Phillip Golub: Abiding Memory

  There’s plenty of music out there that bludgeons the listener with unabashed intensity. Pianist Phillip Golub’s music, on the evidence of Abiding Memory, is more insinuating and subtle. Working in a quintet format, with electric guitarist Alec Goldfarb, cellist Daniel Hass, bassist Sam Minaie, and drummer Vincent Atria, Golub’s music weaves lengthy melodic lines into an often surprising, perpetually fluctuating compositional style. As is often the case, track titles betray the way Golub thinks about his music. The opening pair of pieces, Catching a Thread and Threads Gather, establish the key metaphor for these tracks. It’s not easy to talk about “solo” and “accompaniment” in this music. Guitarist Goldfarb is prominent on Threads Gather, but until the last minute or so when he’s heard all by himself, the rest of the band is off on individual tangents that somehow all fit together. It’s a boon to the listener that the revelatory mix by drummer Atria allows all of the complexity of Golub’s arrangements to shine through. The Group to Hear is notable for the basic structure of piano and guitar playing a game of musical tag over a fairly sparse ensemble sound. For the slowly moving and mildly dissonant A Regrouping, Golub’s arrangement features harpsichord and piano, bowed bass and cello, lightly tapped cymbals and drums, and a smattering of guitar. The music picks up towards the end before morphing directly into Unspooled (Waiting Quietly). This is one of the less complex tracks, with a comparatively straight-ahead groove under an electric piano solo by Golub and a guitar solo by Goldfarb. The multi-part Where Lapses Elapse gets back to the layered strategies that characterize his music. The ominous At the 11th Hour threatens to explode around a repeated cello riff, but Golub on piano and Atria on drums hold things together. The harpsichord is back for the eerie A Moment Becomes, which leads right into Abiding Memory. For the title track, Golub puts his piano front and center, with hints of Jaki Byard, Don Pullen, and early Cecil Taylor in his generally dark and fragmented style. Vijay Iyer, who contributed a luminous liner essay for his one-time student, lauds the “impassioned sincerity [and] irrepressible ardor” of the music. This is a very young band, and they all sound ready for anything that a composer or fellow improviser throws at them. If, like me, you use your knowledge of particular players whose work you enjoyed to follow them in other projects, here’s a quintet of names to keep in mind. Definitely recommended.

Endectomorph Music BR324045; Phillip Golub (p, Rhodes el p, harpsichord) Alec Goldfarb (el g) Daniel Hass (clo) Sam Minaie (b) Vicente Atria (d); Astoria, NY, no dates indicated; Catching a Thread/ Threads Gather/ The Group to Hear/ A Regrouping/ Unspooled (Waiting Quietly)/ In a Secret Corner/ Where Lapses Elapse/ At the 11th Hour/ A Movement Becomes/ Abiding Memory; 58:17. www.endectomorph.com