Patricia Brennan: Breaking Stretch

Wild-willed vibraphonist Patricia Brennan gets straight down to business without any fanciful mission declaration with the Afro-Cuban, effusively powered, clear-the-dancefloor and blow-the-ceiling-off this joint "Los Otros Yo (The Other Selves)," the opening cut of her third album Breaking Stretch. She does so in a captivatingly, wickedly good way.

Brennan—who has added much vitality to music by such other big thinkers as Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson, Anna Webber, Michael Formanek—began her musical education at 4 years old listening to her father's salsa records and her mother's Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin albums. Thus she holds no allegiance to any musical trend or definition save for creating a sound that was not there before she and her chosen cohorts injected it into the nerve grid and bloodstream. She laid this credo bare for all to hear and relish on 2021's fiery Maquishti (Valley of Search) and the correspondingly forceful More Touch (Pyroclastic, 2022).

Here on Breaking Stretch she expands the core band from 2022 album—bassist Kim Cass, drummer Marcus Gilmore and percussionist Mauricio Herrera—with the intriguing and fully engaged alto/sopranino saxophones of Jon Irabagon, Mark Shim's tenor, and the always ready for action Adam O'Farrill on trumpet and electronics. So the title track languishes and swaggers, each voice its own moment and a textured compliment to the other. Irabagon and Smith hold sway, Gilmore bashes away, O'Farrill flares in bursts and Brennan comps along. Smith leads "03 555," charting out dreamily and nebulously until the track gathers itself and dashes headstrong into a rush of syncopation at about 3:05. It is here Gilmore and Herera steer into a hyper-insistent groove (with O'Farrill now charging) that takes the track to the finish line. It is invigorating on so many levels that it is hard to keep track of them all.

Cass intros and defines "Palo de Oros (Suit of Coins)," until Brennan decides that everyone should join in with a really big band wallop. Horns dart, electronics zing. Irabagon's sopranino stings. Brennan steps to fore between drums and percussion high energy. After the relative quiet of "Sueños de Coral Azul (Blue Coral Dreams)," the party continues full speed ahead with "Five Suns," a careening whirlwind of solos that Cass somehow keeps from flying off the handle to merge and meld into a white-hot whole.

With its polyrhythms and mathematical tensions taut as a snare drum "Manufacturers Trust Company Building" comes on like a free jazz blow-out but is really a study in the balance between free jazz indulgence and the more constructed ensemble work Brennan is quickly becoming adept at. The floating closer "Earendel" (the oldest and most distant star mankind has yet discovered) reflects again Brennan's keen adaption of all things upon all musical things. And all musical things upon the advancement of the species.

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