Muzzled by the use of electronics, it is Adam O’Farrill’s trumpet which drags us headlong into the whirlpool of Patricia Brennan’s new album Breaking Stretch, her third as a leader following the solo effort Maquishti in 2021 and More Touch the following year, a quartet outing which was released to widespread acclaim on Pyroclastic Records. The percussive gulp of the trumpet’s valves is carried away by the Latinate flair of Mauricio Herrera, as O’Farrill is joined too by Mark Shim on the tenor saxophone with Brennan herself merely accenting the rhythm until she takes a free rein and begins to develop the melody on vibraphone.
‘Los Otros Yo (The Other Selves)’ attains a dizzyingly transcendent quality as the clip-clop of Herrera’s percussion is offset by overlapping horns, including the helical effects and frayed ends of O’Farrill’s trumpet which is stretched out of shape by all manner of processing. The opening track on Breaking Stretch, the daring and suggestive ‘Los Otros Yo (The Other Selves)’ captures the essence of Brennan’s new album, which is full of angular and overlapping lines, mouthy and strung-out brass plus complex percussive rhythms, yet never gets bogged down, always carrying an ebullient atmosphere and a propulsive sense of swing which is the product of lively and generous collaboration.
The title track eases off a little bit at first, which only enhances the slightly queasy, Wurlitzer merry-go-round sensation, with Marcus Gilmore on drums and Kim Cass on bass providing a stable though limber backbone before the emphasis turns to Jon Irabagon whose high-register sax weaves through the composition at breakneck speed, as though he were reckoning with the quickening tempo of the piece and making haste in order to burst through the finish line. Then a more bronzed passage from Shim’s tenor is offset by rattling drums and Brennan holds down the sustain pedal, the bars of her vibraphone resounding like organ keys as in dazed fashion ‘Breaking Stretch’ languors to a close. It is a composition which much like the rest of the album rewards close attention and repeated listening while also carrying a sense of easygoing though sophisticated uplift.
The buoyant vibraphonist Patricia Brennan – a Michael Formanek, Matt Mitchell and Tomas Fujiwara collaborator who courtesy of Mary Halvorson’s Cloudward and Stephan Crump’s Slow Water has already starred on some of the best records of the year – is still making her mark as a leader having found a home on the pianist Kris Davis’s always riveting Pyroclastic Records. With a cheery disposition and steely confidence, now with Breaking Stretch she expands on the deft rhythms and tactile rhapsodies of More Touch by adding to that sensile backbone through a trio of horns. The drummer Marcus Gilmore, percussionist Mauricio Herrera and bassist Kim Cass who together with Brennan made up the More TouchĀ quartet are joined by Jon Irabagon on alto and sopranino saxophones, Mark Shim on the tenor and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet with occasional electronics.
Dashing out of the gates on this debut album by her septet, the third track ‘555’ is more circumspect as the doleful tone of the tenor plays against the lower ranges of her marimba, while the percussion creates these slow-moving but still turbulent eddies and the electronic effects of the trumpet allow the instrument to switch between rhythmic accents and sinking drones.
Brennan, who has been busy producing effects of her own through delay pedals and a touchscreen device attached to her vibraphone which can effect rapid shifts of pitch, doles out a series of squibs or celestial squiggles which seem to exist at some remove from the ensemble, her own limpid version of letting sparks fly. Yet by the end of ‘555’ it is Irabagon’s saxophone which sounds out of left field, like a duck whistle stranded in the swirling mire.
Then the sparkling ‘Palo de Oros (Suit of Coins)’ commences with a pattern of dialup harmonics on the bass before Cass segues into a solo which lasts for a couple of minutes, sonorous yet still playful. Brennan says of the track:
As a child, I played countless card games with my grandmother. One of the Spanish suits is the suit of gold coins, also known as pentacles. The shape of the pentacle – a five-pointed star composed of ten line segments – inspires the rhythmic structure here: a time signature of ten beats, each of sixteenth note value, with the division of the measures and phrases divided into micro and macro groups of five beats. Only one section uses four beats. This binary structure, with its melodic and rhythmic density, represents the grounding force of the earth element, which is also associated with the palo de oros. I want a sense of foundation amidst all the swirling movement.
At the end of Cass’s solo on the double bass, the ensemble enter with a real sense of urgency, or more than that a dramaturgy which is emphasised at the top end by Irabagon on the sopranino saxophone and O’Farrill’s powerful trumpet. They skirt and accompany one another through some dense runs and collide for some jaw-dropping harmonies which feel euphoric while they would also befit the crushing blows of any cinematic fight scene, from conventional American action fare to martial arts films and mecha anime.
The twin percussionists Herrera and Gilmore accompany Brennan for a brief solo before the horns come back in for a passage of bluesy post-bop which leans in the direction of Shim’s tenor. The ensemble ekes out a bit of space for a showcase by Herrera over short spurts from the horns, and then falls back together as ‘Palo de Oros (Suit of Coins)’ reaches its careening climax, the longest track on Breaking Stretch at a heaving and surging and ultimately breathtaking nine minutes and forty seconds.
Hailing from the city of HolguĆn, the percussionist Mauricio Herrera is a master of Afro-Cuban forms and rhythms from the brisk tempos and picaresque spirit of guaracha to tumba francesa which arrived in the late eighteenth century from the French colony of Saint-Domingue and changĆ¼Ć which originated in the sugarcane plantations of eastern Cuba. Both tumba francesa and changĆ¼Ć swept across continents, bringing together West African percussive rhythms, traditional French dances and choruses and Spanish guitar melodies, with Herrera manifesting this musical breadth and more, equally adept at the rumba and mambo as his tool kit includes paired congas and bongos, twined batĆ” hourglass drums and gourd shakers.
Behind him Marcus Gilmore is the bedrock, from fills to more clangorous moments of emphasis a steadying force as Herrera uncorks his more shuffling rhythms. And on the double bass an unhurried Kim Cass also provides a supple net while featuring across the course of Breaking Stretch on a few standout solos.
The horns lead us out on ‘SueƱos de Coral Azul (Blue Coral Dreams)’ as more electronic fidgeting from Brennan conjures a diaphanous haze before the composition finds its sense of swing. For the most part the nine tracks on Breaking Stretch are briskly upbeat and otherwise they are equanimous, with anxious or downcast sentiments only fleeting.
There’s a spectral interlude in the middle of ‘SueƱos de Coral Azul (Blue Coral Dreams)’ where those electronic accoutrements to Brennan’s vibes get their own solo, before crashing cascades of percussion and the soaring of the alto sax take us off in another direction. The cover of Breaking Stretch features a photograph of Litli-HrĆŗtur in Iceland which was taken by the French-Swiss artist Julian CharriĆØre in July of 2023, after the small mountain which is part of the Fagradalsfjall volcanic area erupted with multiple fissures and a lava flow of up to 50 cubic metres per second, prompting wildfires in the vicinity. Defying its title ‘SueƱos de Coral Azul (Blue Coral Dreams)’ perhaps captures the essence of this phenomenon the most as the closing section of the track splits into three layers, with a top line of alto saxophone, the sustained tones of the trumpet serving as the bass and the tenor squeezed in between, like strata but with a molten quality as the musicians resemble that lava still in flow.
Pyroclastic products were collected from the tephra of the Litli-HrĆŗtur eruption. On the other hand Brennan has said that ‘SueƱos de Coral Azul (Blue Coral Dreams)’ is an ode to her hometown of Veracruz, which also reflects upon her migration to the United States and her own sense of self now that she has lived there for as long as she grew up in her native Mexico.
Brennan was selected to join the Youth Orchestra of the Americas at the age of 17, visiting every country on the continent and performing with such renowned musicians as Yo-Yo Ma and Paquito D’Rivera. She was a classical marimba player and performed with symphony orchestras in Mexico and Philadelphia before being lured by the timbral and improvisational possibilities of the vibraphone, soon falling in as part of the lively avant-garde jazz scene in New York City.
Since her debut solo record Maquishti she has been noted for her use of electronics, with the Digitech Whammy effects pedal helping her to expand the range of her instrument, while she also incorporates an array of granular delay and pitch shifting devices. Brennan who is keen to emphasise the percussive nature of her work has cultivated an unusual ensemble on More Touch and now Breaking Stretch, with two percussionists in Herrera and Gilmore featuring alongside her vibes. The expanded septet has few obvious counterparts, but perhaps calls to mind the Bobby Hutcherson album Ambos Mundos where Francisco Aguabella and Orestes VilatĆ³ shared duties on the congas and timbales while Eddie Marshall played drums and Roger Glenn contributed other percussion. That album spotlighted the pianist Smith Dobson with James Spaulding on the flute and Randy Vincent or Bruce Forman on guitar, while for Breaking Stretch the composer Brennan wants even the horn players to sometimes sound like percussion instruments.
Her marimba training comes in especially handy during the second half of Breaking Stretch. The sixth track which is entitled ‘Five Suns’ proves especially jaunty, with Herrera working out another Latin groove amid the loose time-keeping of the claves and Shim’s playing on the tenor saxophone, as Brennan’s marimba adapts a funk bassline before she switches over to the vibes at about three minutes and forty seconds. The standard vibraphone has a three-octave range whereas a classical marimba stretches out over five octaves, giving the marimba a lower bottom end so that like the horns it can masquerade as a bass instrument. Here it is those horns which stay on top as the ensemble surges in staggered fashion towards a climax, then slumps in a weary heap like a jumbled pile of clothes, the players worn out from all of their exertions.
‘Mudanza (States of Change)’, inspired by a wistful poem of the same name by the Veracruz native Salvador DĆaz MirĆ³n, features a limpid and meditative introduction on the marimba, which approaches the two-minute mark before a series of foghorn blasts disrupt the ambiance. O’Farrill’s trumpet blends and blurs into more strained and inquisitive appeals on both saxophone and electronics, all buildup with a kind of horror movie aesthetic, as if we were just waiting for some calamity to occur but the musicians hold their course so that the buildup itself becomes the site of drama, rather than giving way to a jump scare or paint-by-numbers denouement.
‘Manufacturers Trust Company Building’ is the briefest track on Breaking Stretch and it picks up where ‘Five Suns’ left off, through the surging of staccato horns and Afro-Cuban percussion, as though ‘Mudanza (States of Change)’ was just an intake of breath, allowing the ensemble enough time to recover. The playing of the collective here is so loud and so dense that we begin to get a frazzled low end, rife with distortion from which the vibraphones peek out as the horns crest on top, a thick layer of static which is only successfully pummelled through by Gilmore from behind the drum kit.
The composition was inspired by the iconic ‘Golden Arbor’ of the sculptor Harry Bertoia, a 70-foot long and 16-foot high patchwork screen made up of 800 bronze, copper and nickel panels, which for most of its life has occupied a prime spot at 510 Fifth Avenue, where it was commissioned for the opening in 1954 of a branch of the Manufacturers Trust Company bank.
A midcentury masterpiece which has been described as a ‘three-dimensional equivalent of a Jackson Pollock canvas’, as a piece of music ‘Manufacturers Trust Company Building’ can boast the same glimmering and shapeshifting aspect, weighty and dense and from one angle apparently welded tight with each panel thoroughly worked over, yet still permeable and glinting from its many facades. As the septet develops the composition, ‘Manufacturers Trust Company Building’ attains a helter-skelter atmosphere, twirling but never quite spinning out of control before the track sputters to an abrupt halt.
‘Earendel’ which draws the curtain on Breaking Stretch introduces yet more textures, as the piece opens with some muffled slide trumpet and more electronic effects, little bleeps and bings then almost the sound of a slide whistle, making for a mishmash of quizzical tones and timbres. A gurgling sound hails more aerated effects, with a buzzing ambiance like a spaceship taking flight. Only the steady plucks of Kim Cass on the upright bass provide a tether, before the drums slouch forward and the vibes keep time with a bit of a lag as the horns come in adopting the same languid manner.
A woozy and heady, thoroughly disorienting track, ‘Earendel’ compels the listener to dance but never lets us find stable footing. The composition takes its name from the most distant known star, discovered some 28 billion light years away by the Hubble Space Telescope. The name itself was derived from an old English word for ‘rising light’ or ‘morning star’, while EƤrendil the Mariner is a character from J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythic pastiche The Silmarillion, but there is nothing elven about the composition here which hews more closely to concepts of infinity.
Through the swaying of the ensemble, Jon Irabagon takes a furrowing solo on the alto sax and there are more watery effects as we slosh through the middle of the composition. Then the duelling brass of tenor and trumpet seek to give more structure to the track, adopting a martial tone which frays and unravels before the last as the universe here is figured as some misty, liminal or even stygian space, with Breaking Stretch fading out on the sound of a distant heartbeat.
