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TAO 002CD
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"Free improvisation is as much an act of discovery as of creation. On their breathtaking debut, Expanding Light, the brand-new Whit Dickey Trio shines their collective illumination into the heretofore unexplored darkness between them. The album teams the drummer with one of his most long-standing collaborators in saxophonist Rob Brown & for the first time with the young firebrand bassist Brandon Lopez, in what is certainly hoped will be an ongoing communion. The light and the dark, intimate friends and fresh relations -- these are a few of the dualities embodied by the new recording label Tao Forms (launching May 1, 2020 with The Piano Equation, a cosmic solo piano outing by Matthew Shipp). This second release by the label continues the remarkable creative renaissance which Dickey embarked on with his stunning and widely acclaimed 2019 double-album by the Tao Quartets, a Yin and Yang pairing of two distinct ensembles. Expanding Light is an exercise in going full-bore Yang. The result maintains a visceral ferocity even at its most abstract and more gentle moments, a sonic territory that the drummer refers to as 'free grunge,' influenced as much by Nirvana at their finest as by the holistic experimentation of Dickey's mentor, Professor Milford Graves."
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TAO 001CD
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"Further honing a singular cosmic musical language, Matthew Shipp begins celebrating his landmark 60th year with this new work for solo piano. The Piano Equation is also the inaugural release from Tao Forms, a new label devoted to enlightened and elevated free jazz. Over more than half of his lifespan, Shipp has built up an unparalleled body of work and a wholly original musical language that only becomes more hyper-focused and distinctive with the passage of time. Shipp's abstract eloquence is on vivid display throughout The Piano Equation, which presents Shipp alone at the piano, brilliantly solving his higher-order musical mathematics, approaching each new unknown from unexpected vantage points as in some form of cubist algebra. Shipp builds his solo music in a cellular fashion, formed like the building blocks of human life out of disparate elements that combine and evolve in ever-unique and fascinating forms. 'There are billions of different human beings on the planet, all constituted with the same genetic material but all completely different,' he says. 'All of these pieces can be generated with a different mother/father idea and the basic cellular material can unfold in billions of ways.' Stride, swing and the avant-garde collide like so many elemental particles, the aftereffects radiating outward in increasingly complex and intricate formations. The scientific, the personal, the political and the fantastic co-exist throughout Shipp's work, melding in the radical vocabulary that the pianist employs on the album, which speaks with its own alien yet familiar logic. Fragments of melody coalesce and transform, dissolve or shatter into kaleidoscopic reveries."
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