Patricia Brennan: Breaking Stretch
Pyroclastic Records

As a vibraphonist and marimbist, Patricia Brennan is a powerhouse, as a composer and conceptualist, fierce, intrepid, and keenly intelligent. Those latter qualities are evident in the vision she articulates in liner notes for her envelope-pushing third album Breaking Stretch. Intellectually, she's someone captivated by binaries, oxymorons, and paradoxes and in shifting fluidly between diametric poles. Such concepts apply whether the focus is the multiplicity of self, the dichotomy between volcanic and astronomical imagery on the cover, or the tension between the percussive and the melodic that's inherent in her mallet instruments. As she astutely puts it, “The generative, triggering tension in the music unifies opposites: broadness and depth, rupture and flexibility, breaking and stretching.”

The album title also analogically applies to the desire to push her band and music to its limits, to teeter on the edge without splintering apart. Nothing's fixed in Brennan's world when elements slip-slide into different forms and identity's always a work-in-progress. That applies to her music but also herself: as someone who came from Mexico but has now spent almost half her life in the United States, she questions whether she's now more American than Mexican. Like her mercurial music, she's a product of blend and convergence.

To help realize her expansive vision, she added Jon Irabagon (alto and sopranino saxes), Mark Shim (tenor sax), and Adam O'Farrill (trumpet and electronics) to the musicians from her second album More Touch, bassist Kim Cass, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and percussionist Mauricio Herrera. Such a septet offers a limitless panorama of colours that's explored throughout the new collection. Elements from multiple genres emerge during this oft-volcanic recording, from free jazz, funk, and Afro-Caribbean sounds to psychedelic rock, salsa, and folk. Think of it as Brennan's ultra-personalized bitches brew.

While she cites as influences Fania All-Stars, Earth Wind & Fire, and others, the opening cut, “Los Otros Yo (The Other Selves),” sounds as if her septet's picking up where Ronald Shannon & the Decoding Society left off with Street Priest and Barbecue Dog decades ago. Like that outfit, Brennan's roars with furious intent when horns blaze across the rhythm section's no-holds-barred assault, the key difference between the outfits, of course, her vibraphone. In keeping with the concept of multiplicity, melodic lines appear in tandem but at different rhythmic rates. Brennan's vibes glide across the thrusting percussive foundation, with thunderous horns punctuating the track's slinky, soca-inflected groove. The title track follows, Brennan exploring the tension between contraction and dilation as melodic gestures by the wailing soloists spiral and the percolating ground shifts like some perpetual motion machine. Testifying to the fecundity of her imagination, other tracks draw for inspiration from the far reaches of the galaxy (“Earendel”), the visual art of Harry Bertoia (“Manufacturers Trust Company Building”), the poetry of Salvador Díaz Mirón (“Mudanza (States of Change)”), and Aztec mythology (“Five Suns”).

As arrangements are typically dense, Cass's unaccompanied bass at the start of “Palo de Oros (Suit of Coins)” comes as a welcome moment of calm. Restrained too is the drumless “Mudanza (States of Change),” which blossoms from a gentle marimba solo into a transfixing series of ominous staggered chords that suggests Brennan's got a future in soundtrack work if she's so inclined. The convulsive lurch with which “555” is introduced allows the electronics that Brennan often sprinkles across her music to be more audible and generate contrast with the acoustic sound of Shim's tenor. If “Sueños de Coral Azul (Blue Coral Dreams)” possesses a plaintive undercurrent, it's perhaps because the composition's about Brennan's migration from Veracruz, Mexico to the United States and the tension she feels between longing for her hometown and the satisfactions the life she's now leading has engendered.

September 2024