[Cover photo credit to Anna Yatskevich]
Jazz pianist and composer Matthew Shipp has announced the release of The Cosmic Piano, a new album of solo material, arriving on June 20th, 2025 through Cantaloupe Music. Shipp has also shared the title track via his Bandcamp page.
The Cosmic Piano taps into the potential of the piano, with Shipp channeling a lifetime of knowledge and influences into nearly an hour of spontaneous music.
Shipp says:
The preparation is your life. If you’re a real improviser — and I mean real by acknowledging that it’s a praxis and an art form and a discipline — it’s like being a boxer. You do your road work, speed bag, heavy bag and then you spar, and it’s an all-day process for you. It’s a lifestyle.
This all informs why Shipp wanted to release the album through Cantaloupe, the in-house label of Bang on a Can. The New York-based arts collective has built a reputation for nurturing new music dubbed as “alternative classical,” “experimental classical” or “indie classical,” and is known for collaborating with artists and composers across all genres, including Jazz, Electronic, Rock, Pop and Hip-Hop.
As Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang writes in the liner notes for The Cosmic Piano,
Matthew had the idea that if his music could be heard in the context of Cantaloupe’s catalog, it could encourage people to hear a different aspect of what he does. It isn’t that Matthew made a different kind of music than he usually makes — this music is clearly his! The powerful architecture, the sly dissonance, the joyful and quick changes of pace, they are all still here. What has changed is the context in which we are listening to it. Matthew imagined that changing the frame in which we hear the music might allow us to hear something new in it, something we did not expect.
Shipp will be playing two shows at the Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational chapel in Houston, on June 20 to mark the summer solstice.
The chapel’s website, which features the work of renowned painter Mark Rothko, contrasts the artist with the musician thus:
Mark Rothko’s painted fields somehow resonate. They live in time, like sound, floating off the canvas by way of the viewers’ observation…whereas the sonic resonances of Matthew Shipp’s piano create vibrating sculptures, forms made from the particles of air.
