Phillip Golub: Partisan Ship

In a lot off ways, it is a game of catch-up listening to Brooklyn pianist/improvisor/composer Phillip Golub once he kick-starts the oddly titled Partisan Ship into high gear with "Loyalty Oath," a piece of mad musical fiction that holds attention in place with its octopi rhythms and runaway melodies rushing in all at once. 

Partisan Ship is oddly titled because Golub, an unapologetic polymath far out on the progressive spectrum, and his juiced and jazzed up cohorts—clarinetist and saxophonist Yuma Uesaka, trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, Anna Webber -flute and tenor sax, David Leon -alto sax, Layale Chaker, five string violin, drummer and percussive everyman Jonathan Starks, bassist Sam Minaie, and multi keyboardist Elias Stemeseder—keep their feet to the fire. Not many traditionalists are going to go along with the hyperkinetic title track: the saxophones flying, the drums avalanching. 

Whatever Golub's prime instrument, the Flexichord, does exactly what is best left for an MIT grad to explain, but Golub is not afraid to use it to Partisan Ship's cranked-up advantage. With seemingly all the keyboards and electronics at the ready, Golub, Stemeseder, and Starks (whose sensory percussion might need explaining, too) cut loose on the pulse pounding "interlude (adrift)." "mutiny meeting," with its impish blend of Horace Silver and Herbie Hancock. The relative quiet of "blue-orange reflections." The vertigo head rush encountered throughout "cries of the initiated."

Golub, whose 2024 breakout Abiding Memory (Endectomorph Music/Berthold Records) and 2025's duet with drummer Lesley Mok, dream brigade (Infrequent Seams) were the five alarm fires clearing the way for "utopian microtonation" of Partisan Ship's most gnarly, yet immersive salvo. ElSaffar sails above Webber's imploring flute while the rest of the ensemble smooths things out big band style. The lunatic "afterword: partisan session" follows and closes Partisan Ship, a set of music that veers like a tornado, with its own destination.

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