Before the World

Shipp was invited to perform a solo concert during the Workshop Freie Musik '95 at The Akademie der Künste, in Berlin. He was informed that the concert would be recorded. A first for him, Shipp was "giddy" with the novelty of the experience, so before he played he conditioned his mind to "sound good for the recording."[1] As he was quoted in the liner notes, "Since this was my first solo concert, to get my hands really accustomed to using the whole piano I actually worked on some things from the classical literature—baroque stuff mostly. That got me thinking in some new directions, and now I really want to work at it."[2]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[3]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz	[4]

In his review for AllMusic, Thom Jurek states "Many of the themes and schematics here reveal themselves as fundamentals of or 'bases' for later works."[3] The JazzTimes review by Willard Jenkins says about Shipp that the concert "displays his enormous facility at the keyboard. From a ripple to a scream, Shipp is quite literally all over the piano, though he never chooses to overwhelm with simple technique just for the sake of illustrating his capacity."[5]

All compositions by Matthew Shipp

1. "Before #1" – 32:44
2. "Before #2" – 5:42
3. "Before #3" – 3:42
4. "Before #4" – 4:09
5. "Before #5" – 22:07

• Matthew Shipp - piano