Cosmic Suite

A quartet album by pianist Matthew Shipp — one of the most important and distinctive figures on the New York avant‑garde scene, often placed in a lineage between Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor — with Daniel Carter on reeds, Joe Morris on bass, and Whit Dickey on drums. Recorded in New York in 2008, Cosmic Suite features four musicians deeply embedded in the creative music community, each of whom would go on to release their own, mutiple albums on Not Two Records. Its nine interconnected parts explore the absorbing middle ground between composition and free improvisation that defines Shipp’s art, unfolding as a continuous structure shaped by intuition, form, and collective tension.