For this episode of The Buzz, JJA Book Committee chair Bob Blumenthal speaks with the winners of the 2026 JJA Jazz Awards’ two Book of the Year categories: pianist Matthew Shipp, honored for Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings (Autonomedia), and pianist and critic Ethan Iverson, honored as the writer behind Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart (Cymbal Press).
Shipp and Iverson are both working musicians who write, and the conversation keeps circling back to what that dual life costs and gives them. Shipp traces his path from commissioned blog pieces to a book collecting essays on David S. Ware, Paul Bley, and Wayne Shorter, plus prose poems on boxing, decadence, and the New York club scene he came up in during the 1980s. Iverson describes fifteen years on the road with Billy Hart before finally getting the older drummer on tape, reading him the manuscript twice, and watching Hart pull stories back out both times. Both men also discovered, mid-conversation, an unlikely shared history: each once worked as a dance-company music director, Shipp for a small post-Cunningham troupe in the 1980s, Iverson for the Mark Morris Dance Group decades later.
The episode also catches Shipp and Iverson comparing notes on a much more recent flashpoint: the online reaction to André 3000’s ambient flute album, which briefly made Shipp’s own criticism go viral. But the conversation’s real center is a shared argument about criticism itself. Both reject the old line that music writing is “dancing about architecture,” insisting instead that jazz criticism, done by people who actually play the music, is inseparable from the playing.
(The musical excerpts heard in this episode are “Iverson’s Odyssey” from the Billy Hart Quartet’s 2006 album Quartet and “Nu Bop,” the title track from Matthew Shipp’s 2002 album on Thirsty Ear.)
Buzzworthy Notes
Guest & Host
Discussed
- Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings — Matthew Shipp (Autonomedia, 2025); introduction by Yuko Otomo
- Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart — Billy Hart, as told to Ethan Iverson (Cymbal Press, 2025)
- Billy Hart — NEA Jazz Master; Iverson has played in his working quartet since 2003
- David S. Ware — saxophonist; Shipp played in his quartet for sixteen years
- Paul Bley — pianist; subject of one of Shipp’s essays
- Wayne Shorter, “Night Dreamer” — the 1964 Blue Note album Bob Blumenthal cites as still holding up on repeat listening
- Steve Dalachinsky — poet; longtime friend and collaborator of Shipp’s, referenced throughout the book
- Dewey Redman — saxophonist; the first musician whose stories convinced Iverson of the value of oral history
- Nasheet Waits — drummer; source of the “start playing like I’m teaching” line Iverson cites
- Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original — the Monk biography both guests recommend; Kelley also blurbed Shipp’s book
- Thelonious Monk / Joe Turner, "In Paris" - the 1954 album both Matt and Ethan enthused over near the end of the discussion
- Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones — 1977 collection of musician-to-musician interviews Shipp calls a formative read
- J. C. Thomas, Chasin’ the Trane — early Coltrane biography Shipp says changed his life at twelve or fourteen
- Hampton Hawes with Don Asher, Raise Up Off Me — the memoir Iverson used as his model for pacing and length while writing Oceans of Time
The 2026 JJA Jazz Awards
- Oceans of Time is Book of the Year, Biography or Autobiography
- Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings is Book of the Year about Jazz: History, Criticism and Culture
- Full list of 2026 winners: JJA Jazz Awards · announcement
Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need. Visit jazzfoundation.org.
This podcast is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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