Photo by Daniel Sheehan

If the casually curious observer were perusing Matthew Shipp and Joe Morris’s discographies, they might think they’d come upon a pair of potentially unnerved math/science-heads. Shipp’s “Harmonic Oscillator” and “Algebraic Boogie,” Morris’s more surreal “Stare into a Lightbulb for Three Years” and “Radiant Flux”: the tune titles suggest more than a hint of the experiment, of the long focus and aesthetic unreeling of new knowledge.

Indeed, that sense of discovery is what binds Shipp and Morris. They’ve found myriad ways to build their compositions and improvisations, each delving into dozens of musical configurations and always bringing to them a semi-singular voice that metamorphoses as they play in different contexts. And just as Shipp headed into almost-uncharted territory when he began curating Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series in 2001 and recorded with the Antipop Consortium, El P, and DJ Spooky in 2002 as part of the series, Morris continually re-drew himself into new bands that challenged his prevailing language and, eventually, switched from his first real instrument, guitar, to playing acoustic bass.

But we get ahead of ourselves.

For Shipp, the journey started when he was in Wilmington, Delaware, in his single digits, as a 5-year-old taking piano lessons. He progressed into a love of jazz at the turn of adolescence, and with that in mind headed to New York in 1984. It took him a few short years before Shipp recorded a set of duos with alto saxophonist, Rob Brown, and then a few more years before Shipp’s real first-move came out: Circular Temple, with William Parker and Whit Dickey. Released on post-Black Flag-era Henry Rollins’s Infinite Zero label, Circular Temple was a bold statement for its sheer thoughtfulness, its slow efflorescence, its unbending patience.

The way Shipp struck chords and notes, his narrative sense, these demonstrated one of the freshest sensibilities available. He wasn’t trying to stoke kinship with the energy clusters of Cecil Taylor, but Shipp found much to embrace in the overall sonics, the shadows and the echoes and the moods that Taylor and, say, Bill Dixon embraced. Quickly Shipp went on a tear, recording multiple albums almost every year from ’97 up to and including ’09. Trios, quartets, solo sets, duets, a dizzying 15 albums with tenor saxophonist David Ware, Shipp has been among the most tireless players. He’s found in-the-pocket grooves and energy bursts and cryptic abstractions all incredibly tantalizing.

Up in Connecticut, Joe Morris came to the guitar as a teen, playing gigs within his first year of playing. His jazz epiphany happened with John Coltrane’s Om, as unbridled a display of energy as any in the history of recorded music. Morris took his growing musical curiosities and headed to Boston, where in the 1970s he delved into free improvisation, spent the ‘80s starting his own label and releasing his albums, and then during the ‘90s created swirling, dense, and then crystal-clear (if nervy) guitar work alongside Shipp, Joe and Mat Maneri, Rob Brown, Eugene Chadbourne, et al.

Morris’s sound on guitar was sui generis, unlike anyone else. He had a meaty tone, free of distortion, and he had a mangled way of tying and untying knots, moving in long, sometimes loping, always tireless bursts of creativity. In 2000, Morris decided to play bass, too, making himself a guitarist’s bassist, someone who could weave rhythms as if they were harmonies.  He’s played with Shipp for more than a decade, starting with the Morris ensemble set Elsewhere in 1996, moving to Thesis: Duos in 1997, continuing in ’09 with three separate sessions bringing the pair together. But the duo, that’s a level of intimacy and close listening that commands attention, and the Shipp/Morris pairing will do that ineluctably with this event.

Photo by Paul Jacquat

Photo by Laurence Svirchev

Opening, the extraordinary singer Saadet Türköz performs songs from her Khazak and Turkish backgrounds, transformed through her knowledge of Western music, particularly free jazz, and through the most unleashed of improvising.

After beginning her career with an impromptu performance at a friend’s wedding, she recorded her first CD Kara Toprak in 1994, and her second, Marmara Sea, in 1999, before traveling to her parents’ homeland to lay down her third release, 2006’s Urumchi. It comprises love songs, lullabies, dirges, and folk songs, extended through improvisation and accompanied by Kazakh musicians playing such instruments as the dombra lute and the kilkobuz, another stringed instrument.

Her stunning technique aside, the essence of her performances is the conjuring of the most mysterious and transporting of moods and hues. As Türköz has put it: “I seek to evoke pictures and atmospheres by means of voice and music which transcend cultural boundaries.”

Tonight Türköz performs with the cellist Peggy Lee, who has been a fixture since 1989 of the fertile music scene of Vancouver, British Columbia. A participant in many projects there, including the renowned NOW Orchestra, she also has been a frequent collaborator with Canadian, American, and European players. She is, for example, a first-call band member for visitors to the city’s famed annual jazz festival, including trumpeter Dave Douglas, guitarist Nels Cline, and Seattle-based keyboardist Wayne Horvitz. Her repertoire takes in improvising, new chamber works, and electro-acoustic ensembles, among them her Peggy Lee Band, formed in 1998 to perform and improvise around her own compositions. And it has won wide acclaim; Downbeat said it “exemplifies the strength and maturity of the Vancouver jazz and improvised music scene,”  while the New York Times praised its flowing, organic sound.

Raised in Toronto and trained in classical music at the University of Toronto, Lee has said that her evolution as a musician quickened when she arrived in the West and interacted with musicians like, her now husband, percussionist Dylan van der Schyff: “It wasn’t just a matter of the kinds of sounds; it was more breaking out of being a reader and trying to get the flow happening – of hearing and playing at the same time. Some of the techniques that I use in written music, and especially in new music, I’ll use as an improviser, but sometimes I also like to play with a nice tone. Or in tune. I’m not trying to discard my whole training, but just get the other part of my brain working as far as thinking creatively at that moment.”

Those are qualities that lend themselves ideally to her duo with Saadet Türköz. As Lee noted in a 2005 interview: “I don’t know that I even play experimental music. It’s just music that makes sense to me given who I am and where I come from.”

– Peter Monaghan