pb (at) patrickbrennansound (dot) com
patrick brennan has for decades been rumored as an underground secret, a contrarian & independent progenitor of conceptually original music sharp at the frontiers of an ever expanding Blues Continuum. The NYC based composer & alto saxophonist coordinates ensembles & projects from unaccompanied solo excursions to 20+ musician formations.
His multidirectional creative music “expands upon compositional what ifs and the plasticities of rhythm section dynamics,” as jazz.pt writer António Branco has described it. “On the shoulders of giants like Ellington, Monk, Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Henry Threadgill and others, brennan constructs specific sonic and conceptual environments for collective improvisation, a kind of sonic lego from pieces that can be combined in infinite ways.”
brennan’s various recordings have been issued by labels such as Clean Feed, CIMP, Cadence, Creative Sources & deep dish, which includes, alongside his more composition intensive efforts, collaborations with the Morrocan Gnawi Ma’alem Najib Soudani & freely improvised settings with bassist Lisle Ellis, the innovative Portuguese electroacoustic prepared guitarist Abdul Moimême, & Lisboeta Ernesto Rodriques’ string quartet, this along with an orchestral collaboration with the contemporary Buenos Aires Tango master Ariel Pirotti.
“brennan plays within a sense of the jazz continuum, a highly expressive player possessed of a brilliant economy of line who can infest a fragment of a scale with tremendous psychic weight.” — Stuart Broomer, Point of Departure.
patrick brennan’s distinctively heterodox saxophone work features most prominently in two of his current quartets. s0nic 0penings, a more than four decade long project which currently includes contrabassist Hilliard Greene, violist Jason Kao Hwang, & percussionist Michael T.A. Thompson, embodies the deepest ensemble dive into the possible extensions of the unique musical language that he’s been evolving. KnCurrent, with Hwang’s electric violin, Cooper-Moore’s diddley-bo, and On Ka’a Davis’ guitar is of a very different order: totally free collective improvision with a focus on the wide spectrum of electronically generated sound salted with a commonly experienced Blues sensibility. brennan’s a capella rōnin phasing project transfers the ensemble intricacy of s0nic 0penings to a single voice along with radical revisions of Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, & Roscoe Mitchell.
brennan focuses no less intently on grassroots community music generation, well off the grid of market determined conditions, initiating situations that have drawn the participation of many of the most creative players in New York’s exceptionally fertile artistic environment. He formed the modularly organized transparency kestra in 2013, a most-of-the-time volunteer community improvisers orchestra that experiments with a large ensemble’s capacity for spontaneous self-orchestration using layered polyrhythmic interfaces called transparencies. brennan also sustains a quasi-monthly residency at New York’s Downtown Music Gallery called sketchbook series, involving an array of short order “quickie” compositional settings with ever varying combinations of concepts, instruments & players.
brennan is the author of Ways & Sounds (Arteidolia Press 2021) a thorough rethinking of the nature of music that centers the social relations involved in the generation of music as a key component of compositional structure & goes on to question conventional distinctions between composition & improvisation.
An abstract conception balanced with plenty of wit and soul. — Time Out
His compositions are fresh and quite original. patrick brennan’s a first class saxophonist and composer. — Cadence
Since moving to New York City in 1975, one-time bassist/painter patrick brennan has crafted a musical path that is open in its candor and indebtedness to all facets of black music. Much like trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, the alto saxophonist brews a thicket of his own distinct musical language that “unlike much contemporaneous vanguard music is built specifically upon the potentialities of swinging and polyrhythm.”
For the astute lay person this means moving the expressive expansiveness of trap playing and the drum choir into “the foreground of an entire orchestra’s intelligence.”
But none of this captures brennan’s subtle humor and wit.
— Ludwig VanTrikt, All About Jazz
His sound isn’t easy to file. It’s not totally free, unhinged, but what it’s tethered to is hard to say. It’s not exactly melodic either. His sound is puzzling and inviting. He could hold an audience unaccompanied. — The Other Night at Quinns
A superior musical endeavor featuring a rare musical vision performed at the highest level. — All About Jazz