After winning an open scholarship to read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, he ran the university jazz club.
At Oxford, Shipton also wrote for the student magazine Isis and directed plays, including Ben Jonson's The Alchemist.
Shipton had a keen interest in visual arts and was one of the authors of the catalogue of paintings in the collection of St Edmund Hall.
On leaving university, Shipton became an editor at Macmillan Publishers, working on primary school books and teenage fiction.
During this time he played bass in the New Iberia Stompers, subsequently joining Sammy Rimington's band and the group led by jazz traditionalist Ken Colyer.
As Music Publisher at Macmillan, he established a series of oral histories of jazz musicians, including lives of Barney Bigard, Buck Clayton, Art Rollini and Bill Coleman.
Shipton appears on records with Ken Colyer (also on DVD), Herb Hall, Pat Halcox, Bill Greenow, Sammy Rimington, Bob Wilber, and Butch Thompson's King Oliver Centennial Band.
He is at present a lecturer in jazz history and a research fellow at the Royal Academy of Music, London.(source?)