Thursday Night Jazz Presents Lesley Mok & Phillip Golub

About Lesley Mok — Lesley Mok is a drummer, composer, and improviser based in Brooklyn, NY. Interested in the ways social conditions shape our beings, Lesley’s work focuses on transposing, augmenting, and overacting humanness to explore ideas about normalcy, alienness, and privilege. She explores this by writing in a way that subverts traditional instrumental roles, often utilizing extreme ranges and unconventional timbres, while creating a context that allows for simultaneously different musical perspectives. By maintaining an agile and improvisatory approach, Lesley creates fantastical and evocative sound worlds through the use of dissonance.

About Phillip Golub – Phillip Golub is a composer and pianist from Los Angeles, CA. Now based in New York City, his music strides the boundary between the spontaneous and the premeditated, making the act of interpretation the central concern of his work. Phillip’s music has been performed by groups including the Plus-Minus Ensemble and the EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble and in spaces such as Merkin Hall (NYC) and The Broad Stage (Los Angeles). He has performed at venues spanning from Milton Court Concert Hall (London) to The Stone, The Whitney Museum, and National Sawdust (NYC). Phillip’s band, Tropos, released its first album Axioms // 75ab to critical acclaim on Biophilia Records in 2020. Since February 2019, Phillip has also been intimately involved with the development of a new opera, Iphigenia (premiere 2022), with a new score by Wayne Shorter and libretto by Esperanza Spalding. Phillip holds degrees from Harvard University (B.A. English), The Guildhall School of Music & Drama (M.Mus. Composition), and The New England Conservatory (M.M. Jazz Performance).