Phillip Golub / Lesley Mok: Dream Brigade

Pianist Phillip Golub and drummer Lesley Mok explore the porous boundaries between form and freedom on their exploratory debut as Dream Brigade, blending spontaneous composition with intuitive interplay in a wide-ranging program of six spontaneous inventions and two dives into the Great American Songbook.

An in-demand side person, Mok can be heard in the blue chip ensembles of pianist Myra Melford and reedist Anna Webber, as well as leading the group The Living Collection. Golub's resume includes principals as varied as Amir ElSaffar, Brad Shepik and Cecil McBee, and made a well-received leadership debut Abiding Memory (Endectomorph, 2024).

By its nature the piano tends to provide the dominant voice. Although Golub traverses multiple stylistic languages, he often imbues even percussive or atonal approaches with more of a melodic dimension than might be expected, shifting him into a singular expressive space. For their part Mok often manifests as a more reserved presence, with texture and tone privileged above rhythm. Many of their contributions are subtle—a bowed or scraped cymbal here or a distant tap there—which evoke the lightness of touch and economy of a Paul Motian.

While piano-drum duets no longer have an aura of novelty, this outing ranges more widely than most. On the nimble dialogue of "Kindling," the collision of Golub's cell-like phrases and the drummer's brushed clatter brings to mind the patron saint of modern piano players Cecil Taylor, while on the oblique rendition of "Darn That Dream," Golub recalls Paul Bley for the first three and a half minutes, before nodding towards the dissonant intervals of Thelonious Monk when joined by Mok's emphatic clatter.

Minimalism too offers a lens through which to view proceedings, sometimes in the dense form of "Reverse Palindrome," where press rolls unite with a stream of two-handed patterns, and "Tunneled Throat," where Golub overlays bass register pummeling with sweeping cyclical figures atop a snare-fuelled rat-a-tat or at other times more sparsely, as in the two-note motifs of the hushed "Invisible Ink." These tendencies converge in "Low Passage (Part 2)," which builds from near-silence to a menacing crescendo of rumbling drums and dramatic chords.

They end with the second standard, "Conception," a reading that feels at once celebratory and elegiac. It remains rooted in tradition while making a persuasive case for its limitless elasticity. It puts the final stamp on a striking debut on which the personalities are as important as the instrumentation.