Words by David C. Obenour
Partisan Ship makes its landfall with sounds both familiar and foreign. The vessel for Phillip Golub’s third album to bear his name, the composer helms this jazz odyssey along with fellow “microtonal partisans” Amir ElSaffar (trumpet), Anna Webber (tenor sax / flute), Layale Chaker (violin), David Leon (alto sax), Yuma Uesaka (tenor sax / clarinet / bass clarinet / contrabass clarinet), Jon Starks (drums), Sam Minaie (bass), and Elias Stemeseder (synths). Slinking through all different tunings at unsettled and twisting rhythms, the music is curious in the best manner possible. While these messengers hold fast to their beliefs, we are better suited on thoughtfully hearing them out.
Off Shelf: To me, your music occupies this uncanny space – as a whole, existing outside of context of the familiar but largely performed on instruments with recognizable tones. Asking inspiration can be a hard thing to quantify, but I would be interested to hear how you respond to that.
Phillip Golub: I have many influences but I don’t hold them at the front of my mind when creating something. I mostly just try to set them aside and let intuition lead. I put myself in the listener’s seat and I try to think up what would be exciting and interesting to me, and aim for that.
Having said that, there are some clear influences for this project: Steve Lehman, Amir ElSaffar, and Anna Webber’s microtonal jazz/creative music projects, as well as some microtonal jazz/creative music albums by Vicente Atria, Layale Chaker, and Alec Goldfarb. It was really the experience of starting to play a microtonal keyboard sound in Layale’s band – on her album, Radio Afloat – when the ideas started to form that I could make my own microtonal jazz project.
OS: With a score that ran 157 pages, can you talk about how you approached composition for Partisan Ship? How defined were the parts as opposed to how much was left for the discretion of the players?
PG: The music is all through-composed with individual parts for each instrument. For much of the music, the parts are very specific but there are various kinds of discretion left to the players. For example, there are many solos as well as more open “comping” for those solos. There are occasionally also cycled sections that are repeated several times. Sometimes in these sections players are invited to develop their part as it repeats. There are also some tracks that were put together without any score but rather were created at the very stage of recording and editing.
OS: You have quite the assemblance of players for this album. What were you looking for in bringing them together? What changed for you about the music when you gave it over to them?
PG: I wanted this music to have a “larger-than-life” feeling to it. Having many different instruments and personalities is part of what creates that. I also wanted to feature some of the people in the New York creative music scene who have developed an incredible virtuosity regarding playing microtones on their instruments. I wanted the album in some way to be a celebration of these individuals – to create music that could really show what they can do. I feel each of them brought a unique sensibility that shines in moments they take solos, across the record.
OS: You’re credited as playing the Flexichord here, an instrument of your own design. Could you talk a little about the inspiration behind it and what you appreciate about the sound it gives you and how you’re able to play it?
PG: The “Flexichord” is not actually an unique instrument or object in the physical realm. I recorded my “Flexichord” parts for Partisan Ship on a standard midi controller. I didn’t do anything as “involved” as, for example, Georg Vogel, who creates his own controllers to allow him to get many more than 12 notes per octave. I chose not to use a controller with any “innovations” that allow you to play microtonally such as Georg’s, or the commercially available lumatone or osmose for several reasons.
Above all, I wanted to use the 25 years of experience expressing myself on the standard keyboard layout. From the very beginning, I decided that technology would be utilized after the moment when my fingers strike a key to make microtonality happen. That ended up having a great influence on the various tuning systems I ended up using. Some tuning systems simply make more sense than others on a standard keyboard layout.
“Flexichord” is merely the name I gave to a preset in a piece of software I used called Pianoteq. Still, I feel that it is more than simply a sound I made in some software. I carefully crafted a sound that has certain qualities of a “real” instrument – you hear a woodiness and hammer attack that have the feel of the physical world. It combines ‘flexi’ and ‘chord’. It’s “flexi” because some parameters such as its tuning, among others, can change on the fly. It’s “chord” because it has “strings”, even though these are digitally physically-modelled strings.
OS: There’s this moment at the start of “Interlude (adorn)” where the sound shifts rather dramatically, almost sounding like your ears are unplugging or coming out of water. Could you talk about that and what you liked about it amidst the flow of the songs?
PG: Much of the music on Partisan Ship is very dense, hard-hitting, relentless, and so on. A different kind of space opens up in the interludes. I see them almost as a chance to recharge your listening batteries. For me, they were also a chance to play with sound in a way that I rarely get to do.
OS: That’s interesting you say that because “blue-orange reflections” is another moment that sticks with me, almost as if it’s allowing me to catch my breath with its laidback, slinky melody. Can you talk about your experience and thoughts behind it?
PG: Indeed. This track is a moment of calm: a sunrise after a mutiny before the partisans get back on track with their mission. It’s an anomaly on the record in several senses. It’s the only track with violin, the only track with sensory percussion, and it was also the only track that was recorded in a studio all together – the other tracks were home recorded one instrument at a time. All of these things give it a different feel from the surrounding music.
OS: Can you think of other moments that stand out to you? Things that you find repeatedly catching your attention when listening back?
PG: For me, it’s really the performances of the band members. I listened to this music over and over again as performed by my notation software as I was writing it. When I received people’s actual recorded performances – particularly their solos, I was truly mesmerized! Anna, Amir, Yuma, David, Layale, Elias, Sam, and Jon did things that I didn’t know where possible, and brought things to a place I couldn’t have imagined. There are too many of these moments to point to from each of these musicians. Picking one wouldn’t be fair to the others. But it’s especially their solos that stand out to me.
OS: Speaking of flow of songs, how did you approach sequencing for Partisan Ship? What sort of dynamics were you trying to balance?
PG: I wanted to create the feeling of being on a continuous journey, with unexpected turns and discoveries along the way. Part of the challenge was how to fit together a sequence that left the listener best equipped to take in all of the music. Still even more important to me was creating the sense of a narrative, and ultimately of an arrival in a new world. It’s perhaps not a coincidence, then, that the piece with the most small microtonal intervals – utopian micronation – is the arrival point of the journey, before the “afterword”.
OS: Narratively, Partisan Ship is loosely based around a narrative of partisans on their journey to a utopian micronation. Can you talk more about that and how you incorporated it into the accompanying art and liner notes?
PG: The narrative of partisans is partly humorous, of course. The metaphor of being a partisan, i.e. the party of microtonal jazz maniacs came naturally, and the description of the album as an odyssey into this soundscape followed. Mario Fabrizio, painter and prolific drummer, responded both to the music and my narrative of it in the artwork. In his drafts, I loved the bold colors and the bold brushstrokes which captured the almost naive brashness with which partisans believe in their cause. And similarly with Cory, when he sent me the liner notes and asked, “I have a crazy idea what do you think?” I immediately said yes because it is just these sorts of bold imaginative takes on the forms of artwork and liner notes that I wanted to surround and lift up the music!
As I got down to writing, I quickly realized that my music had a certain journeying quality to it. It felt like a group of people striving for something, on a mission. It also had an undulating quality, with phrases and rhythms coming like waves. My wife, Ege Yumuşak, gets the credit for the punny title of the album and band that captures both of these qualities. The ensemble is a band of ‘partisans,’ on a mission to make the world a better place, in this case through the metaphor of an unflinching commitment to alternate tuning systems, breaking out of the hyper-rational Western Equal Temperament system.
We live in a time where liberalism tells us that to be ideological or “partisan”, is a bad thing. The dominant idea of liberalism is that ideology is antithetical to progress or even democracy itself. Other worldviews hold that ideology is essential, that without it, democracy reduces to merely a game for the elites to play, a game over who has more money to buy factions of society. I believe one of the main problems of the early 21st century is that we haven’t had enough ideology, not enough partisanship! The left, in particular, has largely lost its ability to really identify what it is and what it isn’t – which has weakened it and allowed everything to shift much more rightward.
I don’t really think that this music somehow contains these opinions or analyses within it. But, I see the project as a whole as some kind of musical analogy for the type of politics that I believe we should be living. I believe the music at least communicates the attitude with which I think we should carry ourselves in the world. The project is in this sense ideological, or partisan. It is a far-fetched idea. A super complex and difficult-to-perform microtonal album, everybody recorded separately, mixed by the composer – even though I had very little experience mixing, and so on. It’s a project almost doomed for failure! “Why has socialism failed everywhere it has been tried?”, they love to ask. Even though the project seemed almost impossible from the start — I didn’t even know if what I was writing for everybody was possible to play on their instruments, and sometimes it wasn’t – I went ahead with it anyway because I believed these ideas must be realizable.
It is in this sense that I am invoking these imaginary “partisans” out there somewhere, who are fighting for their cause against all odds. I don’t know if people will get that message from the music, but I’m hoping that the title of the album and the individual tracks might help people imagine something like this. I don’t want to dictate a purpose or narrative to the music too much. It’s a jazz album, after all, not a political platform! Hopefully by the time listeners reach the utopian micronation where microtonality reigns supreme they can imagine a world without many of the seemingly immovable rigidities that we find ourselves living with day in day out. 12-tone equal temperament one among them.
OS: Have you performed the songs live? Has that continued their evolution and life as compositions? How have they changed since having recorded them?
PG: We’ve only had one chance to do them live and we’ll have another on July 7th at Sisters in Brooklyn – for those of you in the New York area. Hopefully more down the line. The most interesting part about doing it live is how the open transitional sections, essentially the “interludes” work live. They become quite free and open sections and become greatly extended. We eventually have to find our way into the composition, knowing our destination point, but not how we will get there.