Phét Phét Phét — Shimmer
Phét Phét Phét, a musical venture founded by multi-instrumentalist and composer Jarrett Gilgore, is a coalescence of creativity and care, straddling familiar conventions, parameters and language. It’s a sonic snapshot of a Pan-American community of collaborators learning how to unlearn, embracing the audacity to play with an open heart.
The word ‘phét’ (pronounced peht) is actually a Tibetan syllable, meaning ‘cutting through’, signifying a deep kindling with the present moment. It’s a fitting term to define Gilgore’s creative trajectory so far. Eternally sparked by an innate curiosity for experimentation — and a steadfast eschewing of cemented jazz dogmas — Phét Phét Phét marks a swift departure from his more improvisational quote unquote avantgarde projects and ensembles — yet every bit as maverick in both sound and execution.
For one, Phét Phét Phét has no fixed lineup of members: it’s meant to be an ever-evolving project that allows Gilgore to collaborate with the musicians he meets along the way, and create a collective dialogue. The inaugural iteration of Phét Phét Phét that made Shimmer began almost a decade ago, when drummer Gibrán Andrade visited Baltimore in 2015 and Gilgore set up a show for him. Friendship and mutual feeling opened up a relay between the US and Mexico City, a tessellation of worlds within which Andrade, Susan Alcorn, Mabe Fratti, Marc Miller, Hector Tosta & Marco Carrión were orbiting around.
After calling Baltimore home for 10 years, Gilgore moved to Mexico City at the beginning of 2022, with no intention to make a record out of some of the songs he composed for Phét Phét Phét. Encouraged by Fratti and Tosta, he started making demos at their house, before eventually fleshing out the tracks in a studio at the beginning of 2023. Andrade would be an early catalyst, tracking Gilgore’s recordings with his dexterous pulse, essentially kickstarting the project into something that moves and propels.
“These songs are from a time when I was re-evaluating my relationship to being a musician,” Gilgore explains. “I wasn’t listening to or playing much music. I was feeling really stuck in the identity I had become attached to being a professional musician. I was tired of the improvised music scene I was part of and I felt like the music I was devoting my life to was doing a better job at alienating people than it was at connecting with them. These songs are not about me or my virtuosity on the saxophone. They are about connection and co-creation — the facilitation of an experience for others. To me, the biggest problem in modern western culture is the unwillingness to feel and the compulsion to conceptualize. My music is about feeling. Feeling is not a concept. It’s a space one enters into.”
Phét Phét Phét may be Gilgore first ‘solo’ project — for lack of a better word — he makes an ardent point of not being the central figure around the music. Throughout these five wholly differently conceived compositions, Gilgore’s saxophone playing often acts as a shepherd or a tender: a supportive, nurturing force encouraging collaborators to take his arrangements someplace exciting and unexpected. And doing so, not resorting to unfettered free jazz incursions Gilgore has honed in the past.
Phét Phét Phét is as much about intent as it is about abandon; a collective pursuit for an intermediate between conceptual and happenstance where feelings are granted an open expressway. Opening track “Half Glass” immediately executes the act of cutting through, as Gilgore’s arpeggiated sax playing becomes the water’s edge between lush synth arrangements and cherubic vocal harmonies to soar above. “I wrote the demo for that track in 2018. And then for a few years, I didn’t touch it. I initially only wanted to have the saxophone in that song as a texture that’s adding to the synth. I didn’t want the saxophone to be the focal point of the song. I didn’t want to have any improvisation…I wanted it to float.”
Shimmer’s title track loiters in a reverie of melodic currents, enchanted by Fratti’s placid spoken word delivery, read impromptu from a Michel Houellebecq book. It’s an act of impulse feeding into something previously solidified and left alone. The track captures the new lease of life Gilgore found in Mexico. “It all happened organically and spontaneously. Everything in that text was about things I had already been thinking about. It was so quick. Mabe recorded one or two takes of reading that text. And then there it was. It’s one of those things you can’t plan or recreate.”
“Windpocket People ‘’ is the off piece where Gilgore’s playing gets permission jumps to the fore in joyous abandon, unfolding in primordial shrieks with traits of harmonic similitude. “I think in my life at least — I think we have all various phases of this — where we put all this effort into something. And then something happens, and we enter this period where we all just kind of float. And re enter into this current or something where we don’t really need to try so hard and things just kind of unfold. This track was like a homage to the people who have helped me in those periods.”
Closing off the A-side of the record, the metamorphic space rock of “Se Siente Como” strikes like a permanent departure from the strain of earth’s gravity, capturing the immediacy of a band playing together in a room. The song is held aloft with an arresting vocal performance by Fratti: her singing somehow emanates both resilience and fragility in equal measure. “Mabe and I co-wrote it. There’s actually no words except “It feels like”. I don’t think it was intentionally made like that. I told Mabe to just improvise with syllables. What ended up happening: the only words to the song are ‘it feels like…’ and then there’s this kind of language that’s connected to the moment. Everytime Mabe sings it, it would have different syllables.”
Shimmer lands on new fertile soil with 20-minute B-side piece “You are the Eyes of The World” — named after a text detailing how to rest into the nature of mind by Tibetan Buddhist master, Longchenpa. Where most of the first half of the album revolves around collaborators reigniting music Gilgore had been working on before his move to Mexico City, Shimmer’s conclusion befittingly finds him on the inverse: the editing and production became a fresh catalyst for the music’s direction. The track was born out of two separate sessions with fellow Baltimore luminaries, Susan Alcorn and Marc Miller, before Gilgore moved south of the border. Upon revisiting Alcorn and Miller’s improvisations in his new environment, he became inspired to finish it by carefully lacing Miller and Alcorn’s parts together, all while removing his own organ parts out of the equation. “You are the Eyes of The World” sounds like the music rests in auspicious flux: like a primordial soup where possibilities feel vast and endless.
“For me this piece is really about the process of becoming. Not the outcome but the process of arriving. Striving. Growing. Growth is the process of aligning our behavior with what we value. One can’t grow without intention. The evolution of this piece is precisely that. Intentional changes. Where it arrives at is irrelevant. The outcome doesn’t matter. There isn’t really one. It’s the experience within the process. To say there’s an outcome is to say there’s an end. To say there’s an end is to say there’s a beginning. I don’t really believe that.”
Where Phét Phét Phét goes from here is anybody’s guess, much less Gilgore’s. But one thing is for certain: Shimmer is as generous a musical document as there is about the act of paying things forward, surrendering to the moment with unified expression: music fully attuned, unshackled from the very canvas it is conceived on.
“Although I play a few different instruments, the majority of my recorded output up to this point has been instrumental improvised music. With these songs I didn’t want the saxophone to take over, nor did I want improvisation to be the central feature of this music. I wanted to construct a world where I’m not in the center, and also not just existing on the periphery.”
