the entire programme; to jump right up on this session, 1:39:25

Gilles shares an uncompromising jazz session and music discoveries from across the world.

17/06/2025

Nameless Sound and Rothko Chapel Present: A World Premiere by Matthew Shipp

On the occasion of the Summer Solstice, we invite you to experience a one-of-a-kind performance inside the Rothko Chapel.

Kinetic Process, composed especially for this sacred space by renowned pianist and composer Matthew Shipp, will receive its world premiere. Shipp is a pioneering figure in avant-garde jazz whose sonic language draws from jazz, classical modernism, and abstract expressionism.

His compositions unfold as vibrating sculptures—sonic forms made of air, rhythm, and time. Set within the Rothko Chapel, where painted fields resonate in stillness and light, this performance becomes a living conversation between sound and space, movement and meditation.

How will sound move the eye?
How will color orient the ear?
Where will these monumental forms of sound and light meet?

Critics call his work “a surrealist narrative” (New York Times) and “a fresh range of possibilities for contemporary pianism” (Wall Street Journal).

Register now to be part of this powerful moment of artistic convergence:
https://www.rothkochapel.org/experience/events/register/2588

14/06/2025

Great Read: brand new feature in the newly revived (great!) JazzTimes on Ivo Perelman and Matt Shipp written by Tad Hendrickson on occasion of Armageddon Flower's imminent release:

Saxophonist Ivo Perelman was at a momentary loss on a recent afternoon. He’d gone up to WKCR the day before, on the Columbia University campus, … Read More "Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp: Staring into the Abyss"

13/06/2025

Also just recently up on Burning Ambulance by Phil Freeman, a focus on James Brandon Lewis' outstanding series of Quartet recordings, a committed and distinguished group featuring Chad Taylor, Aruán Ortiz and Brad Jones. All released by the Swiss label, Intakt, including the brand new, very, very beautiful and powerful, 'Abstraction Is Deliverance', which leads with a deeply effecting piece titled after & dedicated to the immense saxophone colossus, David S. Ware.

It seems impossible, given the breadth and depth of his output, but it’s true: Tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis has only been “on the scene” for a little over a decade. He’s made mor…