Though it’s far from the only trio that pianist Matthew Shipp has led over the years, the lineup with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker is a special one, as the albums The Conduct of Jazz, Piano Song, and Signature have made clear. The Unidentifiable, the trio’s second for ESP-Disk’, has a certain stark and transparent beauty, with episodes morphing from abstract groove and swing (“The Dimension,” “The Unidentifiable”) to the elusive Afro-Latin vibe of “Regeneration” to the closing chamber epic, “New Heaven and New Earth.” Baker’s attention to texture and tone color, most clearly on “Dark Sea Negative Charge” and the short solo prelude “Virgin Psych Space 1,” is consistently striking—indeed, there’s an inner clarity to his interaction with Bisio even when Shipp is going at maximum tilt. Soon after this album’s release, Shipp published an essay on what he calls the Black Mystery School Pianists: players such as Monk, Mal Waldron, Andrew Hill, and a select other few—exponents of “an underground language,” one with “a certain geometry and architecture,” a mode of “generating sound…grounded in a technique they invented…that cannot be taught in school.” While Shipp does not consciously emulate any one Mystery School figure, he draws on their historical examples, here and throughout his catalog, in pursuit of The Unidentifiable.