Operatic in scale and full of poetic drama remarkable given it is the work of one man. Alone with a giant canvas that the piano has become, Shipp fills the air with beautiful visions and nocturnes. Listen carefully and you will discover a sense of the baroque in the ruins of chords, a dystopia that is set plain in footfalls and silence. Shipp's progressions and episodic tonalism drift from the modal to a chiming sense of lullaby, a restless quest that somehow avoids desolation. There is a concision to Shipp's thinking that perhaps was absent in his younger days when there was a seething anger that was often exhilarating but just as regularly difficult to navigate as a listener. Shipp knows how to avoid the clichés of abstract, avant jazz and his compass is reliable. The real genius here is how he manages to avoid any puzzling sense of oblique endings and you feel safe in his hands as he guides us on a mysterious path. If any musician can be said to improvise in complete sentences that span pages of purple prose, chapters even, then Matthew Shipp is a perfect candidate. Zero? More like, on this evidence, heroic.