The Good and Evil Session: An Interview With Matthew Shipp on André 3000

"If you have a midlife crisis, there’s probably stuff you need to deal with"

Pastoral composure: Matthew Shipp (Photo by Anna Yatskevich)

If you’re among the many doomscrollers catching wind of the very interesting beef between postmodern jazz pianist Matthew Shipp, 64, and 7 Piano Sketches, the slight and self-explanatory new release from André 3000, it’s not what it looks like. Shipp’s not necessarily some old man yelling at the cloud; his work has incorporated electronic textures, hip-hop beats, and occasionally even name rappers for more than 20 years. But Shipp’s instantly viral Facebook rant about how much the 16-minute collection sucks has been picked up by media outlets and lit a small fire under the conversation of whether it’s more admirable to stay in one’s lane or dabble outside of it.

RIOTRIOT hopped on the phone with Shipp yesterday evening to talk about the ups and downs of publicly criticizing a sacred cow, along with his own history of musical exploration, and where to draw the line of respect. It was a good, fired-up, impromptu chat that you can read below. (I also look forward to Matthew’s reaction to André receiving an honorary doctorate from Berklee mere hours ago.)

Hey man, how's it going?

Good, good. It's been crazy.

Yeah, I was going to ask. What have the last few days been like for you?

Well, I’ve just never experienced anything like this. [Laughs.] It's pretty insane.

Has it been a positive thing? I've seen people raise concern that you’ll be harassed.

You mean physically?

Oh, I mean just like, bullying you online.

I mean, there's a little of that. There's definitely some people that think I'm a jerk, and a couple of them have made it bad. But even they have been slightly polite about it.

So I guess to start, what's your relationship with André's music normally, like OutKast and what he’s most famous for?

Back in the day I checked them out a little bit because everybody who was hip and cool was telling me “you should check them out, even if you don't like them.” And I liked it, but I never really spent the time. Back then I was really exploring more electro-type stuff, like Amon Tobin and DJ Shadow. If I'm getting the time period right in my head. I heard it, said “this is good,” but I never really followed OutKast that close.

So this wasn't a personal hero of yours failing you.

No, no, I don't know the albums or anything. I just knew his reputation, heard some, and thought it was really cool.

Did you play New Blue Sun, the flute album that he made?

No, I stayed away from that last year, because everybody I know was talking about it. Before I even get to the flute album, I didn't meet him, but he was hanging out at the Vision Fest a while back. And from what I hear, he took lessons from Richard Keene, who was a reed player. So he was hanging out in our scene. When I heard about the flute album, I knew he had been hanging out around us. But then I heard it was kind of on a New Age vibe and I just started getting the image of a Black person with money going New Age. I couldn't figure it out, and I didn't want to listen to it. From what people told me, it was pretty rudimentary, which is fine. It was kind of shocking to me, the attention it was getting, but I didn't even really think about it.

Somebody told me it won a Grammy. And I started thinking of Hubert Laws and Nicole Mitchell, any really good flute player. I was like, “why would a hip-hop artist who plays flute on a New Age-y type of album win a Grammy?” ‘Cause you can go in any New Age book and crystal store, hear loads of generic…I mean, I don't know the genre. But you can hear stuff that seems like it's put together for that ambient [effect]. It was just confusing to me. I actually thought it was comical and I thought maybe he was just having a good time and pulling people's leg. I don't know what was in his mind, I didn't really think about it. But other people I know were actually pissed off about it.

Really?

Yeah, some reed players I know and some people that were just like, “Why is it getting attention? It's all right.” That’s what I heard from people, I never heard it. This I guess was a little more personal to me since it was piano.

The Facebook takedown that you wrote, it’s entertaining to read. It’s inspired. I think people are responding to it because there’s a lot of feeling behind it.

Oh, that’s definitely what people are responding to. [Laughs.]

You can tell it’s from the heart. I don’t know if you follow the music criticism world but fewer negative music reviews get published these days for complicated reasons. Sometimes a publicist will stop giving a publication access to Artist A on their roster if the site trashes Artist B. And obviously social media is flooded with Trumpies and trolls just trying to destroy someone. So there’s less negative criticism published now that’s actually smart and thoughtful, and I think your post went viral for that reason. But what would you say drove that passion? Was it simply just listening to the music or was there also a component about him going to the Met Gala wearing a piano on his back?

Well, it was combined. I didn't even know about this album. It didn't even cross my radar. A friend called and told me, and I was like, “what?” I was sitting at my computer, so I looked it up. Then I saw that photo and I had been hearing about the Met Gala that day, but it didn't even register. And then my friend told me about the album and I went online, listened to it on YouTube and that rant was a product of that. It just really took me out. And I guess one guy went online and said, “you're hitting low-hanging fruit, because you're a professional pianist, and this guy says he's not.” But that's not even the issue. I mean, if anybody goes to the extent to have an image like that come out and they do that with the release of an album, and then the first day the album's released it's in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and where else did I see it, NPR. There was planning and there's publicists and there's obviously a record company, a major one, it's Epic Records, right? And that massive thing with the Met Gala. So he's trying to make a splash with it. If he wasn't, you would just give some copies to a friend.

André 3000 at the 2025 Met Gala (Photo by Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images)

So the idea that it's just for fun, I mean, no, he's putting out a product. I really respect him, he's a historical artist. He has the right to do whatever he wants, but I have the right to say if I think it's tasteless, you know? So yes, there was a lot of…I don't even know if emotion is the right word. Seeing the photo, and I've talked to a few people that know him or have dealt with him. Not a lot, but a few. And I think I've got a pretty good personality profile in my head of him. I'm convinced that he's a really sweet guy.

I don't know him; from what I've been told, he’s a really sensitive and sweet person. But to me there is also a slight degree of entitlement and narcissism¹ in that photo and doing that. I'm not gonna say it's mocking piano players, but it just seems to be a little bit un-self-aware. And then you can't hide behind the fact that it's not serious or he didn't say he did it as a joke. But the fact that he admits that he's not [a piano player]...when you do that with that type of initial push for the product, it's out there as an object of discussion.

I think the last time I was on NPR was, like, 2007. I've had a couple cuts played on one program, but they're just a couple of cuts, not an interview. And I think Kevin Whitehead did a review of an album of mine on Fresh Air. Before that it was 2003, I was on All Things Considered and Fresh Air. So you're basically talking about 15-20 years without a sporadic cut being played. I've done historical work, and I’ve just seen a piano album of his on NPR. It just released some stuff in my head that was not pretty, let’s put it that way.

Oh, I got that. I have mixed feelings on what he's doing. I like the flute album, and I wasn't expecting to. I held my breath; it's almost 90 minutes. But I play it often at night.

Right, I’ve had people tell me that it’s not bad.

But here's how your rant spoke to me: I saw him live at the Roots Picnic festival, it was all improv, and it was terrible. Terrible. I'm not the most jazz-schooled person but people were walking away in droves trying to get to the next stage.

Who was on the gig?

I don't know who else was in his ensemble. I know that he plays with Carlos Niño but I wouldn’t be able to recognize his group.

Was he playing flute?

Yeah, his digital wind instrument. I’d seen him on Colbert playing a composition from the album and it sounded good. But at the festival, he was just winging it. And as you already know, he's not the kind of person who has the skills to wing it. I guess I wasn't really appalled because it was what I expected the flute album to be in the first place. Maybe the people around him helped him edit it into something nice. I did finally play the piano thing tonight before this interview, and it sounded harmless, aimless. Very inconsequential.

It is, yeah. But that photo is not inconsequential at the gala. And that’s kind of what set me off actually even more than how bad the album was. And then seeing it being a piano album that’s being dealt with in Rolling Stone and NPR and Pitchfork. If I'm gonna make this personal, like what did it elicit in me that made me mad? I haven't been dealt with in Pitchfork, I think Marc Masters [has written about me]…and I don't mean to sound petty, but I can't lie about it. My last album, Concepts of Piano Jazz, it's been awarded in certain ways a lot. It should be in those venues. It really should. But NPR, I don't even get…my publicist doesn't even get responses. So anyway, as petty as that sounds, and it is petty, it's human.

I don't think it's petty. One perspective is that an artist like him does something like this and maybe it will get people to listen to jazz or solo piano music who never would have normally, and whether they're going to go and explore other stuff. I'm trying to think of other examples, but obviously pop musicians go on a lark like this all the time: Elvis Costello’s done classical albums, Lady Gaga did stuff with Tony Bennett. Do people actually go and explore the genre because of this sort of thing?

Individual people that were probably going to end up doing it anyway for whatever reason. Maybe they did get exposed to something here, and that was the impetus to go further. That does happen, but I don't think in any meaningful way. I actually think if more people are gonna check out improvised jazz because of this, it's because of what I did. [Laughs.] More than if he had just done it in a vacuum, because I'm getting loads of people checking out my Facebook page that are not fans of the type of music I do. I'm not gonna say they’re gonna end up buying my albums, but they seem to be kind of curious, like, “who is this guy?”

I do think that's a cool outgrowth of it, even though it might be giving his 16-minute thing more attention than you know might have gotten otherwise. I was listening to Nu Bop earlier and you've interfaced with hip-hop and electronic stuff in your music. You're not someone who’s never listened to any developments from the last 30 years. You made an album with El-P and I was wondering how you two worked that out, like he doesn’t strike me as having had formal training as a musician.

I doubt it. But his father was a jazz pianist. And this is gonna sound weird but El-Ps actual introduction to hip-hop from what I remember him telling me — it's been years — but I'm almost sure he told me that his introduction to hip-hop was “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock.

Oh, wow.

I think he saw working with me as a way — not to get close to his dad — but as a gesture to his father. I mean, he didn't say that, but that's the sense I got. He basically was just doing beats and things on a computer and we just played to that. And then he cut everything up and kind of constructed the pieces from there. I have no idea what his musical training is or isn't. We talked in broad…actually most of the talking was jokes, he's very funny.

That's awesome.

But he was very respectful and in awe of what we did. We were just doing our thing, and he's obviously really great at his thing. I'm a big hip-hop fan, especially early hip-hop. And you see my posts, I'm really big into ‘80s dance music. In the 2000s, I worked with Antipop Consortium, you know my album with them, right? I think the last hip-hop person I was really into back then was ODB, who I was really into. ‘Cause he's such a genre unto himself. Then after that, I got into Dr. Octagon really heavy. Actually, I've recorded with him. It hasn't been released, but I did some tracks with Kool Keith. It hasn't been released. I hope it is at some point, but it's not his stuff. It's with a private producer and both of us were on it.

That’s really cool.

I start getting an attitude about hip-hop because most of what I hear actually offends me nowadays.

The genre’s in a weird place lately. I feel like there's a larger split than ever between quote-unquote “what the kids are listening to” versus other factions of it now. Do you know Billy Woods at all?

No, I have such an attitude about it now, I don't. Blocked it out.

I would love to see what you think of his stuff because he incorporates some jazz musicians and uses a lot of dissonance in general. He's kind of on the avant fringe of what I would call the mainstream the way El-P was.

Right, right.

How familiar are you with Kendrick?

I checked a little Kendrick. I mean, I hear why people like him. It's just something about the time we're living in now that I just can't. I can't deal with it. Even somebody as gifted as he is, I'm just in a different headspace now. And I guess so is André, because he doesn't seem to want anything to do with… [Laughs.] He's trying to reinvent himself, obviously.

Has anyone from André’s camp reached out to you about this whole thing?

Yeah, I had a couple of musicians who have worked with him contact me and said stuff. Both of them are kind of upset because they really like him as a person. They understand what I'm saying but they would rather not see this.

If you were going to give André advice on how to do something good, while also knowing he can’t suddenly just fast-forward through decades of piano training, what do you think he should focus on?

My advice for him is not to do this.

[Laughs.]

No, really. He’s a historical artist. He is great, he has a body of work. That's number one. Number two, if you have a midlife crisis, there’s probably stuff you need to deal with and putting, like, un-thought-out works of art in public is not how to deal with those problems. Number three, being that you're a historical artist and have a great body of work, I understand the idea of a restless spirit wanting to do something, but there actually is nothing wrong with resting on your laurels, if your body of work is as important and beautiful as his is. Number four, with this he actually seems to have the need for attention. So that might need to be dealt with. I'm assuming he's financially well off, I don't know. And he does have a body of work to be extremely proud of.

So why the need for continued attention in this manner, which is definitely there. Number five, I would suggest that if he has that urge to do something and he doesn't think he's relevant in hip-hop anymore, but he wants to do something, then do it as a hobby but don't put it out for public consumption in this way. There’s nothing wrong with doing it for the love of joy of doing it. If you wanna have a concert playing piano and have your friends there, it's great. So those are the things…that's the list of what I would have to say.

Are there any artists, maybe a rock artist, who you think has actually succeeded at something kind of charmingly amateurish in the jazz realm, in a way that you think actually worked?

I can't think of any, I don't know. If he would have actually done it — I mean who knows, maybe he did — as a complete and utter joke, that would have been actually pretty funny. Even if he is punking us, which — I have no idea what his motivation is, I don't know him — it's not exactly a joke. To me it seems like it's tied to some type of self-worth. I don't understand the need to talk about what could be construed as a midlife crisis and all for half-baked works. Did he say something about not feeling relevant with hip-hop anymore?

I remember him saying something about not knowing what to rap about at his age. Which is valid but there’s actually a lot of rappers in their 50s, and El-P is one of them, who’ve matured pretty gracefully. There’s an LL Cool J album from last year that shocked me.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a great album, and he hasn't made a good album in, like, 30 years.

Right, right. To me there's a disconnect in [André] doing this the way he did it. Some people have said, like, “what does it matter?” I think it just points to general things in the culture that, I don't know, have gone awry. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter, but it does.

What bothers me most about this phase of what he's doing is, as I said, I was a fan of the flute album and I'm a CD buyer. Paying over 20 bucks for a CD is not my favorite thing but the vinyl was $80 new.

Oh my god.

So that takes away some of the “aw shucks, I'm just fooling around having some fun.” Either he or more likely his employees are consciously doing something that's a little bit exploitative at that point when you’re charging your fans 80 bucks for a record. I don't think he's short on cash, OutKast is about to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I don't think the album won a Grammy but it was nominated for Album of the Year. It’s probably one of the only jazz-adjacent albums to be nominated for that in some time. So that is representing something and I definitely get where you're coming from. It's that price point thing that makes it feel a little more insidious.

That's a great word. To me it feels like he's a super-cool guy, obviously a historical artist. But there’s still some slight to this and I'm not saying that about him in general, but to this, there's an It factor that just doesn't doesn't add up. It doesn't even feel sincere as a punk type of thing, that’s the feeling I get from it. Obviously feeling went into me and came out on Facebook. [Laughs.]

It’s a worthwhile dialogue, I mean, I hope nothing too ugly comes from it. I don't know if you've gotten more negative responses or positive ones from it.

No, vastly positive. I mean, vastly. Not only that, but I've gotten notes from musicians thanking me, saying that, you know, they know a lot of people that would have wanted to do that. And then they went off about how they think what he's doing is fucked up. Even going into chat rooms where people are talking, I mean, if some people are confused by what I said, there's nobody that thinks this is a great album. Or I haven’t run into it. I’ve seen a couple people say they enjoy it.

I only saw right before we spoke that 7 Piano Sketches is apparently recordings from 2013 that he just put out?

On an iPhone, yeah.

So I don't think he thinks of it as any kind of major work, but what's making him put it out now? Did the label pressure him to put something out to commemorate the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thing? Or the designers of the piano Met Gala outfit, did he feel he had to scrounge up this companion piece?

It's just something weird about it and it doesn't add up. It’s less than the sum of the parts. I have immense respect for him as a historical hip-hop artist. I just want to just make that clear.

I'm a huge fan of him. And I also think that this is a very interesting dialogue.

He could be sitting home laughing about all this. As much as he was gonna get a massive amount of hits anyway, this has definitely helped him in some away. I would hope he doesn't have an attitude about me because I respect him as a historical artist. But at the same time, he was hanging in our scene. And, to me, this does smack of a little disrespect to us. Maybe not, intentionally, but he was around people where doing this type of thing is their life. And I’m sure there was nothing insidious in his thought process, but how it comes across to me is he has much more access to things than we do. For him to do a watered-down, horrible version of stuff that's in the vein of what he might've heard around us and then show up with... I mean, actually, I think it's disgusting. [Laughs.]

That doesn't mean I think he's disgusting. That type of celebrity might be in such a bubble that he doesn't really even think through right. There's no malice whatsoever on his part. But just knowing that he'd been around like practitioners of this who are some of the best in the world at this [for whom] this is a lifestyle, a life choice. And he's gonna do that, and then reap the benefits of hip-hop fame, and then on top of it, have a subpar product and the fact he’s admitting it…there's something to me that’s just wrong about it. That's not to judge him because every indication I get is that he's actually a really special person.

And for the people who are coming in droves to check you out now, what would you want them to hear first?

Everybody’s so different. Some people might hear a more avant album than Nu Bop and actually relate to that. Somebody might be into hearing hip-hop, but that's not their concept. I have a vast body of work and it's all slightly different. And I can't ascertain what a good entry point…maybe my last trio album, New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz, for a certain variety of people overall might be the best starting point to get across who I am.

¹Matthew has requested to clarify the “entitlement and narcissism” comment: “I am not saying at all that he is these things, I am just describing a feeling I got upon seeing the photo that might be more indicative of an attitude in hip-hop.”

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.