Keyboardist Phillip Golub generally falls under the umbrella of jazz, but that doesn’t mean he’s a traditionalist. Indeed, you don’t need to get very far into his third album to realize he moves forward far more than he looks back. Created with the help of the virtual keyboard instrument Pianoteq and the flexichord, a MIDI-enabled microtonal keyboard of Golub’s own design, the ten tracks on _Partisan Ship_sound far less like Theolonious Monk gone electronic, and more like Autechre and the Aphex Twin after binging on Chick Corea albums. His outsider setup and use of microtones allows Golub to set every song in its own unique tuning, while his fleet-fingered riffing gallops between the notes of the twelve-tone scale into otherworldly realms where music means something different than it does in our three paltry dimensions. Interestingly, however, Golub draws upon the vast talent pool of the NYC jazz scene, including such forward-thinking players as saxophonist/flautist Anna Webber, clarinetest Yuma Uesaka, saxophonist Amir ElSaffar, and drummer Jon Starks, to ground the sound in the music he began with in the first place. “Mutiny,” “cries of the uninitiated” and even the everything-but-the-dishwasher opener “loyalty oath” may use microtonal harmonies and skittering electronic faeries, but they still, ultimately, sound like jazz – just jazz beyond the century in which we currently live.
