dream brigade with Phillip Golub and Lesley Mok
Friday November 6th at Tonal Park Studios at 7014-C Westmoreland Ave, Takoma Park, MD. Doors at 7:00, music at 7:30. Admission: $20-$30, sliding scale. Advance tickets. (Co-presented with Rhizome DC)
Phillip Golub (piano), Lesley Mok (drums).
On the heels of debut releases as bandleaders in 2024 described respectively as “an exquisite and stimulating work” (The Living Collection – All About Jazz) and “possess[ing] a grounding, mesmeric magic” (Abiding Memory – DownBeat Magazine), drummer Lesley Mok and pianist Phillip Golub joined forces as dream brigade. Their self-titled debut album, released March 14, 2025 on New York creative music imprint Infrequent Seams, is an immersive and captivating collection of improvisations that has earned wide international acclaim. Strikingly, it also features the duo’s highly personal interpretations of two jazz standards. On dream brigade, Mok and Golub break away from the rigorously composed constructions of their recent individual projects to allow their voices as improvisers and instrumentalists to speak for themselves.
Mok and Golub met socially in Boston, where they studied at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, respectively. Their collaboration began in 2021, when Mok invited Golub to perform a duo concert at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, NY, in the months following the reopening from the COVID shutdown. Since then, dream brigade has performed regularly across the Northeast and Midwest, with recent engagements at The Jazz Gallery, CloseUp NYC, Spoleto Festival USA, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, The Bop Stop, and others.
“More impressive than such details is the overall rapport and interaction between Golub and Mok, which goes far beyond sound and rhythm into bracing compositional studies.” — Peter Margasak in The Wire Magazine
“That was very nice [...] One thing I like about Lesley on this recording is that her ideas are very deliberate and intentional. It’s not tentative. She has a thing that she’s going for, and it’s intentional. I learned from that. And I’ve been really impressed with everything I’ve heard Philip do. I think he’s a voice to be reckoned with.” — Terri Lyne Carrington in Jazz Times “blindfold test”
“In their effortless balance and the acuity of their ideas, Mok and Golub prove to be an inspired pairing.” — David Adler in Jazz Times Top Releases March 2025
“Individually, pianist Phillip Golub and percussionist Lesley Mok are among the most resourceful and individual composer/performers coming up in New York’s creative-music scene. Together, they’re dream brigade, with a compelling new self-titled album coming this Friday on Infrequent Seams that shows what happens when they throw caution to the wind for a set of spontaneous inventions and reconstituted canon, with exhilarating results.” — Steve Smith (Night after Night)