ABOUT

JAmes Shipp is a vibraphonist, percussionist, synthesist, composer/arranger and songwriter. For the last two decades he has performed, recorded, and toured the world with some of New York City's best musicians. Trained as a jazz vibraphone soloist and accompanist, James's post-conservatory interests have led him to become a sought-after Brazilian percussionist, a multi-instrumentalist in bands both mostly-improvised and tightly arranged, a composer of music for experimental theater, and a versatile producer of recordings, bringing to bear his knowledge of both acoustic and electronic instruments on a wide range of projects.

As of late, James performs and records with much-lauded clarinetist and multiple Grammy Award nominee Anat Cohen’s Quartetinho, the Anat Cohen Tentet, Miho Hazama’s M-Unit, the Christina Courtin Band, Kolumbo, and the LaValle. He has recorded and performed with Paquito d’Rivera, Kurt Elling, Snarky Puppy, Jean Rohe and the End of the World Show, Banda Magda, the Nadje Noordhuis Quintet, Bokante, Kate McGarry, Becca Stevens, Bob Lanzetti, Stephanie Coleman and Nora Brown, The Kronos Quartet, and Sting. He was nominated for two Grammies in 2020 for his contributions on vibes and percussion to the Anat Cohen Tentet’s Triple Helix and Miho Hazama and M Unit’s Dancer in Nowhere. In 2025 he recorded on the soundtrack of Ken Burns’ American Revolution series for PBS.

Since 2015, James has had an ongoing collaboration with bassist/composer Haggai Cohen Milo, with whom he wrote and performed music for the collaborative dance pieces a Jephta's Daughter at the Munich State Opera in 2015, and A Monteverdi Project at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden in the fall of 2018. In 2023 he reprised the role for Cohen Milo and Margaux Marielle Tréhoüart’s directorial debut Gletcher (Glacier), a music/modern dance piece commissioned by the Laustiz Festival and performed in Weißwaßer, Germany that September. The following year he returned to the festival as co-composer for their second piece, Stille Post, Lauter Traume.

In 2024 James’ collaboration with Cohen Milo extended beyond the world of dance to a tour of Germany playing a re-composition of Mahler’s Das Lied Von der Erde, incorporating free playing, aleatoric techniques, and multi-lingual rap, culminating in a performance in the Berlin Philharmonie alongside the Hamburger Symphoniker. This tour spawned the Gravitations project and ensemble, with which Shipp and Cohen Milo composed and presented impressionistic re-imaginings of Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and Verdi’s Requiem in Hamburg in 2025. They also arranged a suite of Yemenite Jewish songs for rhythm section, choir, and soloist for 2024’s Diaspora project.

As a leader, James has been performing his mostly satirical songs solo and with his band since 2016, and released The Virus Diaries as a weekly pandemic music and video series in 2020/21, and the album James Shipp Sings his Famous Songs in 2022; as a songwriter he is represented by TRO-Palm Valley Music. He has performed as a duo with trumpeter Nadje Noordhuis since 2012. In late 2017 they released their first album, Indigo, music from which was featured in the 2024 Paolo Sorrentino film Parthenope. Their second album Multitudes featuers Jamse’ work as a mallet player, percussionist, synthesist, and composer, and was released to glowing reviews in 2023. James’ band Nós Novo took improvisors’ ears to traditional Irish repertoire and released Strange Sweethearts in America to critical acclaim in 2009.

James has been a bandleader, composer, producer, and workshop facilitator for Carnegie Hall’s social impact programs for the last decade, working with thousands of people of all ages in prisons, jails, hospitals, shelters, and schools throughout New York City. He has been the musical director and producer of Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project since 2019, and has arranged and conducted the project’s season-end concerts in Zankel Hall since 2021. Two of the lullabies he co-wrote through that work were featured on the 2018 Universal Music Group release Hopes and Dreams, sung by mezzo-soprano Joyce Di Donato and soprano Pretty Yende. James was the director and producer of Carnegie Hall’s youth-driven, genre-crossing Future Music Project Ensemble from its formation in 2016 until it ended during the pandemic in 2021, and was the creative director and lead educator of the music program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility for its 2015/16 season. James was a faculty artist at the Silk Road Ensemble's 2016 Global Musician Workshop, where he taught Brazilian, Irish, and Finnish tunes to students from all over the world.

JAmes earned both a Bachelor's and Master's of Music from the SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music. He currently lives in Brooklyn, and is very happy there.