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

We continue our conversation with Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp on ‘Armageddon Flower’ (TAO Forms, 2025). You can read Part One here.

PostGenre: As far as focusing on the heart, does that go back to getting out of the way, too? Obviously, you need mental and technical skills to be able to make the music you make. But you are also trying not to over-rationalize everything. 

Matthew Shipp: OK. Bruce Lee is one of my idols. I think he’s one of the great simple philosophers because everything he says has a directness and simplicity to it. Someone asked him once what his technical goals were within martial arts, and his response was, “To have no technique.” I think that is one of the greatest quotes ever. He’s referring to a level you can get to only through hours and hours of practice. It takes that much work to let yourself really be able to give yourself over to unconscious, subconscious primacy. But he’s also speaking of a level of trust where you’re at one with the event. In a fight, the whole dance of the two fighters is choreographing itself, so actually, he’s not even fighting there. He’s not even throwing the punch. He’s floating in a unified, universal hole with the whole event. And there’s even no separation between him and his so-called opponent. So, when he said his technical goal was to have no technique, he meant when you really give yourself over to the universal, the universe, or universal processes to do stuff through you. The paradox of it all is it takes years of practice to have the narrow construct to be able to throw it all out. 

PG: So, is that ability to throw it out part of what makes the music sound so fresh? You have both worked with not only each other but also the other two members of the String Trio in so many different configurations over the years. Granted, part of it is probably just working with William Parker but even after all the years together, the music never sounds routine or repetitive.

Ivo Perelman:  It’s because what we do is endosymbiosis. I love biology, so I use a lot of terms that biologists use. Endosymbiosis means that it’s more than just an interaction between us. It’s a multiple four-way symbiosis where one changes another, and both end up changed. That’s how cells developed over billions of years. With endosymbiosis, we are moving away from comfort zones and from comfortable zones at all times. And that makes this band very unique and special. We hate to get into things we have heard before, or that feel familiar. 

We’ve never spoken about it, but I’m sure William would agree with me. I know for sure that Matthew hates sounding familiar. So that’s why we always always sound different. Just as every day is different. Every minute is different from the previous minute. We’re trying to just be truthful and recreate what life is about; a constant flux, a constant change. 

MS: William Parker is a vibrational musician, meaning he’s studied bass and everything, but he’s tapping into something almost pre-African. He’s tapped into something that goes back so far and could even be unearthly. And if he’s playing off the grid as far as any kind of academic ways of teaching music, and if it’s a real subconscious process, the subconscious process is going to renew itself constantly. Every night, you have different results. There may be patterns. But different things keep coming together and dissipating and reconfiguring in different ways. And if you have a bunch of individuals that both naturally can relate to each other, and that’s all happening in all of their playing, then the reconfiguration of the group sound is going to be very different from CD to CD. So, I think there is a natural reconfiguration that goes on between us, all of us. 

I will say it has been a marvelous thing in my life to have worked with William Parker for all these years. He’s such a unique figure in the world. To have been able to have a friendship and musical relationship with him that’s lasted from the time I moved to New York – I met him in ’83 or ’84 – to now has been more than a dream come true. 

As for Mat Maneri, he grew up in a musical family where his father was a composer. His father was also an improviser, and that mode of being was brought to him at a very young age where it had a chance to really inculcate itself in him and take on a life of his own. He grew up in a family where they played [Arnold] Schoenberg and [John] Coltrane for breakfast. I met Mat when he was a teenager. He seemed to me at that time to be a complete rebel. When I met him, he looked like a punk. 

And none of the four of us learned jazz academically, per se. In my case, I studied, as a young musician, with Clifford Brown’s teacher and John Coltrane’s teacher. The way I approach learning jazz was very different from people who go to college and study it. I learned from teachers who taught two of the greatest jazz musicians in the history of the world, and they both had a very intuitive approach to teaching that did not center around things like method books.  

William studied with Jimmy Garrison, Wilbur Ware, and Richard Davis. Even with that, he is basically his own man. He just got some knowledge, some approaches, and some ways of thinking from all of them. But he was his own man before he even played bass because he used to listen to records and practice playing bass on a broom as a teenager. By doing that, he was coordinating a kinetic connection between the notes he was sharing and hearing in his brain and the instrument. His physical being and his spirit were connecting before he even played bass. It was like he developed a sense of himself playing music as opposed to going to the Berklee School of Music and learning their method. 

That’s all to say that the albums and the music change on their own. Again, that’s the lack of control from our point. There’s a reconfiguration happening on a subconscious level in all our playing and then collectively, when we get together. 

PG: I think that is all of the questions unless Matthew wanted several about André 3000. [laughing]

MS: [laughing]. I will say that anybody who thinks it’s cool that he put out an improvised piano album or music album without having done the work is well advised to listen to Armageddon Flower and understand the difference between people who have dedicated their whole lives to the art and craft of doing something like this compared to what seems to me to be a stunt – or, at least, that is how i perceive what André did; I don’t assume to know his actual motivation –  by somebody who has not put in the work. I would hold up the record as a testament to the life and the art. To the craft of people who are presenting a mature product that comes from a whole lifetime of thinking about the questions that are involved with actually creating music in this way. I do think that this record stands out in an unbelievable way and is worthy of everything. I say that egotistically and non-egotistically. It stands out in a way that’s very important for this time. 

IP: To me, Armageddon Flower was not created for random reasons. At this particular time, Armageddon Flower is not a random name. It’s a serious name for a serious music that reflects a serious moment in world history. Personally, this recording is a landmark because I feel like there’s nothing that I should say after it. If I keep recording, it is because I have nothing better to do or just want to enjoy myself. But as far as music material, I’m finished with this album.

MS: I’m nearing the end of my recording career, too. I know I’ve been saying that since 1999. But even my friends are saying they can tell I mean it. 

PG: Do you actually think both of you would be able to step away from it, though?

IP: I could keep recording forever, but what’s the point? I meant all of what I have done, and it’s there, recorded. So that’s it. 

MS: I have two recordings coming out this year and two box sets coming out next year of things that have been sitting around. And then after that, I plan one more record that will be done outside the jazz paradigm and will probably be sold to an art gallery. But after that, yes, I can see myself stepping away. I’ll be sixty-five at the end of the year. I take up a lot of oxygen in the jazz world. There are many younger players who I think are great And deserve more attention. I don’t want to keep recording. I’ve gotten a lot of press over the years and a lot of accolades that many great musicians don’t feel they received. I don’t want to keep putting stuff in the marketplace out of a feeling that I haven’t gotten my due yet. At some point, I want to be able to theoretically go up into the ashram like Alice Coltrane did and maybe come out every once in a while to give a concert. But it’s not like you’re trying to be relevant within the jazz industry. 

I take up a lot of oxygen, and people pay attention to my recordings. At some point, I want to step out of the way because there are some young people who I think really have a lot to say and are not necessarily getting a lot of press at the moment. I know I’ve had to battle with other people that I feel have taken up too much oxygen. In their case, I didn’t feel that their work justified the attention they received. Instead, it was mostly from reputation and history. I do feel that Ivo, William Parker, and myself keep growing, and I feel that our work warrants it. But I still don’t want younger people to be in competition with me for oxygen. 

IP: Also, even if I never stepped into the studio again, I have many albums in the can already. It would probably be a few years after I’m gone before everything is released.  There’s just not enough time to release it all. So, at some point, there may be many recordings released by me, but they would have been made years earlier.  

MS:  Mainly on your own label, right? 

IP: Yes. Some of them I recorded for my own label long ago and will keep releasing them. I’ll designate somebody to release them after I’m gone if it comes to that. But Armageddon Flower is a fundamental album for me in the sense that it was such unbelievable perfection and the way it came about. Also, for the social and historical reasons that I described. I learned a big lesson from this session. Every session teaches you something. This one taught me that every book has a last word on the last page.  

MS: We as humans are finite even though our spirits are attached to infinity. Theoretically, everything is infinite. With the construct that we are now living in as Ivo Perelman and as Matthew Shipp, there has to be a last chapter of the book. William Blake once said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Everything connects to everything in the universe. And if infinity is a mathematical concept, then everything could go on forever in a theoretical way. But we’re not dealing with theory. We’re dealing with physical matter within this dimension, for which there has to be a last period or a closing of the book at some point. 

That doesn’t mean the book can only suggest finite ways in people’s imagination. Every listener is a fresh construct in the universe. Every listener brings a whole new set of images, listening habits, and a listening history. So, every listen by a new person is a whole new thing, and the work of art hopefully takes on a whole new life.

‘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: Anna Yatskevich