"We Should Talk About Music": Matthew Shipp and Ethan Iverson on Writing as Practice

 For this episode of The Buzz, JJA Book Committee chair Bob Blumenthal speaks with the winners of the 2026 JJA Jazz Awards’ two Book of the Year categories: pianist Matthew Shipp, honored for Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings (Autonomedia), and pianist and critic Ethan Iverson, honored as the writer behind Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart (Cymbal Press).

Shipp and Iverson are both working musicians who write, and the conversation keeps circling back to what that dual life costs and gives them. Shipp traces his path from commissioned blog pieces to a book collecting essays on David S. Ware, Paul Bley, and Wayne Shorter, plus prose poems on boxing, decadence, and the New York club scene he came up in during the 1980s. Iverson describes fifteen years on the road with Billy Hart before finally getting the older drummer on tape, reading him the manuscript twice, and watching Hart pull stories back out both times. Both men also discovered, mid-conversation, an unlikely shared history: each once worked as a dance-company music director, Shipp for a small post-Cunningham troupe in the 1980s, Iverson for the Mark Morris Dance Group decades later.

The episode also catches Shipp and Iverson comparing notes on a much more recent flashpoint: the online reaction to André 3000’s ambient flute album, which briefly made Shipp’s own criticism go viral. But the conversation’s real center is a shared argument about criticism itself. Both reject the old line that music writing is “dancing about architecture,” insisting instead that jazz criticism, done by people who actually play the music, is inseparable from the playing.

(The musical excerpts heard in this episode are “Iverson’s Odyssey” from the Billy Hart Quartet’s 2006 album Quartet and “Nu Bop,” the title track from Matthew Shipp’s 2002 album on Thirsty Ear.)

Buzzworthy Notes

Guest & Host

• Matthew Shipp — official site
• Ethan Iverson — official site and Do the Math archive
• Bob Blumenthal — JJA Book Committee chair; two-time Grammy winner for album notes

Discussed

• Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings — Matthew Shipp (Autonomedia, 2025); introduction by Yuko Otomo
• Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart — Billy Hart, as told to Ethan Iverson (Cymbal Press, 2025)
• Billy Hart — NEA Jazz Master; Iverson has played in his working quartet since 2003
• David S. Ware — saxophonist; Shipp played in his quartet for sixteen years
• Paul Bley — pianist; subject of one of Shipp’s essays
• Wayne Shorter, “Night Dreamer” — the 1964 Blue Note album Bob Blumenthal cites as still holding up on repeat listening
• Steve Dalachinsky — poet; longtime friend and collaborator of Shipp’s, referenced throughout the book
• Dewey Redman — saxophonist; the first musician whose stories convinced Iverson of the value of oral history
• Nasheet Waits — drummer; source of the “start playing like I’m teaching” line Iverson cites
• Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original — the Monk biography both guests recommend; Kelley also blurbed Shipp’s book
• Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones — 1977 collection of musician-to-musician interviews Shipp calls a formative read
• J. C. Thomas, Chasin’ the Trane — early Coltrane biography Shipp says changed his life at twelve or fourteen
• Hampton Hawes with Don Asher, Raise Up Off Me — the memoir Iverson used as his model for pacing and length while writing Oceans of Time

The 2026 JJA Jazz Awards

• Oceans of Time is Book of the Year, Biography or Autobiography
• Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings is Book of the Year about Jazz: History, Criticism and Culture
• Full list of 2026 winners: JJA Jazz Awards · announcement

Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need. Visit jazzfoundation.org.

This podcast is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

Transcript

Lawrence Peryer: Hello and welcome to The Buzz, the podcast of the Jazz Journalists Association, an international professional organization of writers, photographers and broadcasters focused on jazz.

I am Lawrence Peryer, proud JJA member and managing editor of The Buzz. 

The JJA Book Committee reads through dozens of new jazz books every year and hands out its Jazz Awards for the best of them. This time, two nonfiction winners are part of one discussion. Ethan Iverson won the biography and autobiography Award as the co-writer behind Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart, from Cymbal Press. Matthew Shipp won the history, criticism, and culture Award for his essay collection Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings, out on Autonomedia. JJA Book Committee chair Bob Blumenthal sat down with both of them for a unique talk with two working musicians who are also Award-winning writers. Here’s that conversation.

Bob Blumenthal: Hello, I’m Bob Blumenthal. I am a board member of the Jazz Journalists Association and the chairperson of the JJA Book Committee. We read on average three to four dozen books a year, and we then submit nominations for the JJA poll. This year we nominated four books in the autobiography/biography division, and three books in the division we’ve called history, criticism, and culture.

We have with us today the author of the winning book in the second category, Matthew Shipp, whose book is Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings. And — I don’t get to use this word often — the amanuensis of the winning biography/autobiography book, Ethan Iverson, for Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart, As Told to Ethan Iverson. We’ve got two guests here who are both great musical artists and very talented writers, and in my brief encounters with each, very articulate individuals.

So I think we’ve got the makings of a good session here. I wanted to start by asking each of you about your writing history, because I know you’ve each been doing it for a while. Let me start with Matthew: how did you get into writing? When did you start?

Matthew Shipp: I’m a very heavy reader. Over the years, a lot of blogs just asked me to do articles on certain things, so it happened mainly because I was commissioned to write pieces for blogs and various websites.

I do write kind of prose poetry about my own creative process, but that was something I originally did for myself with no ambition of publishing. A couple pieces got published, and then people would ask for more. So I had a backlog of material from writing for blogs and websites over the years, and I guess I’m officially a writer on some level now. But it was never an ambition of any sort. I love language. I love reading. I immerse myself in language a lot, and I’ve been asked to write on things — usually things pertinent to my own interest in artistic things that really move me.

I don’t really consider myself a writer in the sense that a journalist gets a call to do something and can go do the research and put it together. Things need to gestate in my mind for a long time before they flow out. That’s how I got into it — I guess I’m a writer, since I have a book.

Bob Blumenthal: Ethan, I know you’ve been writing for quite a while. Do the Math goes back over twenty years, I believe. I wanted to ask about your history — how you got into writing.

Ethan Iverson: Yeah. Let me actually back up for a second and say thanks for having me here with both of you.

I’ve been reading Bob Blumenthal since I was a kid. And Matthew, I’ve got to say your conceit about the Black Mystery School — I think it’s a very good conceit. There’s a lot of weight to that, and I fully support that essay. You’re definitely, as far as I’m concerned, on the side of the angels with that one.

I guess where I grew up, there was no jazz. I was in the most lily-white belt of the nation, in Menomonie, Wisconsin. Very few musicians of any sort — country music was the dominant form. To try to learn something about the music, which I’d only heard on TV — off of Sesame Street, and Mister Rogers, and a James Bond movie, and a Pink Panther cartoon or whatever — the only way I could try to figure it out was to go to the library, find some records, and read the books. So I’ve always had an intense relationship to jazz criticism, which is quite different from my mentor, Billy Hart.

The book we just produced — Billy lived the music. He’s a practitioner. As far as I’m concerned, anything he says is the truth. He has a library, he knows some jazz books, but I don’t think reading the critics has much to do with his life experience.

That’s not true of me. I’ve read the books. I’ve thought about them, and decided whether I agreed or not, after the fact, as it were.

Bob Blumenthal: So when did you actually start writing?

Ethan Iverson: The Bad Plus had its surprise breakout success in 2003, and that was more or less simultaneous with the dawn of the internet, and the dawn of blogs.

I remember reading a few early music blogs and thinking, “Oh my God, I finally found fellow obsessives who are willing to talk about their passion for free on the internet.” In retrospect this was a golden era — maybe 2003 to 2010, something like that — where it wasn’t just jazz, but the nerds of the world, whatever their passion, got to put out their research for a few years. It was exciting, and I think a lot of that work is lost now.

There was a jazz blogosphere, and I had a little bit of a political reason too. I figured I was playing in front of these surprisingly large audiences who were treating us as if we were something new and special, and I wanted to cut across that a little and say names like Thelonious Monk to my audience.

So it was quite practical, in a way. I thought, okay, if I have a platform, let me shine some light on people that I think are important.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay. I want to ask each of you about the particular books that won the award. Matt, you had these various essays you’d done, and the time came to put them together. What inspired you to put them together in a book, and how did you go about it?

Matthew Shipp: I have to give credit to Yuko Otomo, who did the introduction to the book. Her husband was Steve Dalachinsky, a poet who lived in Soho for years and used to run an open market on the street — everybody used to come by his open market. James Blood Ulmer, Rashied Ali, Jean-Michel Basquiat — everybody would be out there. Steve and I were really close friends, and Yuko encouraged me to put the essays together.

The initial idea was to have something really positive, because I’d adopted the role of enfant terrible a couple of times and done some essays that were meant to provoke more than anything — those were excluded because they’d served their purpose at the time and weren’t needed here. I just wanted to combine a lot of my interests.

I have a poem on boxing and jazz — I see a real connection there. I moved to New York in ’83, and I was a club kid in the ’80s, because I didn’t start going on the road until around 1990, when I joined the Ware Quartet. I was music director of a dance company, but other than that I wasn’t going to Europe or anything. I was in New York every night, waiting for my career to begin, going out to dance clubs. I had a whole social life in New York in the ’80s, in the same kind of circle that Basquiat and those people were in.

So I have a very colorful past and view of New York from that ’80s scene, and I wanted that to be part of the book too. Then I wanted to do portraits of musicians I really love. I played with David Ware for sixteen years — he passed away, and I wrote three obituaries when he died: one for The Daily Beast, one for ASCAP’s website, and one for NewMusicBox. I was only able to find two of them online, so those are in the book. When Paul Bley died, I did a little piece in JazzTimes — that’s in the book too. And a piece for The Wire on heroin. I’ve never been a heroin addict, but I was around it constantly with older Black musicians and also in the club scene with the kids, and I managed to stay away from it. But I was always intrigued by the transcendental aspect of people needing something like that, whether it’s musical language or a substance. So I just wanted to collect a bunch of essays that interest me, and that I thought would interest other people too.

I just want to say one thing about something Ethan said. When The Bad Plus was at its most popular, I was also doing a lot of crossover work, if you want to call it that. It was a great period — I want to commend them for bringing a lot of people into jazz, and they were having fun doing it. It was fun and good, and I don’t know if Ethan was apologizing earlier for the fact that a lot of people might not have known who Monk was. There’s nothing wrong with doing honest, good music and bringing people into the fold. I think in that period they’re to be commended for really bringing people into jazz, and not in a stuffy way. I think it’s a really good thing.

Bob Blumenthal: And that was your Thirsty Ear period, right?

Matthew Shipp: Yes. Yes.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay. You touched on a couple of things — first, a connection with Ethan I wasn’t aware of, because Ethan, when I first heard of you, you were known for working with Mark Morris, I believe. Is that correct?

Ethan Iverson: Yeah. Who did you work with, Matthew — who were you the music director for?

Matthew Shipp: Situ was the name of the dance company. Elaine Shipman was the major choreographer — she used to be with Merce Cunningham for years. She was a Black woman; she’s died since. Her co-director was a guy named Harry Shepherd, who’s also died — I think he was an AIDS victim, back in the ’80s.

Ethan Iverson: Of that era.

Matthew Shipp: Yeah. He was actually from my hometown, Wilmington, Delaware, which has nothing to do with our connection. He’d won a bunch of Bessie Awards, which were the big awards in dance back then. It was a post-Cunningham type of dance company. I didn’t know you worked with Mark Morris — wow.

Ethan Iverson: I guess we have more in common than we even realized, Matthew.

Matthew Shipp: Including Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Ethan Iverson: Oh, hey, there we go. We’ll continue this Zoom after Bob is done, with the Buffy —

Bob Blumenthal: — knowledge bomb. So the other thing you already touched on, Matt, that I was going to ask you both about later, was deciding what to leave out when you put something together. Billy says in the book, “I could tell a lot of stories, which I won’t, except in the case of one musician who I knew quite well and has been the subject of many stories.” Ethan, how did your book come together with Billy — what he was willing to give, what you had to prod him on, and putting the whole thing together? Could you talk about that?

Ethan Iverson: I think, as Matthew is alluding to, there’s nothing quite like talking to someone who’s an authority. Not everyone is an equal authority. Billy Hart is an authority, and that’s what I felt from the first time I met him. Not only was he a great drummer — that’s obvious — but he also had incredible wisdom in what he’d say, and it turns out that everybody in his orbit says the same thing: talking to Billy Hart has always been a concentrated dose of wisdom.

The first master I had anything to do with was Dewey Redman. I didn’t really know Dewey, but we made a little record together and then did a tour, and he told me all these stories. I suddenly realized I didn’t know anything about this music — Dewey was the truth. I kept thinking about those stories, and then Dewey died a little on the young side, and I realized no one ever heard them; the stories aren’t part of the record. The only way you heard those stories was if you knew Dewey.

A week later, I went out with my recorder to Billy Hart’s house and got an interview from him on tape, and that was the beginning of many interviews I did for Do the Math. When COVID hit, we were supposed to do a tour for his eightieth birthday. All the gigs got canceled, so I said, “Okay, Billy, let’s get on Zoom — I’m going to interview you for the book.” He said, “No.” I said, “I really think we should do this.” He said, “All right,” a little recalcitrant. I think if you’re really in this music — not like me, but if you’re someone who’s really in it — what you allow to be part of the record is a fraught affair.

I read the manuscript to him twice, and he took things out both times. I thought, I’ve got to stop reading this to him, because he’s going to keep taking stuff out. I’m just going to get this to the finish line and let some of the more racy things stand, because I do think it’s important. It’s important to know these are humans too, that there’s flaws and humor and ghastly things that happen. There’s not too much of that in the book, but a lot of memoirs are less interesting than they should be, because at the last moment the author says, “You know what —” At the same time, I always like it when there’s some real salty stuff in a book, so I did what I could to get as much of it as possible into the final manuscript.

Bob Blumenthal: How much — setting aside the parts he might have wanted to exclude — how about withdrawing information you both agreed should be in there, but he just wasn’t raising?

Ethan Iverson: I’ll tell you this, Bob: I was uniquely suited to do this, because I’d been on the road with him all these years and heard so many stories, and I remembered them. So I really prompted what I thought were the juicy bits. I’ve seen an author come in — what was the word you used? Begins with an A.

Bob Blumenthal: Amanuensis.

Ethan Iverson: Sometimes those people are just hired at the last minute to do the job. In my case, I’d been staring at this guy for fifteen years and making mental notes, and then finally got the chance to do the book. By that measure, I was qualified.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay. In my experience, both interacting with Billy and hearing from other musicians, he’s a very inspirational individual, so I can imagine it was wonderful hearing him tell his stories. I wanted to ask you each: what moves you to write about a topic? Because the whole universe is out there, musical and otherwise — what brings you to the point where you say, “I’ve got to write about this”?

Matthew Shipp: First I want to say something about Ethan — I think you just sold me a book. I’ve been pretty busy with stuff, but I’m now very curious. I actually love Billy. I don’t know him well, but he heard me play very early in my career — I did a duo with Rob Brown, and we opened for the JoAnne Brackeen Trio, which he was playing in. He came backstage — this is when we had no name or anything — and he was just really supportive. I’ll never forget that. Especially early in your career, when an icon comes backstage and says something, it means everything to you. He’s just such a warm person, the few times I’ve met and talked with him.

What gets me to write about a topic? It has to have interest to me — I’m always trying to connect with my own audience more deeply. If something’s of interest to me, it’ll be of interest to people who might be interested in my music, and that’s one thing. One topic I’m very interested in is myself — I think I have a pretty good talent for going inside myself, seeing what makes me tick, observing it, and being able to write about it. I can write about my own internal states, what drives me, and how I think it might pertain to other artists, or not.

Other than that, it’s hobbies I really enjoy — martial and fighting arts, dancing, literature, especially certain kinds, especially decadence: Henry Miller, Genet, William Burroughs, people like that. I’m intrigued by what motivates and drives people to do things, and by what drives me — I have an intense drive. At the same time, I can look at myself and think I’m a joke also, and the metaphysics of all that really concerns me — metaphysics in general. So that’s what drives me to take a topic and try to dissect it, see it from my point of view, and see how it relates to other people.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay.

Matthew Shipp: Ethan has an extremely great mind for actually pulling things apart in the jazz vocabulary and describing them. I want to say one thing about the Black Mystery School — I once read something he wrote, and I couldn’t find it again. I tried to find it online — it was about Mal Waldron, about how his phrasing doesn’t quite fall under a lot of people’s hands, how it’s oblique. I couldn’t find it, but it actually tied into what I said in the Black Mystery School piece. If he remembers where he wrote that — I searched online and do remember reading something of that sort from him, unless I dreamed it.

Ethan Iverson: I’m sure, Bob, you can relate — after writing a lot, you don’t always remember where you wrote something. Maybe that’s the case here. But for sure, we share a lot of the same heroes — people who see the world in a certain way. I guess one of the things that gets me — I don’t know if “inspired” is the word — is that I feel my role is, in part, to actually be a musician in the conversation. There’s been a lot of excellent jazz criticism, but not all of it comes from a musician’s perspective. So I felt, when I started blogging, there was room for that — and I suspect Matthew feels the same, that there’s room to actually be a player, a practitioner, and say, “This is how I think it goes.” It’s not unprecedented in jazz, but it’s comparatively uncommon, I’d say.

Bob Blumenthal: The greatest gift I ever received was someone finding a complete set of The Jazz Review in an antique store and giving it to me as a present. One of that magazine’s missions was to have musicians write, so you found a lot of very interesting material that was first-person, as it were.

I wanted to ask a question from my own perspective, because in recent years so much of what I’m doing is revisiting older music, and whenever I’m confronted with that, I go into it thinking, “Am I going to have the same reaction that got me so excited about it, possibly decades ago?” It’s such a relief when I do — not that I had doubts, but it just happened to me yesterday: am I still going to think Night Dreamer by Wayne Shorter is one of the most brilliant things he ever did? Yes, I still feel that way — what a relief. But I wonder: when you’ve landed on a topic, do you go back and revisit the artist, and have any second thoughts in the process of putting your thoughts together?

Matthew Shipp: In my book, the artists I did little essays on — like David S. Ware, I played with him for sixteen years, obviously a big part of my life. I did an essay on Paul Bley, who’s like God to me — every time I hear Paul Bley, it’s a recreation, like the pieces come alive again in a new way.

There’s a short essay I did on Wayne Shorter, originally for NewMusicBox, because he won some big award — this goes back to around 2001 or 2002 — and he wasn’t there to receive it, so they asked me to write something. That essay is pretty general, but the basic premise is that his language bridges people. If you take the compositions he did in the Miles Davis period, people who approach jazz from post-bop or whatever — that’s a quantum, open universe of sorts, with suggestions that go toward free jazz. And Wayne Shorter is obviously very influential within fusion too. The premise of the essay is that he influences so many generations and different musicians, and that we could all be at each other’s throats about stuff, but you always come back to the importance of Wayne Shorter as a composer and musical thinker. That’s very rare — that somebody’s language is that open. You can have criticisms of various parts of his long career, but you always go back to him. I don’t want to say he’s a Bible, but he’s an intense generator of concepts and approaches.

So there was nothing — everything in the book, every musician I dealt with, are people who’ve been a big part of my education and life as a musician, and they will always have a place in my heart.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay, Ethan — do you have second thoughts?

Ethan Iverson: Yeah, I co-sign all that, but something comes to mind when you talk about going back to something. I remember reading, in high school I think, the last interview of Thelonious Monk, and Monk says, “When you listen to an old record, it doesn’t sound the same.” That’s what he says. I remember reading that and thinking, “Huh, I wonder if that’s true.” I wasn’t old enough to know then. Now I’m old enough to know that I agree with Monk — those old records you knew, they don’t sound the same. At least not to me.

Matthew Shipp: Are you talking about listening to your own records, or other people’s?

Ethan Iverson: Either way, probably.

Matthew Shipp: Because I think it’s always a recreation. Your own records — if it’s been enough years, you were a whole different structure, a whole different creature then. It’s like looking at — I don’t want to say a corpse, but a whole different thing. Depending on your mood, that can be really good or really bad.

Listening to other people’s work — with Monk, the solo record he did in Paris, the first thing he did, it’s been under different names, I don’t even know what it’s called — I’ve been listening to that since I was fourteen, and I’m sixty-five now, and every time I listen to it, a new dimension opens up. That doesn’t happen with every artist, but with that record, and with Monk, it does.

Ethan Iverson: That’s really one of the greatest records of all time — the Paris record.

Matthew Shipp: There are no words for it, exactly.

Ethan Iverson: Really, it’s incredible.

Matthew Shipp: Right.

Bob Blumenthal: I find there’s music that made me this rabid consumer of jazz — that really excited me — and artists I heard at the time who became my iconic artists from when I was thirteen years old. To go back fifty-plus years later and write about some of that music, you have to stop and say, “Okay, I had a relationship to this to the point where I could probably sing some of the solos.” Whereas anything made since I started writing, there’s very little where I can still sing the solos. So I try to say, don’t let my teenage enthusiasm get in the way of my contemporary understanding of what this music means. That’s where the issue arises for me.

Ethan Iverson: Bob, I’ll just say I think this is a very deep point you’re making — that we’re all infected by our first love.

Bob Blumenthal: Right.

Ethan Iverson: As a critic, it’s easy to just keep fighting the battles of your first exposure, your first loves and griefs in this music. I can’t really say that about myself, but I can see it in certain authors — they never got over something, they could never see it a different way. Someone else is good at staying contemporary. I think that’s an interesting topic, and it’s certainly not just in music — it would be anywhere. The culture critic is one of the demons they fight is themselves, for sure.

Bob Blumenthal: In my case, on the one hand, I say it’s a good thing that what got me into this was Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis. But at the same time, I’ve been listening to music ever since and taking in all kinds of other influences. Each of you represents music I wouldn’t have conceived of when I was fifteen, but now I can appreciate your music as well as other people’s. I wondered if the musical activity you’re involved in at a given time inspires any writing on your part — I know you’ve each had both long-standing relationships with specific ensembles and other kinds of projects. As you move from one musical setting to another, does it inspire writing?

Matthew Shipp: I’ve never had that experience. I think there’s a bifurcation in my mind between what I’ve written and the actual projects I do. I’m also a very private person, and I guess some people who see my online presence wouldn’t agree with that. Musical creation is a very personal thing to me. No specific musical project of mine has inspired the writing —

Ethan Iverson: Okay.

Matthew Shipp: — the writing, for me, is always more general metaphysical questions — like why I’m even bothering to do this, or why the universe even needs it. That’s where I come from, not specific musical things that lead to a piece.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay, Ethan?

Ethan Iverson: I’ll reframe this slightly, because someone told me something I thought was very important — it crystallized something, and it definitely relates to what Matt’s talking about. The great drummer Nasheet Waits — I think he’s amazing, this guy, great drummer and a very interesting personality — teaches at New England Conservatory next to me. We were hanging out one time, and he told me, “I just worry that I’m going to start playing like I’m teaching.” I thought that was really smart to say.

That’s actually not spiritually the same as being a practitioner — they don’t necessarily even go together, they could actually be antithetical to each other. I do think writing jazz criticism could be antithetical to being a good jazz player. This is stuff that’s on the table, not something I’m dismissive of. I’m trying to be a practitioner, I’m a teacher, and I’ve certainly written a hell of a lot of jazz criticism. But at the same time, a good gig — if I’ve played a gig I liked — doesn’t really interact with either teaching (I’m not going to tell any of the kids what I played) or the criticism, because I don’t really explain too much of what I’m trying to do anyway. I agree with Matt about being essentially private, and I’m sure most of my heroes also regarded it as a pretty private affair.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay. You touched on this earlier, Ethan, but technology has changed dramatically in the twenty-first century — I wondered if that’s inspired, inhibited, or affected in any way your feelings about writing and the need to write.

Ethan Iverson: Matt, I’ll answer it first.

Matthew Shipp: I hate technology — if I had my way, I’d just have a pen and paper and be in a cave. I actually slightly have a mind for it, which bugs me slightly, because I can figure stuff out. But I’m just old school, man.

Ethan Iverson: I think it’s worth acknowledging, perhaps for the historical record, that both Matthew Shipp and I were part of the hot-take economy surrounding André 3000’s piano record.

Matthew Shipp: I was wondering if that was going to come up.

Ethan Iverson: I think it’s worth saying, because if we’re talking about technology, this whole thing is rampant.

Matthew Shipp: That album was not moderately viral — that was viral. I never had a week and a half of my life like that week.

Ethan Iverson: Really — what happened, Matthew? Let’s hear about it.

Matthew Shipp: A writer Bob knows pretty well, a friend of mine, called me up and asked if I’d heard that album. I said no — he’d put out a piano album. We were talking on the phone, and he said, “Yeah, you should — you have a big mouth, you should say something about it.” He was joking with me — “You say things about people’s projects, this is really horrible.” I said, “I don’t care about — whatever.” As I was talking to him, I put it on YouTube, and I thought, “My God, this is horrible.”

I kept saying, “But I’m still not going to write anything,” and then, “Wow, this is really hard.” I was doing a search, still on the phone with him, and I saw the photo from the Met Gala with the piano on his back. I thought, “Fuck this guy” — the whole idea of a celebrity putting out a half-baked piano album, probably selling a lot of copies, and just showing off. So then, in utter madness, I wrote that. It just came out.

I went to practice — I don’t have a piano at home — and walking home from my practice room, I was thinking I should probably erase that, that I’d just let off some steam. I ran into a friend, a kid I know in the neighborhood, and he said, “Wow, that thing you wrote about André is really intense.” I know he’s young, his generation doesn’t do Facebook, and I said, “How did you see it?” He said, “People are talking about it, it’s all over.” I went home, and there were articles coming up every half hour in some newspaper. It got to the point where I was at a store and a woman behind the counter — who knows me, but doesn’t really know this area of the music — was looking at Google News on her phone. She said, “Oh, I see you went off there, André, there’s an article here” — she had Yahoo News open — and everybody in line was looking at me.

That whole week I was almost in hiding. I got stopped by people on the street, some hip-hop-looking people I didn’t know, all cool, wanting to talk about it — some really agreed with it. I’ve never experienced anything like that. I remember waking up one night at two in the morning and seeing a discussion about it on a website in Saudi Arabia — I couldn’t read the text, but the captions were in English.

Ethan Iverson: I’m really glad you said that, because it needed to be said.

Matthew Shipp: Right.

Ethan Iverson: If we’re talking about technology, there are a lot of different things at play there. The Met Gala is a certain kind of tech thing in a way —

Matthew Shipp: Right.

Ethan Iverson: — where you’re trying to make a splash. His album was recorded, I think, on an iPhone, then mastered in a sort of home-studio setting. Matthew’s response, and mine, were both — mine was moderately viral, no one stopped me in the street — but Matthew’s response was genuinely viral.

Matthew Shipp: I think my language was so strident, people weren’t used to that. That’s why — people were like, “Whoa.”

Ethan Iverson: I enjoyed having someone else on my side.

Matthew Shipp: Right.

Ethan Iverson: Because people don’t like to hear it about their pop stars.

Matthew Shipp: No, they don’t.

Ethan Iverson: Someone like Taylor Swift is apparently essentially armored from criticism. From what I understand, you can literally not criticize her online.

Matthew Shipp: Right. But there were a lot of André fans who actually wished he was doing hip-hop, and some of them didn’t mind the flute album because it was New Age. I ran into a lot of André fans who weren’t coming from where we were coming from — more like, wondering what’s up with this. I saw a lot of that.

Ethan Iverson: Wow.

Bob Blumenthal: I’m much more of a technological Neanderthal than either of you.

Matthew Shipp: I’m a Neanderthal too.

Bob Blumenthal: I find myself restraining from saying, when I go to the library and look at their new jazz releases, “You bought this celebrity’s crappy excuse for a jazz album when there are all these great artists you can’t find on your shelves” — but I control myself most of the time. I’ll name the artists when we’re done, off the air, because we don’t need to give them added publicity.

Musicians have different attitudes toward practicing — some practice hours a day, some say they don’t practice. I wonder about writing: if you haven’t written for a while, do you feel you need to keep the chops up? Does this ever come up?

Matthew Shipp: No, because I don’t consider myself a professional writer — I consider myself a musician who has insights into my own creative process, and has periods. I’m always immersed in language, I read a lot, I run prose poems in my head. This is going to sound weird, but I write a lot on social media, and I try to strike a real balance between being a rabble-rouser and just trying to bring people in. I guess that’s where I get my practice. But I don’t work at it as a craft — if I feel inspired, I might sit down and write a prose poem for myself, but only when inspiration hits. My brain works constantly, I run experiments with language in my head a lot, but that’s not the same as sitting down and having stuff actually come through.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay. Ethan, maybe you write so much you don’t need to practice — I don’t know.

Ethan Iverson: In terms of the Billy Hart book, I’d never written a book before. I was looking at this document of all the interviews — I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of words — and I thought, I want this to be the size of my favorite jazz memoir, which is Hampton Hawes’s Raise Up Off Me, written with Don Asher. That was my model: pocket-sized, not too big, but every page pretty exciting.

A lot of memoirs are pretty boring, especially the first two chapters — no one cares what your grandma did in 1805. I really wanted to cut to the chase and have really heavy technical content. I think the book is too technical for some people, but I figured we’ve got Billy Hart actually telling us the secrets of the music — I’m willing to risk the memoir being a little hard to read for a non-musician.

I really liked working with an editor, a guy named Suja Hader — he banged the thing down into something smaller and advised me on some very good structural things. Then I had two gigs in Europe a couple of days apart, at the height of summer, and I said, “I’m going to go to Florence for four days, lock myself in the cheapest hotel room I can find, do room service, and finish this darn book.” That’s what happened.

I want to thank Cymbal Press for putting the book out, because it’s so challenging to do anything artistic these days, thanks to technology and everything else. Gary and Sylvia at Cymbal Press have now put out several important jazz books — the Phil Woods book, a really interesting book of Richie Beirach and Dave Liebman, other books by Joel Harrison — I think, if this connects to the Jazz Journalists Association, a very important anthology. Anyway, they were really easy to work with. Sylvia’s a great copy editor — all of it was very smooth. I just wanted to plug Cymbal Press while I have the moment, and thank them for their work getting this book out.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay. I was going to ask each of you if you could recommend one other book, besides your own, for the people listening to this podcast to read — new or classic. Ethan, you’ve already mentioned the Hart autobiography, but throw in another if you’d like. Matt, let me ask you.

Matthew Shipp: First I’d like to thank Autonomedia, my publisher — a Manhattan-based publisher who’s done a lot of historically anarchist texts and things like that. It was a perfect fit, because they’ve done a lot of things rooted in the Lower East Side Manhattan culture I came out of in the ’80s. I really love them — they’ve been so cool and helpful with this. So I want to thank Autonomedia.

I guess the Robin D. G. Kelley book on Monk is just luscious — it kind of brought everything together for me with Monk, and he’s a real historian. I haven’t read Ethan’s book yet — is it a biography, or — I know people get bored if the first chapter is about your grandmother in 1865, but I understand writers wanting to put the person in complete historical context, especially with Black musicians — I guess with everybody, because if your great-grandfather was enslaved, you understand the mindset of an author who wants to get all of that in there. But — is the book a biography, or a memoir?

Ethan Iverson: It’s as-told-to. People say it sounds like Billy talking, which it really is. And the first chapter does have his grandparents in it.

Matthew Shipp: Billy — no, I get it.

Ethan Iverson: I was just trying to make a joke there.

Matthew Shipp: No, but I know what you mean — you want to get to the meat of the person, and then you’re reading about 1840, this person married that person, and there’s something about their great-grandmother’s family. It can get tedious, even though it’s important if you’re trying to get a holistic view.

I think the Monk book by Robin D. G. Kelley, and also Notes and Tones by Arthur Taylor, are — I read Notes and Tones in one night. It was really interesting to me, because that period was a really hard period for jazz musicians, and the book was seeping with bitterness — I remember it being like a weight. But it was really fascinating, really great to hear everything from the musicians’ own point of view and words. The Betty Carter interview was pretty intense — I remember she didn’t really like Sun Ra. Randy Weston was in there too. It was a great read, even though I read it in one night, and it was very heavy in what everybody was dealing with.

Bob Blumenthal: Yeah.

Ethan Iverson: I certainly agree with both those recommendations. Notes and Tones — a very special book.

Matthew Shipp: Yeah. Very special book. Very special. Did you know him — Arthur Taylor?

Ethan Iverson: No. I moved to town just in time that I could have seen him play, but I actually didn’t get to. I think he died in the early ’90s, and I missed him.

Matthew Shipp: I ended up hanging out with him one night at the Knitting Factory. I don’t remember who we were both there to see — we ended up sitting together and just talking. It was really — you read his book, and then — I have another story. When I was twelve or fourteen, the book that changed my life was Chasin’ the Trane by J. C. Thomas. When I first moved to New York, I was at a party in Harlem, and I got into a really weird situation with this guy — I didn’t like how he interacted with people. At one point I said, “What’s your problem, man? Who are you?” He said, “Yeah, my name’s J. C. Thomas.” I don’t want to get into it, because it’s very unflattering — the whole situation — but we resolved it, and actually became friends. I don’t even know if he’s still alive — I haven’t seen him since the late ’80s.

Ethan Iverson: Such an important book — I read it so young, and it made such an impression on me, but I can’t remember seeing his byline any other time.

Matthew Shipp: I think he told me — I think that was the first book about Coltrane —

Bob Blumenthal: I think that was the first book about Coltrane.

Matthew Shipp: — I could be mistaken. I vaguely remember — I was an alcoholic back then, and usually when I hung out with him there was a lot of drinking going on, I’ll speak for myself there — but I vaguely remember him telling me he was trying to work on something about Stan Kenton, believe it or not. Quite a jump from Coltrane. I have that memory — it could be the alcohol talking.

Ethan Iverson: Way to invalidate your Coltrane work, sir.

Bob Blumenthal: Let me wrap this up — this has been fascinating. I think I mentioned this in an email I sent you both: you always hear — and maybe this hits me more than musicians — “we don’t have to write about it, the music speaks for itself.” It’s become a cliché. But we all write about the music to some degree, and I wonder if each of you could say a little about how you see writing informing the musical experience for people.

Matthew Shipp: Well, for me, as an avant-gardist — first, just from a selfish standpoint, as it relates to jazz criticism — there aren’t many ways for me to get my message out there. There’s very limited radio nowadays, basically college radio, for the type of music I do, and even that’s limited in some ways. So I depend on writers who understand what I do and can transmit it in their own language, get the enthusiasm across. I depend on good writing to move people to want to check out who I am, because what other platform is there? There’s none of the machinery that popular music has, or that smooth jazz has, to get people to know what’s out there — I’m not in that world, so I don’t know. But I depend on writers who feel what I do and can passionately write about it in a way that intrigues the imagination of people who might be interested.

That’s the only avenue I have for promotion. I view writing about the music, done passionately and creatively, as a partnership. There are certain writers who’ve followed my career the whole time and write about pretty much everything I do, and I look at it as a collaboration — if I put out an album they think is subpar, I’d expect them to say so. Not a collaboration in that sense, but it’s necessary to get the message out.

Ethan Iverson: Yeah — there’s that line about music being like dancing about architecture. I don’t agree with it.

Matthew Shipp: I don’t either.

Ethan Iverson: I think we should talk about music. It needs critique — jazz isn’t un-intellectual. Jazz is plenty intellectual, and there’s plenty of political and sociological material to discuss as well. If Billy Hart — my master, and the subject of my book — Bob, you mentioned The Jazz Review — that was what, two or three years at most, maybe a dozen issues, not much more. That’s still the gold standard of jazz criticism. I’ve never seen anything better. If jazz had always had that kind of reception history, I think Billy Hart’s life might have been a little different — there might have been more appreciation for the drums, for the music.

If you look at the Down Beat reviews from the ’60s of John Coltrane, they don’t even understand that McCoy Tyner is part of the band — McCoy Tyner invented the harmonic language Coltrane based his music on. But in the Down Beat reviews, that’s not really explicated, because Coltrane was such a comet. I understand it one way, but in another way, I think McCoy could have had a different life if the intellectual and cultural appreciation for his contribution had been firing on all four cylinders from 1960 on. I think there’s real room to get under the hood and ask, “What have people done to create this music?” — and talk about it.

Matthew Shipp: I agree, a hundred percent. There’s so much in the music to talk about, period. And that quote Ethan mentioned — that’s a cop-out.

Ethan Iverson: It sounds good, but it’s not the truth.

Matthew Shipp: It just isn’t.

Ethan Iverson: No way.

Bob Blumenthal: This has been a fascinating conversation. I really want to thank each of you for participating. Once more, I encourage our listeners: Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart, As Told to Ethan Iverson, and Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings by Matthew Shipp — I cannot recommend them highly enough. Thank you both, and you’ve been listening to The Buzz.

Lawrence Peryer: Thank you Bob Blumenthal, Ethan Iverson, and Matthew Shipp. And congratulations, Ethan and Matthew.

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For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

I am Lawrence Peryer, thanks for listening.