The improvising jazz duo is a potent form, offering chances for dialogue, battle, and confluence. There’s immediate pressure on both players since neither can hide, so the opportunity to create tense, vital music is palpable. This seems especially true for piano and drum collaborations, since the piano—more so than horns or strings—is often a percussive instrument, and thus can intersect and connect with drums in unique ways.
On Cactus, drummer Bobby Kapp and pianist Matthew Shipp take advantage of the possibilities inherent in their setup, persistently passing ideas back and forth in a wordless conversation. The quality level matches the participants’ pedigrees. Kapp came up in the middle of the ’60s free jazz groundswell, playing with saxophone legends Pharoah Sanders, Marion Brown, and Noah Howard. Shipp, meanwhile, has been a mainstay in New York’s improvising scene since the mid-’80s, best known for his work alongside bassist William Parker in saxophonist David S. Ware’s quartet.
Yet* Cactus* represents only the second time Kapp and Shipp have recorded together—following 2015’s Kapp-led quartet album *Themes 4 Transmutation—*and they had never played as a duo until they pushed the record button on this fully-improvised session. Given that level of unfamiliarity, their quick reaction time and thoughtful interplay are impressive. The pair lock in immediately and never lose their keen eye-to-eye focus, engaging in such thorough dialogue that it’s hard to find a moment where one isn’t responding to the other.
The responses that Kapp draws out of Shipp are some of the latter’s most percussive playing on record. There has always been a heavy rhythmic bent to the pianist’s music, but here he’s so inspired by Kapp’s versatile work that at times it sounds like he wants to be a second drummer. Passages in the rolling “Money” and the meditative “After” find Shipp tapping chords between Kapp’s snare strikes in an impromptu call-and-response. In other spots, the pair’s exchanged pulses shift into less orderly flights, such as when Shipp’s hard-beat notes dissolve into Kapp’s cymbal runs on the gripping “Before.”
That last example demonstrates the most compelling aspect of Cactus: the duo’s precise tonal control. Kapp and Shipp move from calm to urgent to portentous in single turns of musical phrase, bringing a wide range of moods completely and assuredly within their grasp. They certainly push each other, but they never overreach (one particularly dissonant passage in the aptly-titled “Snow Storm Coming” could be a mess in shakier hands, but here it feels like humans controlling weather). The thrill of *Cactus *is not that the music could fall apart at any moment, but that this duo can handle anything they throw at each other.
