Broken Partials is a beautiful duet album featuring pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist Joe Morris. An exciting meeting between two of the most innovative jazz musicians on the scene today, the CD features eight improvised pieces recorded in February 2010 at Roulette Studio in New York City. Ranging from four to ten minutes, each tune is a unique musical landscape with an ever-shifting terrain that keeps the listener both nourished and alert.

In his excellent, impressionistic liner notes, poet Steve Dalachinsky says that after the musicians played the second piece, Shipp stated: "We'll call this broken partials." Which begs the question: Isn't a partial already broken? But the beauty of this music lies in the fact that all the shards fall together in lovely shimmering mosaics. A fluid stream of ideas flows rapidly from Shipp's fingers; melody and dissonance weave in and out in a constantly shifting hide-and-seek, and the note that you expect to come next never comes � and yet, due to Shipp's good taste and flawless execution, everything sounds exactly right.

Shipp has found an ideal compatriot in Morris. One of the things that makes Morris such an interesting bassist is his thirty-year career as a guitarist; according to eminent jazz journalist Gary Giddins, "If Ornette Coleman were Jim Hall, he would be Joe Morris." And yet in 2000, Morris made the switch to acoustic bass, and his approach to the instrument is both fresh and informed. Whether he provides fat, warm plucking or energetic bowing that shreds the sound into splinters, Morris plays with seamless ease that matches Shipp's liquid agility.

The wonder of this music is witnessing Shipp's ability to find fresh sources of sound within himself at every turn. Just when you're sure what direction he's going in, quick as a wink he makes a small, important choice that sends the music in another path altogether. It might be a lovely melody line, a burst of atonal color, a run of shapely notes, a spacious harmonic ladder, or an insistent, repetitive chord. His dancing hands contain the element of surprise, and his intelligence and keen sense of structure create something memorable every time.

In a recent interview with Westword magazine, Shipp made a very interesting statement: "I would say now that I'm definitely trying to get rid of everything that's not directly my sound. I'm trying to get down to the essence of what it is to play a piano if you're me." It's a journey of parsing out where history ends and he begins, and to perhaps see the places where the two are inseparable or incompatible. Shipp is in his very early fifties, which means an exciting adventure lies ahead as he brings this internal essence out into the world, and allows it to shine so all can hear and share.