Creativity Quote by Matthew Shipp

There is a quiet provocation in how casually Matthew Shipp drops the phrase "utter hatred" onto a scene that, on paper, prides itself on openness. Coming from a musician deeply associated with the avant-garde, the line reads less like a confession than a pressure test: how much of the genre's moral self-image is real, and how much is branding?

Shipp's wording does two things at once. "I can imagine" is a hedge, but it also functions like an invitation to empathy. He is not endorsing the hatred; he's demonstrating that it is legible. That matters because the jazz avant-garde, for all its rhetoric of liberation, can present itself as a closed circuit of codes: extended techniques, abstraction as virtue, difficulty as a kind of proof-of-work. To listeners raised on swing's social clarity or hard bop's tight emotional narrative, the avant-garde can feel like a bait-and-switch: music that seems to withdraw the very pleasures jazz once promised.

The subtext is about gatekeeping in both directions. Avant-garde communities often posture as the embattled minority, but they can also radiate a faint contempt for the "straight-ahead", turning taste into a moral ranking. Shipp names the backlash that follows: not disagreement, but hatred - the heat that appears when people feel their cultural literacy is being judged. In that sense, the quote is a small act of realism. It refuses the sentimental idea that experimentation is automatically welcomed, and it hints that the avant-garde's real challenge isn't only musical; it's social, rhetorical, and deeply human.