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| Out Sept. 6 via Pyroclastic – Patricia Brennan's 'Breaking Stretch' With each new release in her still-burgeoning career, the vision of vibraphonist/marimbist/composer Patricia Brennan has grown exponentially in both scale and scope. From the nucleus of her acclaimed solo debut Maquishti she formed a singular quartet for her venturesome follow-up, More Touch, hailed as "scarily good" by All About Jazz. On her fiercely original third album, Breaking Stretch, Brennan's creative imagination expands yet again, supplementing its predecessor's core band (Brennan, bassist Kim Cass, drummer Marcus Gilmore and percussionist Mauricio Herrera) with an adventurous trio of horns – Jon Irabagon on alto and sopranino saxes, Mark Shim on tenor, and Adam O'Farrill on trumpet and electronics. Due out September 6, 2024 via Pyroclastic Records, Breaking Stretch is an enrichment of the themes and influences that made More Touch such a memorable experience: contemporary classical and forward-searching jazz, folkloric traditions from Brennan's native Mexico, and a wealth of rhythmic inspirations from her youth, ranging from Afro-Caribbean sounds to funk, salsa and brass-driven rock bands. Breaking Stretch sounds like none of those precursors, exactly, but draws together Brennan's wide-ranging interests into a dramatic, mesmerizing balance, shifting fluidly between the grooving and the strident, the ethereal and the intricate. Brennan deftly melds the distinctive voices of her collaborators into a densely layered amalgam, the palette of her own mallet instruments transfigureed through the use of electronics. The title of Breaking Stretch is a concise representation of Brennan's envelope-pushing ambitions. Breaking references her desire to push herself and her bandmates to their limits, to mine the transcendent results of virtuosic imaginations confronted by unexpected challenges. Stretch captures her music's intense elasticity, its ability to stretch from the taut and minutely focused to the wide-angled and reaching. Those extremes are depicted in the album's striking artwork, a mix of astronomical and volcanic images, placing the cosmic and the subterranean side by side – the differences between the opposing poles, as in Brennan's work, at times nearly indistinguishable. "I wanted to push the music and the musicians almost to the breaking point, " Brennan explains. "I wrote music that creates the illusion of width and narrowness, either with orchestration techniques or with a play on rhythmic structures." Rhythm remains the vital core around which Brennan's music orbits. The inextricable combination of the percussive and the melodic is uniquely inherent in her own instruments, the vibraphone and marimba; as a composer, she has applied that blend to her ensemble as a whole. Brennan has described the band on More Touch as a percussion quartet, drawing on her classical studies at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. Despite the addition of three instrumentalists that would normally be described as melodic voices, she continued to approach the expanded ensemble as a percussion group. In her liner notes, she cites influences ranging from the Fania All-Stars to Earth Wind & Fire to the son jarocho of her hometown in Veracruz. Beyond the purely musical, Brennan draws profound inspiration from a variety of sources. The new album's opener, "Los Otros Yo (The Other Selves), " seeks inward for the multifarious identities that make up a single personality; closer "Earendel" looks to the far reaches of the universe as we know it, to the oldest and most distant star yet discovered by humanity. (Brennan is a self-avowed amateur astronomist, who often travels with her own telescope.) Between these bookends are pieces derived from mathematical concepts, Aztec mythology and astrological signs, the poetry of Salvador Díaz Mirón and the visual art of Harry Bertoia. Brennan's past also emerges in her blurring of the lines between the mathematical and the emotional in her writing. Both of her parents were engineers, providing her with nurturing role models whose minds tended toward the cerebral and analytical. Applying such concepts to music comes naturally to Brennan, whose music is undeniably complex and heady yet brimming with fervent passion and emotion. "There's mathematics in everything, " she asserts. "Within mathematics there's tension and release, which are very emotional qualities. For me those push and pull energies coexist, and I feel that every good rhythm strikes a balance between consonance and dissonance. If there's too much dissonance in the rhythm, then it feels tense and hard to listen to; if there's too much consonance it can become boring or stagnant. That perfect balance between tension and release translates back to those numerical combinations." Reflecting on her roots in Mexico has become an increasingly complex notion for Brennan. The release of Breaking Stretch marks 20 years since she moved to the States, meaning that she's fast approaching point at which she will have spent half of her life in her adopted homeland. The nostalgia and soul-searching that the anniversary evokes lend a poignant undercurrent to her music, another instigation to search within and beyond herself. "Where am I really from now?" she muses. "Am I not Mexican anymore? I've been asking myself those questions a lot recently. There are days when I feel super disconnected from my time in Mexico, almost like it was a distant memory or a dream that never existed. As time passes I'll probably have to deal with those questions of identity more and more." Patricia Brennan Vibraphonist, marimbist, improviser and composer Patricia Brennan "has been widely feted as one of the instrument's newer leaders, " observed The New York City Jazz Record. She was voted the top "Rising Star Vibraphonist" in DownBeat magazine's 70th Critics Poll, and her extensive sidewoman work includes the Grammy-nominated John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, Michael Formanek's Ensemble Kolossus, Matt Mitchell's Phalanx Ambassadors, the Webber/Morris Big Band, Tomas Fujiwara's 7 Poets Trio, Mary Halvorson's Amaryllis and Grammy-winner Arturo O'Farrill's Afro Latin Jazz Big Band, amongst other groups and collectives. She has also collaborated with pianist Vijay Iyer as a member of Blind Spot with writer Teju Cole, Iyer's large ensemble project Open City and several small ensemble performances along with renowned musicians including bassist Reggie Workman and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Patricia's own projects include the solo project Maquishti, MOCH - a collaborative duo with percussionist, drummer and turntablist Noel Brennan (DJ Arktureye) - and More Touch, featuring an unusual quartet of mallet percussion, percussion, drums, and bass. Pyroclastic Records Pianist-composer Kris Davis founded Pyroclastic Records in 2016. By supporting artists in the dissemination of their work, Pyroclastic empowers emerging and established artists to continue challenging conventional genre-labeling within their fields. Pyroclastic also seeks to galvanize and grow a creative community, providing opportunities, supporting diversity and expanding the audience for noncommercial art. Its albums often feature artwork by prominent visual artists—Ellsworth Kelly, Julian Charriére, Dike Blair, Raymond Pettibon and Gabriel de la Mora among recent examples. 2024 Pyroclastic projects include albums from David Leon, Ches Smith, Modney, Brandon Seabrook, Patricia Brennan and Kris Davis. Patricia Brennan – Breaking Stretch Pyroclastic Records – PR 35 – Recorded Sept. 16-17, 2023 Release date September 6, 2024 write your comments about the article :: © 2024 Jazz News :: home page |