For someone whose impulsive music typically focuses on "right now," Matthew Shipp has seemed pretty nostalgic as of late. Last year he released a Greatest Hits compilation, and I’ve Been to Many Places also mines his past, presenting solo piano versions of songs he previously performed with groups. Look closer, though, and it turns out both records are tied to the present. Greatest Hits encompasses recent history, culling his Thirsty Ear output from 2000 on, and *I’ve Been to Many Places *has an immediacy that eschews sentimental reflection. Pulsing and bubbling with focused drive, the record focuses more on where Shipp’s mind is at the moment than where it’s been in the past.
On I’ve Been to Many Places, it sounds like Shipp received a shot of B-12 before recording, as sifting through his past has apparently re-energized his present-day self, giving him potent launching points from which to chart untrodden paths. Even when he covers well-worn classics like "Summertime" and "Where Is the Love?"—standards that have been stretched to the point that there’s no elastic left—Shipp somehow unearths treasures buried in their familiar ring. In that way, his playing recalls the rapid-fire tangents that guitarist Bill Orcutt ventured on his 2013 all-covers album A History of Every One.
But compared to Orcutt’s penchant for off-key dissonance, Shipp hews to a more melodic range, which contributes to the impressive nature of I’ve Been to Many Places. The music possesses a bracing freshness due to Shipp’s singular method of expression; he jumps up and down phrases, darts in and out of chord changes, and splits notes into branches so quickly that it can prove dizzying. There’s a sense that the distance between his thought and actions is constantly approaching zero, and Shipp has claimed in regards to his music that “You are directly listening to my brain waves," a sentiment nicely summed in the title of "Brain Stem Grammer".
It may sound like *I’ve Been to Many Places *is a frantic, exhausting sprint, but despite the fact that Shipp’s brain is operating in high gear throughout, the album has as many moments of calm and restraint as it does clusters of machine-gun activity. On halting cuts like "Pre-Formal" and "Symbolic Access", Shipp’s deliberate chords slowly separate until there’s real, palpable silence between them. His reverent take on John Coltrane’s "Naima" seems to fade into itself, so when his runs get faster and pricklier, a core gentleness remains. That dual effect—the feeling of still beauty inside busy expression—permeates much of I’ve Been to Many Places, but regardless of tempo, Shipp's sense of thoughtfulness is constant.
Crucially, Shipp never allows any moment to feel arch or pretentious. That’s not easy to avoid when revisiting past work, be it your own or someone else’s; the temptation exists to apply complicated techniques or conceptual frameworks as a way to transform originals, but as Shipp explained recently, “I’m not exactly sure what’s going through my head when I interpret these songs...There might be an agenda on my part, but it gets murky where the actual conscious agenda is coming from.”
As a result, all the deconstructions and rebuildings on *I’ve Been to Many Places *are more visceral than theoretical, and you don’t have to know anything about jazz modes or music theory to drown yourself in Shipp’s waves—which explains why the album’s best moment is its straightest. Shipp takes two stabs at Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s '70s hit “Where Is the Love?”, and the first runs straight through the verses and choruses in just 90 seconds, injecting them with a gallon of adrenaline. In formal terms, it’s an anomaly—nowhere else does Shipp stick so tightly to his borrowed script—but as he turns momentum into emotion, packing many moods into what seem like nano-seconds, Shipp perfectly captures what makes *I’ve Been to Many Places *so exciting to listen to.
