RECORD REVIEWS
One of Thelonious Monk’s greatest compositions – and aren’t they all great? – is “Evidence.” Its groove is as infectious as its rhythmic language of displacement and discovery is complex, rhythmic intricacy that it would be too simplistic to call syncopation, but there’s so much more. The fact that it grew out of “Just You, Just Me,” not to mention the various traditions birthing that standard, adds another layer of reference and connection; layers of communal discourse similarly inform tilting curvaceous, philosopher, composer, and saxophonist patrick brennan’s most recent s0nic 0penings project. It’s as if “Evidence” was placed under a microscope, each of its implications stretched beyond recall and, via metempsychosis, transported to another plane of existence, each of the work’s 14 parts an homage and an implication.
– Marc Medwin. Point of Departure, Moments Notice — June 2023
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Beyond the multifaceted improvisations, brennan’s compositions cohesively knit together large portions of jazz history. In his liner notes, Howard Mandel states: “This album is also a suite of inter-related movements—separate, comparable, able to be curated for playlists or broadcasts.” A start-to-finish listen paints the complete picture that brennan has envisioned.
– Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz — May 23, 2023
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Alto saxophonist, composer, patrick brennan has been a prominent figure in New York’s avant-garde jazz scene for more than forty years. The s0nic 0penings project was founded by him back in 1979, and all this time has served to promote the ideas of free jazz and collective improvisation. In addition to the musical avant-garde, patrick is also close to world music, he is known for his interest in Gnawa music and collaboration with its performers.
– Leonid Auskern, Jazz Quad — May 6, 2023
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A rare opportunity in our pages to delve into creative American music not invented by those already way too familiar legends of the genre. The quintet of altoist patrick brennan is a solid example of well-constructed open jazz, scarcely lacking in the freedom of “free,” that builds drama through notably original methods.
– Andrzej Nowak, Spontaneous Music Tribune — April 28, 2023
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In tilting curvaceous, patrick brennan expands upon compositional “what ifs” and the plasticities of rhythm section dynamics, working 14 possibilities from the base material (melodically encoded polyrhythmic cells) and developing it in multiple directions. On the shoulders of giants like Ellington, Monk, Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Henry Threadgill and others, he constructs specific sonic and conceptual environments for collective improvisation, a kind of sonic lego from pieces that can be combined in infinite ways.
– António Branco, jazz.pt — April 4, 2023
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Alto saxophonist patrick brennan is at the helm of a superb New York-based ensemble for his new release. Rhythm seems to be the prime directive in this particular suite of music. The saxophonist describes these as “groove instances” or “cells”. The opening salvo features a nerve-jangling stop/start landscape reminiscent of Anthony Braxton’s “pulse-track structures” from his quartet and quintets back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a high compliment.
– Robert Bush, New York City Jazz Record — April 2023
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I first heard saxophonist patrick brennan play at a solo show at Downtown Music Gallery, long long ago in a galaxy far far away. I recall being quite impressed with his fiery and rhythmic playing. On his tremendous tilting curvaceous, a quintet recording featuring a stellar cast of musicians, brennan merges his effusive sound with a set of thematic compositions that takes classic free jazz concepts and stretch them out with fantastic imagination.
– Paul Acquaro, The Free Jazz Collective — March 28, 2023
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Over the course of several decades now, New York City alto saxophonist/composer patrick brennan has been developing a system of structured improvisation centered on the generative possibilities inherent in the dynamic interaction of multiple, rhythm-focused melodic cells. One of the most important vehicles for his exploration in this area has been the ensemble s0nic 0penings. Their performance of brennan’s composition tilting curvaceous brings the composer’s polyrhythmic motifs to life in an exciting, musically effective way.
– Daniel Barbiero, Avant Music News — February 8, 2023
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brennan knows how to balance things by stripping them down to bare essentials without getting too dense or hard to figure out. This disc is one of the best discs of new music I’ve heard. A marvel on several levels.
– Bruce Lee Gallanter
Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter — February 3rd, 2023
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INTERVIEWS:
February 10, 2024
Interview with Šamo Salamon
Dr. Jazz Talks #409
Conversations around the concepts behind brennan’s book Ways & Sounds, the tilting curvaceous recording, and some of the history around his various musical initiatives.
THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. patrick brennan
A. Shahid Stover interviews patrick brennan
The Brotherwise Dispatch, December 4, 2022
BD: How would you describe your own journey through the creative process that it takes to go from the moment inspiration strikes towards its ultimate manifestation as music?
pb: My own impulse has always been to push the envelope. As soon as anything feels complacent or facile, I want to shake it up and find something more. I don’t start from any all-at-once vision. I ask instead why anything has to be the way it already is. These compositional interfaces are themselves extended improvisations that span literally years, questions that get continually retested and transformed as vantage rotates across vantage.
Read full interview at The Brotherwise Dispatch
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patrick brennan: Rhythms of Passion
Interview with Ludwig Van Trikt
All About Jazz, August 23, 2011
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.
Read full interview at All About Jazz
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Interview with patrick brennan:
On his book Ways & Sounds.
Interview with Daniel Barbiero
Perfect Sound Forever, April, 2022
Ways & Sounds, a new book from alto saxophonist, composer and improviser patrick brennan is a thought-provoking extended essay on the structures, of both musical forms and of the human relations that go into the forging of musical forms, underlying musical practice. Ways & Sounds is an inquiry that delves deeply into the questions of what constitutes musical structure, what comes into play in creating music with others, the roles of rhythm and hearing in musical practice, and much more.
Read full interview at Perfect Sound Forever
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Interview with patrick brennan:
Sound opens our imagination toward wonder & awe.
Interview with Simon Sargsyan
JazzBluesNews.com, January 13, 2021
Jazz is not a set of tunes, anyway, & it’s actually much more than just a musical style (something that keeps changing anyway). It’s an attitude & way of being, which happens to also have an indispensible history.
Read full interview at JazzBluesNews.com
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patrick brennan:
lower case name, upper case jazz composition
Interview with Daniel Barbiero
Perfect Sound Forever, December, 2019
PSF: You’re both a composer and an improviser. Something I always like to ask composer/improvisers is how they think of the relationship between these two facets of their musical practice. Is it reciprocal? Complementary? Contrastive? Does one tend to be more fundamental–or perhaps experienced more intuitively–than the other?
pb: To my mind, the distinction between composing & improvising is a false one that’s not likely to go away anytime soon. I see this as more of a byproduct of core divergences between Afrological & Eurological conceptions (these are George Lewis’ terms) of musicking as well of the tilted imbalance of political power that, whenever possible, extolls the Euro- at the expense of the Afro-.
If one conceives of composing as an action, or, in other words, as choosing among sounds in the assemblage of a sonic image, everyone’s composing. …
Read full interview at Perfect Sound Forever
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Articles:
The Sound of One Horn Playing
Three Paths for the Solo Saxophone:
Gianni Mimmo, Marco Colonna, patrick brennan
by Daniel Barbiero
Perfect Sound Forever, June 1, 2020
Because brennan’s metagroove music is rooted in what he’s described as a “multidimensional orchestral conception,” the translation of those ideas into concrete sounds for the alto saxophone posed the specific challenge of how to realize an essentially polyphonic music on an unaccompanied, monophonic instrument. .
…It begins with a staccato burst of notes with a percussive flavor and develops through a series of rhythmically complex, harmonically pregnant moves, chief among them asymmetrically accented phrases and variations in dynamics as well as the displacement of the downbeat through leaps of register and the off-balance placement of quasi-leading tones. The rhythms are further elaborated with accelerating and decelerating tempos and pauses.
Read full article at Perfect Sound Forever
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The Other Night at Quinn’s – Cooper-Moore & patrick brennan
by Mike Faloon
Go Metric, February 21, 2014
...Music might not be enough tonight. Thankfully this installment of the Monday night jazz series at Quinn’s—Cooper-Moore and patrick brennan—is more than music.
brennan opens the night blazing away on his alto sax. 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.
Which makes this show all the better. brennan is accompanied. By another performer who can hold an audience on his own, Cooper-Moore, the madcap maker and player of instruments that are at once familiar and unusual.
Read full article at Go Metric
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Every instrument a drum
Sonic Openings Under Pressure makes
precise yet adventurously rhythmic jazz
by John Chacona
Erie Times-News ShowCase
October 26. 2006
You could make the case that Detroit in the 1960s changed the direction of American music. In pop music, the immensely popular string of R&B hits from the Motown label raised rhythm above melody in American — and maybe even world — pop.At the same time, as the inner-city studios of Hitsville U.S.A. was making “The Sound of Young America,” another rhythmic revolution was quietly going on just a couple blocks away. So quietly, in fact, that most musicians are still unaware of it.
patrick brennan is not among them. As a teenage saxophonist, brennan heard firsthand what almost-forgotten players like saxophonist Leon Henderson (Joe’s brother) and drummer Bud Spangler were doing in out-of-the-way venues such as the Strata Concert Gallery.”What I was hearing was all these polyrhythmic structures that resembled the kind of things that Miles was doing, but they did it in a more deliberate compositional fashion,” brennan told me by phone from his New York home.”It took me years to decode it, but it made a big impression on me. That and following the music back … to Africa.
“When asked if being unschooled contributed to his saxophone sound, Brennan described himself as “schooled and a half. I like to play Charlie Parker backwards, but I don’t have any feeling that I need to do that in my own music.” While this seems to imply that brennan is an anything-goes free improviser of the “energy music” school, the saxophonist doesn’t see it that way.True, the music played by his latest Sonic Openings band has energy to burn, most of it emanating from the extraordinary drummer David Pleasant.
But brennan’s approach is rigorously compositional.”Look, there’s no such thing as music without composition, because there’s always agreement, right? I slowly started to work with a language that made the whole band think rhythmically like the drummer, so that the tactility and the sculptural elements of rhythm become more prominent.”Naturally, Pleasant is central to this concept.”When he joined the group, he took stuff that takes people six months to learn and got it in a couple of hours. He’s Gullah Geechee [from the Sea Islands of Georgia], born in Savannah, and he keeps these polyrhythms going. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”Many observers have theorized that jazz, taken to the brink by the rhythmic fury and apocalyptic questing of John Coltrane’s late-’60s bands, played itself into a corner with nowhere left to go.
patrick brennan and his elegant and fiery band just may have found a way back out, a sonic opening, if you will.