“Even after all these years of free jazz and avant-garde experimentation, you still haven’t heard anything quite like this.” That’s the first sentence of the press release announcing Phillip Golub’s Partisan Ship. If I had a nickel for every one-sheet I’ve received in the past quarter century that contained a similar claim, I’d have to rent a small but heavy duty truck to haul them all to the bank.
I dutifully uploaded the files to my music library and filed the publicity material and went about my life. A couple of times I listened to snippets of it. First time: yup, that is weird. Second time: Actually, that could be kinda cool. Finally one night I booted it up as I as reading some action filled science fiction, and after a while I quit reading and just listened. Since then I’ve listened to the whole thing several times through, including once while working out at the old peoples’ gym, and you know what? Partisan Ship is one highly unusual and highly entertaining album.
Based in Brooklyn, Golub is a composer and in-demand keyboard player in New York’s jazz, world, and avant garde music scenes. This is his 11th album under his own name. As with his most recent few offerings, it was recorded with a large cast of other players from across the creative music spectrum, almost entirely at home. The techniques involved sound to me like a 21st century update of the recording of Miles Davis’s ground breaking In a Silent Way. Sort of.
It’s difficult to describe the many ways in which this music is mind blowing. Golub composed all of it in a 157 page score, then demo’d all of the parts with a MIDI keyboard, then had his collaborators play them separately at home, and he then stitched them all together. In addition to Golub on several kinds of synthesizers I’ve never heard of, the music is played on clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, tenor and alto saxophones, flute, bass clariflute (a bass clarinet mouthpiece on a flute), trumpet, violin, bass, drums, drum machines and percussion, and yet more synthesizers. And it’s played on microtonal scales, using pitches outside the twelve-tone system commonly used in jazz and classical music. And it’s organized around a narrative that Golub dreamed up about a group of “partisans” and their journey to a “utopian micronation,” which is detailed in the liner notes.
What’s it sound like? It sounds like free association, but if you listen closely you realize it’s not. It’s composed music, each part intricately woven together into a fascinating and often moving whole. High speed keyboard runs, polyrhythmic drum and percussion parts, deep honks from low clarinets, melodic flute, Klezmer trumpet lines, all undershot with a multitude of synthesized sounds that create those atmospherics that make it such a good accompaniment to a good SF narrative. And all flowing seamlessly together in a series of discrete compositions separated by shorter interludes.
What I appreciate most about this music is that, though it’s situated firmly in experimental, avant garde, and contemporary music realms, in terms of composition and technique, it remains firmly grounded in jazz. Among Golub’s jazz connections are stints in bands led by Cecil McBee and close work with Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding on their experimental opera … (Iphigenia). Throughout you’ll hear echoes of Monk’s dissonances, Shorter’s compositional sophistication, Miles’s fusion, and much more. It’s not for everyone, but fans of progressive and experimental music should check out Phillip Golub’s Partisan Ship.
(Berthold Records, 2026)
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