Old Stories [CD]

Duke Ellington is the fortuitous touchstone that Matthew Shipp to bring to his recent collaboration with Arkansas-based saxophonist Chad Fowler on Old Stories, their new album of duets on Mahakala Music. For his part, Fowler brought to the sessions a longstanding fascination with Ellington sideman (and alto saxophone pioneer) Johnny Hodges, though, like Shipp, this is expressed obliquely through Fowler's work with avant garde luminaries like Alvin Fielder, Douglas Ewart and Parker.

To Shipp, the title of the album and the chapters comprising it match the music perfectly. “It's a narrative,” he says. “A novel of sorts. And even if your story is new, it's a rearranging of elements. All the new stories are old, in some ways. We seem to have been prepared for it, somehow. It was a real delight. Between the freshness of a new encounter and being prepared, that balance is really there. That's what makes it vibrant and exciting for me.”

Or, as Fowler puts it, “When you listen to it, it feels like we already knew each other, like we're old friends, even though we had barely talked to each other before that. So it felt like the old shared stories that we tell, that reference events that neither of us has experienced.”