AAJ Interview: Phil Robson & Julian Siegel of Partisans

[jkelman]

My interview with Phil Robson and Julian Siegel, of UK-based group Partisans, today at All About Jazz.

It's been five years since Partisans—the British jazz group (not to be confused with the also-British punk rock band The Partisans) cited as the godfathers of the new wave of British jazz, first emerging in 1997 with the out-of-print self-titled debut on the EFZ label—last released an album, specifically the superlative By Proxy (Babel, 2009), which All About Jazz's Chris May called the group's "long expected masterpiece" and "one of the most exciting albums to be released on either side of the Atlantic in 2009."

High praise indeed, but the quartet that's been co-led by the group's two writers—guitarist Phil Robson and saxophonist/bass clarinetist Julian Siegel—has gone from strength to strength with each successive recording, managing to blend a plethora of ever-expanded stylistic interests into a unified gumbo that can only be described as: Partisans. With the band—also featuring bassist Thad Kelly and expat American drummer Gene Calderazzo— on the cusp of a new album coming this fall on, for the group, a new label (Swamp, to be released at the end of September, 2014 on Whirlwind Recordings Ltd), it's also getting ready to embark on a brief but important North American tour that will bring Partisans to Rochester, New York City, Seattle...and, for the first time, to four Canadian cities: Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa and Montréal.

Keeping things fresh is what's allowed the group to exist for nearly 20 years. As Robson explains, "The band has always had this old repertoire stuff that we've played a lot; but we've become very flexible at playing, say, one section of one tune and then going straight into another tune, and that really keeps the whole thing alive. We've started to think of tunes, rather than being these complete pieces where you start at the beginning and finish at ttat the end of a bridge of some tune, and someone might just play a few notes or suggest the feel of another tune, and we can just go straight into it. It's very flexible; it's become a stylistic feature of the band to do that, and I suspect we'll be doing the same with the new material before too long. That's really great in terms of keeping things fresh; we're never going to play the same thing twice."

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Download the title track from Swamp here for free, today's AAJ Download of the Day.