Giving Up Control: A Conversation with Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp on ‘Armageddon Flower’ (Part One)

In Lonely on the Mountain (Bantam, 1980), Western novelist Louis L’Amour wisely noted that “there will come a time when you believe everything is finished, that will be the beginning.” Instead, as Nicholas Copernicus’ heliocentric model posits, our universe is infinite; there is no real end. The concept of continuity is not truly foreign to most. Even ‘80s and ‘90s rock lyrics like “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine,” or “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,” alludes to the cyclical reality in which we live. And, yet, there is a quasi-fatalistic human tendency to find finality rather than acknowledge that a moment is merely an interlude into a new phase. The open refutation of this prevailing mindset is what best distinguishes Armageddon Flower (Tao Forms, 2025) by Ivo Perelman with the Matthew Shipp String Trio. 

At first blush, Armageddon Flower’s title is an act of social commentary. It is a reflection on finding beauty in the perilous era in which the world finds itself. And that is also certainly evident upon hearing the record. At times, you can sonically witness blooming fluorescence in a sea of desolation; new growth out of a deceptively barren landscape. But that is all only surface deep. Flower’s roots go much deeper.

Digging beneath the topsoil reveals personal introspection. Sifting through the excavated terrain, questions arise. What is art? Where does it come from? What is an artist’s role in its creation? When do vines already grown continue to thrive and branch out on their own? And at what point does the artistic ground need to be tilled for the saplings to rise? Two artists at the forefront of artistic expression, saxophonist Perelman and pianist Shipp are ultimately expert gardeners. They have spent four decades planting their ideas into the artistic community. They have nourished them through their own technical skills. Provided great irrigation through the strengths of their relationships with other artists in the group – William Parker on bass and Mat Maneri on viola- not to mention a long history of forty-six albums with each other.  

But ultimately, growth is never assured. It’s not even up to artists at the end of the day. If an acid cloud blocks the sun, what will become of their garden? As two musicians in the twilight of their recording careers, Perelman and Shipp recognize their contributions must take root. Not for ego, but for future growth in the art they love. In this sense, one can say many things about Armageddon Flower. It is a beautiful work by two masters of their craft that slowly develops and buds. But, more than that, one cannot help but sense it is the most realized work to date by both. It is the type of record that provides not only rich organic matter for future planters but that is likely to ensure that no matter how treacherous the terrain, a future seeker will find not a lone sprouting flower but a whole field of them. 

We sat down with both Perelman and Shipp to discuss the album and its deeper implications

PostGenre: You have worked together for almost thirty years. How did you first both meet? 

Matthew Shipp: I knew of Ivo before we played together. I had seen him at the Knitting Factory with a band and thought he was doing interesting things that I wanted to do. I was busy but made a note in the back of my mind to do something with him. For the longest time, I never pursued it. And then Ivo happened to be at a place where my wife worked. Somehow, they started talking, and he mentioned he was a jazz musician. My wife told me, and I mentioned how I had always wanted to work with him. So she brought me home his information, and from there, we talked and started working together. 

Ivo Perelman: Yeah, that perfectly explains it. And I remember that pretty immediately after we got in contact, we decided to do a recording together. So we went into a great, now closed, studio in Brooklyn. Matthew, do you remember the name? 

MS: Systems Two. 

IP: Yeah, that was it. Nancy [Marciano] was the manager. It was a beautiful studio. Beautiful sound. Great piano. And Matthew and I hit it off right off the bat. At the time, I was playing some Brazilian folk things based on Brazilian religious chants. I just played a couple of bars of some of that, and we started free improv with the hook. Most of the other cuts were mostly what we do now: improvised pieces. As soon as we started playing, I thought to myself that Matthew was really something and very unique. Playing with him was completely different than anything else I’d experienced playing with anyone else. I intuitively knew we were going to develop a huge body of work. And we ultimately did. Now we’ve done maybe fifty albums together?

MS:  I have no idea—a lot.

PG: The press materials say Armageddon Flower is your forty-sixth record together.

IP: Yeah, well, it would be even more if it were up to me. Matthew is a very controlled guy. He puts the brakes on some projects to wait for them. Every time we go to the studio together, I want to do something big like a series of five records or a box set of twenty. Thank God Matthew’s a little more sane than I am. 

MS: I’m not going to comment on that. [Laughing].

PG: Do you have any sense of how the way you communicate musically with each other has changed the most over the decades? 

MS: I think our mode of communication was pretty established from the first couple of notes we ever played together. I was working with Thirsty Ear Records at the time and remember calling [the label’s founder] Peter Gordon in the studio – there were no cell phones back then, so I must have used the studio’s landline-  and told him I was playing with this guy who I had instant communication with on some level. 

The bond has only gotten deeper since then. But that’s nothing we control on the outside. That’s just a matter of the fact that when any structure in nature is perceived more and more, you get deeper and deeper into it. So, I don’t know if there’s any change in how we communicate. 

IP: We’ve both changed in our lives and maybe the external stuff around us has slightly changed. But, our communication was established on note two of the first time we played together. With note one, we had to discover what we had together.  By note two, we knew we had an instinctual reset pre-established mental two-way communication. And as we go with our lives and are constantly evolving as musicians, we are individually changing and going to the next level. 

But when we play, there is no limit. The music is limitless. We can keep doing this forever until we die because it will always be challenging for us and very fulfilling for us. And every single meeting, every single recording is not just different, but substantially different than the previous one. 

PG: How much of what you are playing is coming from each of you individually, and how much of it is coming from something else? Matthew’s book, Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings (Autonomedia, 2025), includes a poem he wrote titled “I Have No Influences.” In it, he states that “I intercept electro-magnetic frequencies directly from the mind of God and can convert them to lyrical phrases,” suggesting you are more conduits to a higher power than directing the music yourself.

MS: Well, first of all, I want to say that the poem “I have no influences” is more of a metaphor for taking a holistic approach to music. We all have some pristine virginal relationship to the first cause of everything, whether God or the Big Bang. The poem is a metaphor, and something does take over when creating. Ivo and I have been allowed to have this relationship, a musical marriage of sorts, of two people who stay together for years. You have to wonder why it has worked for us. Many people don’t have something like that. For whatever reason, there’s some understanding that allows it to happen with us. Whatever that is, I think there is a greater thing that takes over. It is more than my language and his language. There’s some gestalt that takes over and has a life of its own and that we can’t control even as we are both conduits for it. 

IP: I think Matthew just touched upon the substantial vital point in all this. He just said that we have no control over it. That’s exactly how I feel, and it is what differentiates our work in the studio and how we play.  For instance, I told Matthew before we recorded Armageddon Flower that I wanted to listen to other music he had done with this String Trio, and he told me not to listen to the other music too much. He wanted us to get into the studio and do whatever happens and ultimately give up control. I have no other choice but to do that anyway. The force that emanates from when the duo meets is unmanageable and uncontrollable. There’s nothing I can do but surrender and know I’m there. My fingers are moving. My heart is beating. That’s all I know. That’s all I can parasympathetically do. Everything else is not up to me. I don’t know if it’s up to God, Charlie Parker, or something else entirely. All I know is that I must have worked with over five hundred musicians in my career, and nothing is like working with Matthew. But to get there, I have to give up control. So, I just went into the studio, and from the first note of the session onward, I gave up control. I thought, I’m not here. This is not happening. This is a dream. Just keep sleeping until you wake up. And that’s what happened. The whole session was like a long, beautiful dream. I did nothing but keep dreaming. I didn’t even register moving my fingers. It was a dream. 

MS: A cosmic dream or a wet dream. 

IP:  Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. 

PG: What is interesting is how you are giving up control while fully improvising. It seems so contrary to the ignorant perspective that many have about improvisation that the practice is inherently an exercise in control; a misguided idea that when improvising, you just go in and play whatever you want in the moment. Ivo, you played classical guitar before focusing on improvised music, and Matthew is classically trained, so you certainly both have experience with improvisation and pre-written music. Do you feel it is easier to give up control when improvising than playing something pre-written?

IP: Yeah, the guitar thing. When I was eight or nine, I realized that I didn’t have what it took to become a classical guitarist. I suffered immensely by having to follow the written music. I used to love the work of [Heitor] Villa-Lobos because his music felt like it was not written. His music is very wild. He uses folk motifs like Bella Bartok did, but his were from native Brazilian music. But I didn’t have the liberty to do that when playing classical guitar. And I knew I was not going to be a musician that sat down in front of an audience and just played what was in front of me. I suffered from doing that. 

I was a good player – a prodigy kid in front of audiences and on TV. But every time, I hated it and suffered. It’s no wonder that I became what I am: a free jazz musician. But there’s nothing “free” about free jazz. It’s exactly what you said. It’s the ultimate control. There’s more control in Armageddon Flower than in any symphonic work by any composer. But it is a cosmic control. It is the control that governs all the universe that separates and attracts molecules, and that contains all the mystery that science tries to explain. We’re just fortunate to be a part of it. 

MS: I was a classically trained pianist, and when I was very young, I wanted to be a concert pianist. I got into jazz heavily when I was twelve years old. It was my calling, and I felt it. I love classical music. I loved the work of [Frédéric] Chopin. But I felt that I could never embody that archetype of a romantic pianist because it doesn’t really exist. Some people feel that is their calling and may feel a natural inclination to make that music come alive again. But as much as I love the image of Chopin in the parlor playing the piano, I didn’t see how that related to the sociology of my life. So I gravitated more to Black pianists that I felt were cool, whether McCoy Tyner, Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill, Thelonious Monk, or Bud Powell. Those were the people I felt an ancestral connection to. It never occurred to me then that I was just following what I felt my divine path was; whatever scripts of my life were written before I came to the planet. 

As it relates to any other mode of being or ways of going about things, one thing Ivo was speaking of is how the music is controlled. We actually do make the claim that we are both good enough at what we do that we can get out of the way. We both have the technical skill and knowledge to play whatever we want, but we work to get ourselves out of the way, so it is the universe itself playing through our instruments. That probably sounds pretentious to many people. It probably sounds extremely egotistical. But we make that claim. Whether someone else agrees with it or not is not our problem. We are just doing what we do and are very serious about it. We take our art and craft very seriously. 

IP: Yes, and that technical skill and knowledge comes full circle with Armageddon Flower. Technicality and knowledge come from a developed prefrontal cortex in human beings more than any other species on Earth. That’s due to changes in systems of food and agriculture and how we changed from hunter-gatherers into where we are today. But think about where we are today. We are on the verge of self-destruction. Demineralized soils. Mental and hormonal sickness. People have never been so sick as they are today. Economies going up and down like a diabetic person who has no sugar control. Politicians can’t control things. They don’t know what they’re doing. And you also have insane politicians taking places of important power. So yes, we are on the verge of self-destruction. That is where our knowledge has taken us, to self-destruction. If that’s the case, it seems that humans’ overdeveloped prefrontal cortex goes against what nature wanted. It’s an experiment that went wrong. As a society, it’s been proven that what we have done has been a failure. 

So, what is the Armageddon Flower? It is that one flower that will survive the destruction and take us back to that primal way of being. Hopefully, with that refurbished primal being, we will remember the good things of this society we are experiencing now, and that’s the armageddon flower. 

MS: As things are now, humanity is going through the same problems over and over and learning nothing from them. That fact really hit me when the war with Russia and Ukraine started. It was clear that mankind had learned nothing. Everybody has the internet now, so all the information is out there for everybody. But people are overwhelmed with information, and society, to me, is just degrading and decaying. We’re not in any type of golden age whatsoever. It seems people are getting dumber and dumber even with all the information available to them. 

Basically, we’ve gone nowhere. Even though we seem to have conquered many aspects of nature – which is an unbelievable phrase. There is much to be said about intuition or instinct. I don’t know what the fine line between those words is, but we’re going to have to get back to a way of living that channels the heart more than the brain. A way that’s more about instinctive marriage with spirit and with the earth. With the invisible things that animate and sustain us. There are primal things that are part of the act of creation that are very beautiful. Those should be the premise of our life, not trying to get an extra ten million dollars that you probably couldn’t even spend anyway.

So, on one level, we’re just going in the studio and playing. That’s what we do so. But on another level, we figure out that any document we make is a statement at the time of things that are in the air.

Stay Tuned for Part Two of our Conversation with Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp. ‘Armageddon Flower’ will be released on Tao Forms on June 20, 2025. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. Perelman and the Shipp String Trio will be performing at Roulette Intermedium as part of the 2025 Vision Festival on June 5, 2025. More information about Shipp and Perelman can be found on their respective websites.

Photo credit: Peter Gannushkin