Phillip Golub
Phillip Golub
Phillip Golub – Partisan Ship
Even after all these years of free jazz and avant-garde experimentation, you still haven’t heard anything quite like this. Rapidly played keyboard notes, a very free-spirited clarinet, drum patterns that seem to trip over their own feet, constant meter changes, and in the middle of it all a comparatively traditional trumpet solo; a bass that does not lay down a foundation but rather circles around it, just like all the other instruments. The sheer density of ideas generated by this constellation is enough for Phillip Golub for just seven minutes: “loyalty oath,” the opening track of his new album Partisan Ship.
To make one thing clear from the outset: the music you hear here from the Brooklyn, New York–based pianist and composer is undoubtedly demanding – more so even than on his two previous albums, Filters and Abiding Memory. And yet it never feels heavy. The title track, for example, can at times sound like a collective improvisation on a first, superficial listen. But the sound that emerges is nevertheless wonderfully light and rich in allusion. Time and again, reminiscences of bebop, big bands, neoclassicism, electronics, noise music, and all kinds of avant-garde playing techniques surface. A system without constricting boundaries.
The result is nothing less than a genuinely new musical language, with its own dynamics and colors of melody – unfamiliar, yet never random or arbitrary. Underlying Partisan Ship is a highly detailed concept. “I wrote all of the music first and then created demo tracks using MIDI instruments,” Golub explains; the score he composed for the album runs to 157 pages. He then enlisted musician friends to record the individual parts. “They either sent me their recordings, or I recorded them myself. Afterwards, I spent many hours editing and producing the material.” Everything was done at home.
The point of departure for this compositional rigor, however, was an experiment: “In advance, I invited composer friends to monthly Zoom sessions, in which microtonal scales or melodies were proposed. Everyone wrote a sketch of about one minute, and those became the starting points for the pieces on Partisan Ship.”
The otherness of this music also has a great deal to do with an unfamiliar register. The compositions on Partisan Ship consistently draw on microtonality – that is, the use of pitches outside the twelve-tone system commonly employed in jazz and classical music. The results open up genuinely uncharted musical worlds. And these worlds – this is what fundamentally distinguishes Partisan Ship from many other more self-referential avant-garde approaches – function, despite all their complexity and multilayeredness, as immediately emotionally accessible jazz. What may sound complicated at first impression draws you straight into the open, if you allow it to.
Here, complexity arises from the music itself and from an attitude toward the world. “I feel that all music reflects the experiences one has in the world,” Golub says. “And to some extent, the world itself. Our world is profoundly complex and often not very comprehensible. I think my music reflects that – not intentionally, but simply because that’s how it turns out.” And what the music on Partisan Ship also reflects, one might add, is an immense beauty.
