Patricia Brennan Spans the Cosmos
The vibist-composer's 10-piece band soars to new heights
Vibraphonist-composer Patricia Brennan is a rare musician: a child prodigy (she started studying music in her native Mexico at age 4) who advanced through the classical world (selected to tour with the Orchestra of the Americas at 17), then won a scholarship at the Curtis Institute of Music while also playing with the local Philadelphia Orchestra—and then, when she moved to New York and took up jazz, turned out to have a flair for sophisticated composition and a natural feel for odd-metered swing and blues.
Her 4th album as a leader, Of the Near and Far (on Pyroclastic, the indie label run by pianist Kris Davis), is a head-spinner. It features her largest ensemble, a 10-piece band of unusually wide tonal range (vibes, piano, string quartet, electric guitar, bass, drums, and electronics), yet it hangs together, loose and tight. She’s long been a systemizing composer. Her liner notes describe how she “developed a process that allowed me to collect pitch and numerical data from constellations [in the night sky],” then overlaid their shapes onto a circle of fifths, discovering “new relationships between pitches, chords, and even key signatures.”
This sounds rather dry to say the least, but the resulting music is anything but. It commands attention—this isn’t new age background filler—but rewards it thoroughly.
Brennan surrounds herself with musicians—most of them, like her, in their 40s—of similarly eclectic bent. She may have attracted most notice lately in guitarist Mary Halvorson’s Amyrillis sextet. Among the players in her own band is pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, a frequent duet partner of Halvorson. Brennan’s drummer, John Hollenbeck, has long led a variety of bands, one of which employed Brennan not long after she moved to New York. In short, she has emerged as a leading figure among a generation of jazz musicians—conservatory-trained, bandstand-tested—able to dive deep into every stream they come across, sight-reading with precision, improvising with flair, flowing with the currents, not sounding the slightest bit academic.
And Brennan navigates a torrent of musical streams: mid-century classical (dissonant, romantic, minimalist, and movements in between), Latin tinge, and avant-garde jazz, laced with shards of hard rock and heady pop. (She grew up listening to Hendrix and Radiohead as well as salsa and symphonies.) She’s an original.
Chris Allen laid down the tracks at Sear Sound, Owen Mulholland mixed the results at 35th Street Studio, and Scott Hull mastered the discs at Masterdisk—all notable names in audio engineering, and the sound is superb. I saw this band play earlier this week in an album-release concert at Roulette, an excellent concert space in Brooklyn. A wide range of colors, textures, and timbres flooded the soundstage, and the CD captures the full gamut. I have just one caveat: the disc doesn’t let us hear the full ring of Brennan’s vibes. (She lays her mallets on the bars with tremendously deft power.) We hear more of that ring here than we do on Mary Halvorson’s album (which Allen also recorded), maybe because Brennan is the leader here. It may be that some compression was necessary to avoid sonic overload, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s a small complaint, hardly worth filing. Check this out, it’s a gem.
