As swiftly as she has ascended the ranks of our most exciting composers, the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan’s work as a leader has until now displayed an inflationary bent. Her debut Maquishti was a solo affair on vibraphone and marimba while More Touch, her acclaimed breakthrough as a composer, added a lively rhythm section through Kim Cass on the double bass, Mauricio Herrera on percussion and Marcus Gilmore on drums. Then for Breaking Stretch last year she emblazoned the quartet with a trio of horns, adding to that tensile backbone through the trumpet of Adam O’Farrill, the tenor saxophone of Mark Shin and the distinctive alto and sopranino of Jon Irabagon.
In fact Brennan’s training is as a classical marimba player, while her first professional job was as a timpanist for a state-funded orchestra in her native Mexico. An offer to join the Youth Orchestra of the Americas at the age of seventeen had allowed her to explore the continent and she performed with symphony orchestras in both Mexico and Philadelphia before she was lured by the timbral and improvisational possibilities of the vibraphone, soon falling in as part of a lively avant-garde jazz scene in New York City.
Her first appearance on record was alongside a veritable who’s who of emerging New York-based jazz musicians as she formed part of Michael Formanek’s eighteen-piece Ensemble Kolossus for The Distance on ECM. Those connections would stand her in good stead. Sessions with Matt Mitchell and as part of the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble followed before she linked up with Tomas Fujiwara and Tomeka Reid to introduce the drummer’s 7 Poets Trio. Then in 2022 she was on hand as the wiry guitarist Mary Halvorson formed her spellbinding and endlessly pliable Amaryllis Sextet.
By my reckoning Brennan has played a role in some of the best jazz albums of the past few years, including Stephan Crump’s ebbing and flowing, trundling and watchful, quietly captivating Slow Water, in short succession Halvorson’s billowing Cloudward and ebullient About Ghosts plus For These Streets with another close collaborator in the form of the trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, who deftly explored the artistic currents of the 1930s while turning a page on his own development as a bandleader. That’s not to mention her own breakthrough on More Touch or the copper-rich complexity of Breaking Stretch, both of which albums were released on Kris Davis’s stellar Pyroclastic Records.
With a quick turnaround her new album Of The Near And Far is both archly conceptual and an act of real daring. Roused sonically by her background in classical and new music plus some of the alternative rock of her youth as much as her present-day improvisational surrounds – she mentions a slew of classical composers with a pronounced interest in folk music like Brahms, Debussy, DvoÅĆ”k, Stravinsky and Aaron Copland, the avante-garde icons John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen whose use of indeterminacy and aleatoric techniques helped to pave the way for contemporary electronics, the pioneering computer works of Paul Lansky plus the grunge of Soundgarden and experimental rock of Radiohead (who sampled a four-chord phrase from Lansky’s computer piece ‘Mild und leise’ for perhaps their best song ‘Idioteque’) – the raw matter for her compositional process came not from the page or her headphones but from a long glance up at the stars. Brennan writes:
In the summer of 2024, I developed a process that allowed me to collect pitch and numerical data from constellations. I overlaid the shapes of constellations onto a circle of fifths, intrigued by whether the symmetry of the constellations could translate into musical symmetry – whether harmonic or melodic. The circle of fifths is already a highly symmetrical structure that organises pitches in a sequence. By mapping the constellations’ shapes onto this circle, I discovered new relationships between pitches, chords, and even key signatures. These relationships emerged purely from the constellations’ symmetry, not from traditional music theory.
Discovering that her collection of pitches made sound musical sense, Brennan set to work composing around the data she had gathered, focusing on the constellations surrounding the Summer Triangle asterism while allowing their mythologies and her own personal observations (spied through a telescope) to suffuse the nature and development of each track.
To carry off this celestial admixture of shapes and sounds, she put together an almost entirely new ensemble with only the bassist Kim Cass remaining from More Touch and Breaking Stretch. Sylvie Courvoisier the sometime Mary Halvorson collaborator, whose Bone Bells is one of the most circuitous and beguiling albums of the year, steps in on the piano and Miles Okazaki fresh from work with Jon Irabagon and Henry Threadgill adds squibs and peals of guitar. The deft John Hollenbeck – who just last week appeared on Meredith Monk’s new collection, a recording of her cooperative, meditative yet curiously defiant Cellular Songs – on drums and percussion completes this first phase or aspect of the band.
Brennan describes her new ensemble on Of The Near And Far as a conventional jazz quintet comprising piano, bass, drums, guitar and mallet percussion plus a string quartet and a kind of roving electronic middleman. Modney and Pala Garcia on violins, Kyle Armbrust on viola and Michael Nicolas on cello make up the string section with Modney and Armbrust having previously accompanied the likes of Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey, Ingrid Laubrock, Ches Smith and Cory Smythe while the violist played on the violinist’s copious and star-studded Ascending Primes last year. Meanwhile the deejay Arktureye – who worked with Brennan in 2021 on ‘Maquishti Prismatic’, a song-length and sample-based reworking of her debut solo record – handles the electronics which ‘sometimes function as interstitial elements while [at other times] they take a more prominent role’.
Of The Near And Far opens through an effulgent toil of straining strings, wind-blown chimes and other scrapes as though a carpenter or instrument builder were working by the flicker of an incandescent lamplight. A loose patter of drums and circling keys join the fray, and soon enough those drums begin to cohere and find their rhythm, accentuated by the up-bow of the strings before Brennan’s vibes wash and weave over the top of the beat and Okazaki’s guitar plays flamenco airs, his picado adding to the sparkling fusion.
Lively and sprightly, like all of the bubbles and gradients in a spritz, the song is called ‘Antlia’ after the constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere. Representing an air pump and headed by Alpha Antliae, a suspected variable star whose brightness changes over time to us earthbound observers, the composition mirrors its namesake by way of its glimmering, stop-start groove with the guitar, piano and limpid vibes together driving the melody. A few glissandos from the vibraphone and the short bows of the strings help ‘Antlia’ towards a climax before Arktureye breaks it all down, interrupting the flow of the song through some squelching, volcanic beats which are redolent of beatboxing. A classical refrain barely forms as the song sputters out and segues into the next transmission.
Twinkling into view, the slow and stately development of the strings leaves ‘Aquarius’ in a state of suspended animation even as Kim Cass plucks away at the low-end on his bass. Then comes a kind of flowering as Hollenbeck’s drums hit with a loping languorousness and a bit of swing while Brennan’s vibraphone sounds suitably watery. As the drums maintain the beat, arpeggios from the guitar sometimes joined by the vibes again make the relationship between Okazaki and Brennan central to the composition.
While vibraphone trios from Victor Feldman to Walt Dickerson to Jason Adasiewicz have tended to incorporate bass and drums, with the 7 Poets Trio by Tomas Fujiwara swapping out the bass to make space for Tomeka Reid’s cello, it is already after listening to the first few songs on Of The Near And Far tempting to imagine an unconventional trio made up of Brennan on vibes, Okazaki on guitar and Hollenbeck on drums, or Courvoisier on keys or even Cass on the bass in the manner of Red Norvo’s trio recordings with Tal Farlow and Charles Mingus.
The end of ‘Aquarius’ sounds like a train coming into an empty station. ‘Andromeda’ picks up the pace with its choppy introduction showcasing some nice interplay between the drums, bass and guitar before Brennan leads the rest of the ensemble through their first big swirl. Okazaki begins to shred as the electronics come to the fore, with each new spiral ever more distorted, the next straightening out into some deejay scratching and Courvoisier’s staggered keys while the string section throbs and Hollenbeck’s drums help make for a pummelling conclusion. This constellation is known as the ‘Chained Woman’ for its association with the mythological princess, who was chained to a rock by the coast and set to be ravaged by the sea monster Cetus. Viewed as a take on the myth, Brennan’s composition might show both the monster lashing the coast but also the heroine breaking loose of her own shackles.
As a composer Brennan harnesses the possibilities afforded by electronics, which featured on Maquishti and More Touch and then again on Breaking Stretch, for instance in the spectral interlude midway through the standout ‘SueƱos de Coral Azul (Blue Coral Dreams)’ or in the opening moments of ‘Earendel’ while Adam O’Farrill also used electronics to furnish his trumpet. Her tools of choice have included the Digitech Whammy effects pedal which serves to expand the range of her instrument while she has also modified the natural voice and resonances of her vibes through a series of granular delay and pitch shifting devices.
Working with a dedicated electronic musician for the first time, on Of The Near And Far these components are even more pronounced yet they really take centre stage on the album centrepiece ‘Citlalli’. The track derives from two graphic scores which Brennan dubbed ‘Citlalli I’ and ‘Citlalli II’, the word meaning ‘star’ in the Nahuatl language of central Mexico. During the recording process for Of The Near And Far, the ensemble improvised a version of each score with the resulting material used to shape the electroacoustic track which appears on the album, a loosely tethered collection of pulses and bleeps which seems to cut up the collective’s strings, drums and chimes before stringing them back together like a train of pearls, cabin by cabin.
Folk themes from the violin as ‘Citlalli’ docks between spheroids allow the track to segue effortlessly into the drooping strings and plucked guitar of ‘Lyra’, with Okazaki’s notes stretching and vibrating over the surge of the ensemble before a quiddity of piano plunks, chimes and wriggling guitar momentarily suggest the springs of a grandfather clock easing loose of their sockets. Brennan’s quavering vibraphone and the clunking menace of Courvoisier’s keys provide a moment of heightened and suspenseful drama then at the mid-point of the composition the band moves off again in a kind of halting or backwards-looking manner. Named for the famous lyre of Orpheus, even as the song swoons with the coiled journey of the strings carried aloft on gambolling vibes and the headlong bounding of the rhythm section there is a sense of turbulence and faltering underfoot before ‘Lyra’ assents to an elegiac closure.
‘Aquila’ bears a suitably curved aspect, all overhang and precipice from the early interplay between bass and vibes to faint caws and sheer edifices as distant cymbal crashes and the sawing drones or vaporous crests of the strings join Brennan and Cass to suggest the sweep and heft of foliage-clad summits. Then through whooshing winds and a few more flamenco airs, without so much as shifting gears we wind up at the final song on Of The Near And Far, leaving those constellations behind like mere twinkles in one’s eye as ‘When You Stare Into the Abyss’ offers one last musical statement. Full of sustained tones and drones which cede to an encompassing quiet, Brennan says that ‘When You Stare Into The Abyss’ contains the essence of the earlier tracks and the piece also shows her embracing post-rock textures even as the second half of the composition traces an achingly sweet music hall melody.
Whether the compositional process here sets out a whole new map in which others might travel or serves more as a conceit, a onetime spur or a vehicle for individual expression, Patricia Brennan’s turn to the stars as she sought a connection between her chosen constellations and the circle of fifths has resulted in something which sounds musically definite.
Ornate, orchestral and often euphonic, Of The Near And Far offers a wholly original take on cosmic jazz while allowing Brennan to test her hand with new collaborative partners. And while the conductor Eli Greenhoe and quartet of strings are crucial to the flow of the album, it is no surprise that the deft percussion of John Hollenbeck and controlled dramatics of Sylvie Courvoisier go hand in hand with Brennan’s limpid and cascading melodicism with Miles Okazaki both febrile and romantic as he imbues her music with a wholly new character and temperament. As always Brennan uncorks our conventions around instruments, engaging in lively duos or trios while affording the musicians equal chance to press textures and shapes, bob and weave in accompaniment or carry the melodic heart of a composition.
