The coronavirus does not seem to have slowed the release of new work by much, though I have noticed a significant uptick in publicists’ emails of late. Here are three new releases from completely different musical universes named Anne Mette Iversen, Julian Wild, and Matthew Shipp.

Anne Mette Iversen Quartet +1
Racing a Butterfly (Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records)
A review
I’ve enjoyed the articulate music of bassist/composer Anne Mette Iversen for some time now. I’ve even played some of her music when guesting on Patti Littlefield’s noon jazz show on KUNM, but for some reason, I don’t seem to have ever written about her. That has to stop, and her latest, Racing a Butterfly, offers an excellent excuse. Inspired by an encounter with an unexpected but welcome lepidopteran companion while on a run in the south of France, Iversen composed the title track to celebrate the playful interlude, and she went on to compose eight more tunes that circle around the butterfly theme. She enlisted her longstanding quartet—with John Ellis (tenor sax), Danny Grissett (piano), Otis Brown III (drums and cymbals)—and added Peter Dahlgren (trombone). The added trombone really underlines Iversen’s compositional skills, highlighting her sensitivity to texture and conversation. The music shines with her characteristic intelligence and warmth, tickling the brain and energizing the heart. Every buoyant moment, whether composed or improvised (and at times it’s not easy to tell which is which), has an immediacy to it, as much due to the composer as to the band, neither of which wastes a note. The energetically jocular “Triangular Waves” opens the proceedings, and the playfulness continues on the title track, with the sax winding itself around the trombone, much the way the butterfly did Iversen, and with the band alternating rhythms on the fly. “Parallel Flying” (Parts 1 and 2) has Ellis and Dahlgren doing exactly that, and it brings to mind all the sorts of parallel flying that we all do every day. The short and lightheartedly mysterious “Butterfly Interlude” divides the album, giving way to “Dancing Butterflies,” with a flowing Ellis solo; “Cluster,” which has Dahlgren rubbing pleasantly against the grain; “Reworking of a Butterfly,” with close work between the horns. “Butterflies Too,” whose four-note piano motif Iversen stunningly expands into the gentle head, closes the album. Fun, refreshing, and substantial, Racing a Butterflysatisfies on multiple levels.

Julian Wild
The Brightroom Sessions, Vol. 2 (Bandcamp)
A review
Following up last year’s volume 1 (reviewed here), which he described as a coming-of-age album, The Brightroom Sessions, Volume 2, indicates that Julian Wild has, indeed, come of age, more concerned with the world around him than with his interior landscape. Not that his interior landscape was uninteresting. It was just narrower in scope than what he addresses in eight original songs on volume 2: the endless cycle of eros and thanatos. Again, it’s just solo Wild, his warm baritone and his finger-picking on acoustic or electric guitar, with occasional, subtle percussion, and that’s enough. Recorded in February during a month-long self-imposed isolation, volume 2 finds his vocalization just as personal as before, but there’s a new freedom to it, and the understated guitar work has matured. Among the highlights are the album’s opener, “Life’s Too Good to Waste,” an oasis of peace and anticipation that sets the mood. “Eventually,” with a particularly nice guitar part, marries love and loss while acknowledging the temporary nature of things. Temporary is the nature of the loving in “Safe with Me,” and Wild finds the beauty in an encounter with no future. “Brief Candle” opens with this verse and chorus and goes on to further explore the topic:

There’s a list of things that god regrets
Written on a pack of cigarettes
There’s a fine line and little time
Between when we live and when we die
There’s a fallen angel in my car
His wings are clipped so he can’t fly far
He says times are tough when push comes to shove
Hang onto what you love

Cry for me but not tonight
Life is short and then we fly
Out of sight and into heart and mind

“It Would Be Love” is Wild’s one wish for the world, and it’s a stirring anthem that begs for a full band treatment in a big open space.

Wild has told me that he has pretty much given up on making a living from his music, but if he keeps writing material like this, he will have no choice but to do exactly that.

Matthew Shipp
The Piano Equation (Tao Forms)
A review
The Piano Equation, Matthew Shipp’s latest solo release and the first from drummer Whit Dickey’s new label, is my first close encounter with the pianist/composer, and its 11 original pieces have me looking forward to the next. Shipp’s sui generis musical language, an ear-capturing mélange of tremendous expressive power, can ambush you with its beauty, and if you speak a little Erik Satie and Thelonious Monk, you will pick up on that language pretty quickly. Like Satie, Shipp can wax lyrically and eccentrically transparent, as on “Piano Equation,” whose occasional clouds he effortlessly clears away, and also marshal a dense phalanx of marching chords, as on “Tone Pocket.” Like Monk, he can boogie with the best of them, as on “Swing Note from Deep Space.” Referencing the history of jazz piano, this track’s collage-like construction deepens the message with each new element that appears. (At one point, there’s a brief American songbook moment that sounds like a snatch of music you might hear as you walk quickly past the open stage door of a Broadway theater.) Shipp’s concretely abstract and multicolored vocabulary covers a seething and spinning storm (“Vortex Factor”) as well as it does a tender declaration (“Piano Equation”). He dares himself to stay balanced as he dances across the top of a fence on “Clown Impulse” and teasingly withholds resolution on “Land of the Secrets.” The reflective mood of “Piano in Hyperspace” is countered by the dark, ready energy of “Cosmic Juice” and the unraveling R&B march of “Radio Signals Equation.” On “Emissions,” Shipp plays as if he is transcribing electromagnetic emissions from a nearby star, while “Void Equation” is all juke and cut. As challenging as it is entertaining, The Piano Equation demands repeated listenings and repays with interest.

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© 2020 Mel Minter