A piano, a drum kit, no bass, one day in a studio in Astoria. That is all there is to dream brigade, and the record Phillip Golub and Lesley Mok released under that name on Infrequent Seams in March 2025 makes the absence its subject. With no bassist nobody is holding the floor and no register is spoken for, so the two treat the gap as permission. Golub can sit in the bottom octaves for minutes, Mok can hand a melody to a cymbal, and neither has to ask.
The two go back to student years in Boston, Mok at Berklee, Golub at New England Conservatory, but the duo only took shape once both had landed in New York and started meeting for sessions that ran as much on listening as on playing. Where most piano-and-drums encounters lean on the drummer to push and the pianist to fill, this one keeps trading the roles: Mok phrases, Golub keeps time, then the reverse, often inside a single minute of music.
Everything was recorded on 19 September 2023 at Samurai Hotel and mixed by Sam Minaie, the bassist in Golub's own quintet. The lone standard, Darn That Dream, runs eight and a half minutes and never quite states the tune; it arrives in fragments, gets left on the table, and comes back changed. Invisible Ink is the record's nocturne, a short returning figure Golub keeps almost still while Mok works the edges with brushes and the odd struck rim. Low Passage, in two parts, is where the pair sit longest in silence, well away from the noisier end of free improvisation. Restraint here is not politeness. It is the material.
What makes the duo worth attention is how far it sits from either player's day job. Mok grew up in the Bay Area and started on classical piano before switching to drums. Their ten-piece band The Living Collection, whose 2023 debut on American Dreams won the German Jazz Prize for international debut album a year later, is music of density and layered breath. They also drum in Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet with Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock and Tomeka Reid, and this July released transient, a solo record of electronics and processed drums.
Golub, from Los Angeles by way of NEC and Guildhall, leads the quintet behind Abiding Memory, out on Berthold in June 2024, and co-founded the collective Tropos. A month before dream brigade appeared he released Loop 7 on Greyfade, a 28-minute piece for two Disklavier pianos retuned to 22 notes per octave. He was a 2025 German Jazz Prize newcomer nominee and spent the year in residencies at Spoleto Festival USA and Dumbarton Oaks.
Two musicians whose other projects are about scale, a tentet and a microtonal machine, spend an album refusing it. It is the room where both find out what they sound like with nothing to lean on.
