There's a certain compulsiveness to Matthew Shipp's piano playing. The player himself may or not have OCD (and there's no intention here to suggest that he does), but his music � especially when he's performing unaccompanied � can veer into maniacal repetitions and surprising reiterations of, say, "Greensleeves" as if the man pressing the keys has no other choice. If he can just get through three more Gershwin phrases, it seems, he could get on with the impressive improvising he was doing.

The fact that he might at any moment lapse into an urgent theme somewhere between familiar and half-familiar is part of what makes a Matthew Shipp recital so magical. Big picture: it's not a new trick. Jazz players have been dropping melody fragments for humor or as a tip of the hat since the days of "Salt Peanuts." But for Shipp they seem to be something else, and that something seems to be somewhat personal. Mired within his knotty phrases and chord dissections, he can't not lock into introverted interpolations. At the same time, the veil of referencing seems to help elucidate the melodic fragments, somewhere between Ayler and Chopin, that spring from his forehead � or rather his fingers.

In that regard, Creation Out of Chaos � a double CD recorded live in Moscow on February 11, 2009, serves as a sort of Young Person's Guide to Matthew Shipp. The indexing and track listing is almost overly literal, creating a set of songs out of the two separate hours which Shipp spontaneously combusted. The concert, intermingling his own compositions with standards ("Angel Eyes," "Summertime," "Yesterdays," "On Green Dolphin Street") is a typical affair, although the length of it � preserving two sets from a single night � establishes the breadth of land the pianist surveys. But having the titles and tracks as road signs assists in following his progressions as he slips in and out of recognizable and quasi-recognizable sections, as say in the sudden but seamless transition from his own lovely "Patmos" (from his suberb solo album 2006 Once) to the Disney via Davis "Someday My Prince Will Come."

Shipp has made some important records, and this isn't one of them. But he's always fascinatingly idiosyncratic, and this time it comes with Cliff's Notes.