SHIPPING NEWS: This year, after several CDs exploring fusions between jazz and electronica, the Wilmington pianist released a solo album.

After several CDs exploring fusions between jazz and electronica, the Wilmington, Del.-born pianist shifted gears earlier this year and released an album of solo piano. Solo acoustic piano, no less.

One, however, is hardly a throwback. Shipp refers to it as "a 21st-century adaptation of a solo piano thing." While the album explicitly builds on the foundations laid by the 1970s solo jazz experimentation of Keith Jarrett and others, it also incorporates many of the concepts Shipp has been working through in his electronica projects. In particular there is a Spartan minimalism to many of the tracks, a sense, akin to electronic loops, of circular repetition. Each piece seems rooted in a purposefully limited concept, but as Shipp cycles around, his sketches become more and more fleshed out. It's like watching a schematic diagram build itself into a functioning piece of machinery.

In its entirety, One sustains a distinct unity of purpose, feeling more like a suite with 12 movements than a dozen disparate songs. Shipp explains that his intention was to create a "river effect," a collection of pieces that "changes and takes shape different ways but flows together as one organism."

The fact that Shipp's music inspires metaphors rooted in biology and engineering (both from me and from the composer himself) is no accident. On this album, and throughout his discography, the back covers of Shipp's albums come to resemble a Scientific American table of contents. Titles like "Electro Magnetism," "Abyss Code," "Blue in Orion" and "Module" don't quite approach the astronomical cosmology of a Sun Ra, but they certainly suggest an artist who can sense as much beauty in an elegant mathematical equation as in an inspired brushstroke.

Perhaps it's that scientific curiosity that pushes the pianist to be such a restless experimentalist. One is the latest release in Thirsty Ear's Shipp-curated Blue Series, whose releases have consistently been among the most interesting and most forward-looking events in jazz since its inception in 2000. Shipp maintains a loose definition of what the series is, stating simply, "I guess the defining characteristic is that we want to be of our time, to find composers and conceptualists who are relevant, and maybe try to push them in some directions they might not have thought of going."

When I suggest that his music, for the growing ranks of listeners unconcerned with limiting their tastes to definable genres, suggests a way of the future, Shipp modestly laughs and insists, "I'm just trying to get through the day."

Shipp explains that his experiments came about organically, from his own personal tastes in beat-oriented music and from a desire to escape what he refers to as the "straitjacket" imposed by the jazz world. "Theoretically, if you apply the human mind to an instrument, you could reach for eternity. I mean, nobody gets there, but if I did feel like I hit a plateau, somebody else could come along and shatter that to pieces. I don't really care if people define me as a jazz musician or just a modern musician. I don't really care. I just really care about communicating something."

Matthew Shipp plays Thu., May 25, 8 p.m., $12, Ortlieb's Jazzhaus, 847 N. Third St., 215-922-1035, www.arsnovaworkshop.com.