Perelman/Shipp/Cosgrove - Live In Carrboro (2023)

Whenever Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp get together, special things always happen between the saxophonist and pianist. When they were joined for a concert by drummer Jeff Cosgrove in 2017, an exciting new dynamic was introduced. As we wrote then about Live In Baltimore, “Jeff Cosgrove doesn’t disrupt Perelman’s and Shipp’s simpatico; he enhances it.”

That performance deserved an encore, and now we’ve got one. Live In Carrboro (Soul City Sounds) is a capture of a concert in the art-minded cove of Carrboro, a suburb of the college town of Chapel Hill, NC.

As with Baltimore, this is a nearly hour-long single performance, beginning with the celebrated Perelman/Shipp duo and Cosgrove carefully assessing the situation for a couple of minutes before seamlessly edging his way into the proceedings. There’s nothing atonal going on at this point; matter of fact, they’re creating melody on the fly and Cosgrove perfectly reads Shipp’s flow and interprets it into defined rhythms. Moreover, Cosgrove astutely recognizes when it’s the appropriate time to pull out and wait for the next portal to jump back in.

Around the fourteen minute mark is an involved duologue between always percussive-minded Shipp and Cosgrove, the former able to bond as tightly to a drummer as he can to a saxophone player like Perelman. But then Perelman himself re-enters the fray and pulls Shipp toward his direction.

The guys up front recede roughly midway through the performance to let Cosgrove create on his own. Here, exhibits a thorough mastery of the drums as an instrument of interesting and subtly placed timbres, a tonal vessel as first championed by Paul Motian. Perelman and Shipp then go off and together embark on another melodic development carefully paced with peaks and valleys that tell a single story with distinct chapters. And then they do it all over again.

The unworldly communion of Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp is a sacred musical bond; Jeff Cosgrove uncannily knows just how to not only keep that bond intact, but strengthen it further.