After developing an obsession with flutes and dipping into ambient spiritual jazz on 2023’s New Blue Sun, an album created with some prominent figures in that corner of the music world, André 3000 recently shared an EP of lo-fi piano improvisations titled 7 Piano Sketches. That project enraged Matthew Shipp, a jazz titan and a longtime friend of our Ugly Beauty columnist Phil Freeman, who wrote a scathing takedown on Facebook, dismissing Three Stacks as a piano dilettante and describing his improv piano recordings as “utter crap -horrific-god awful insipidly wretched nothing.”
