PORT ANGELES — Peninsula College caught New York City-based Matthew Shipp Trio at the right place and the right time.
Between Seattle’s Earshot Jazz Festival and their West Coast tour in Portland, Ore., the trio will stop at Maier Performance Hall on the community college campus, 1502 E. Laurdisen Blvd., at 7 p.m. Wednesday for a one-time-only performance.
General admission tickets for $12 and student tickets for $5 will be available beginning at 6 p.m. Wednesday.
At times percussive and earth-shaking, at other times singing and lyrical, but always a hard-swinging improvisation collective, the trio consists of leader Matthew Shipp on piano, Michael Bisio on bass and Newman Taylor Baker on drums and percussion.
Since moving to New York City from his native Delaware in 1984, Shipp has performed and recorded with some of the great names in modern jazz — including David S. Ware, Roscoe Mitchell, William Parker, Ivo Perelman, Evan Parker and Mat Maneri — as well as musicians from outside the mainstream jazz tradition such as DJ Spooky and members of the Antipop Consortium.
He has recorded more than 125 albums on Hatology and Thirsty Ear, among other labels.
Bisio appears as a bassist on more than 100 recordings. Originally from Troy, N.Y., he studied at the University of Washington in the late 1970s and early 1980s where he swiftly established himself as a talented, unique and probing bassist in the tradition of Charles Mingus.
He also has composed more than 100 works which have been heard in various performance venues, movie scores and plays.
Bisio has performed or recorded with Karl Berger, Joe McPhee, Charles Gayle, Vinny Golia, Eyvind Kang, Bob Nell, Bill Smith, Barbara Donald, Sonny Simmons, John Tchai, International Creative Music Orchestra and New York Composer’s Orchestra West. Because of his versatility on the bass, his talents have also been tapped by the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra and the Northwest Chamber Orchestra. He joined the Matthew Shipp Trio in 2009.
Baker comes from rich musical and intellectual traditions. His paternal grandfather was the only former slave to receive a doctoral degree from Yale University (1906), and two aunts and an uncle on his father’s side graduated from Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
His is an eclectic career: creating new music for the washboard as a founding member of the Ebony Hillbillies; in his “Singing Drums” solo project which has been recorded and performed in festivals around the world; and in his small jazz groups including the Matthew Shipp Trio, which he joined in 2015.
He has toured in Turkey, Poland, Romania, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Peru, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia.
For more information about the concert, contact David Jones at djones@pencol.edu.
