Percorsi Musicale
KnCurrent (Deep Dish Music, 2025)
Eyal Hareuveni
May, 2025
KnCurrent is the new quartet and the album of American, New York-based alto sax player-composer patrick brennan (who leads the rhythm-centric s0nic 0penings, and the Sudani Project, in collaboration with Moroccan Gnawi musician Ma’alem Najib Soudani), featuring fellow veteran musicians from the New York free jazz scene – Cooper-Moore (aka Gene Y. Ashton, a pivotal member of the free jazz movement in the 1970s with David S. Ware, and later with William Parker’s In Order to Survive and Digital Primitives) on the hand-made fretless bass, the diddly-bo; On Ka’a Davis (of SunRa’s Arkestra and Donald Ayler’s septet) on electric guitar; and Jason Kao Hwang (who has worked with William Parker, Henry Threadgill, Joëlle Leandre, Anthony Braxton, and Butch Morris) on electric violin. The debut album was recorded at Tedesco Studios in Paramus, New Jersey, part of Lenapehóking – the homelands of the Native American Lenape, in June 2024.
brennan wanted this quartet to explore “timbre. texture. architectures and connections, serrated vastness, synchronic twists and turns” that can not be codified and mapped as they “fly between the cracks and the boundaries”. The term Current conveys the idea of motion and transfer: of liquid, of electricity, of information. The metaphorical current of interaction and inspiration running between and binding together improvising musicians – the kinship – is at the heart of the KnCurrent quartet.
The unconventional instrumentation combined with the strong-minded personalities of the four experienced improvisers, all equipped with inventive extended techniques, and the high-energy dynamics of KnCurrent turn this ensemble into a restless sonic lab in which timbre is a musical factor on a par with pitch and rhythm. KnCurrent creates its own collective – polyneuroceptive, as one of the pieces is titled – voice and nuanced textured tapestry of sonic collisions.
The last two, politically motivated and free improvised pieces, best capture KnCurrent’s sonic essence. “sumūd (صمود)” is the Arabic word for steadfastness, perseverance, and often refers to the Palestinian fight over their lands in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This piece radiates the stubborn and tasking struggle to find an inspiring, unifying voice, or an anthem. The last piece, “tewatatewenní:io” (in the Kanyen’kéha language, known to us as Mohawk) means we are all free, we are all sovereign, we all carry ourselves, and it is an apt description for the free dynamics of this experimental quartet. This urgent piece claims that the struggle – political or artistic – never stops until we are all free, in bodies and souls.
patrick brennan (alto saxophone); Cooper-Moore (diddley-bo);
On Ka’a Davis (guitar); Jason Kao Hwang (electric violin).