patrick brennan – composition & saxophone
Hilliard Greene – contrabass
Brian Groder – trumpet & fluegelhorn
Michael TA Thompson – trapdrums
Rod Williams – piano
A disc of extraordinary group focus and playing equally inventive and concise, giving the impression that every single note is inevitable in its incisiveness. brennan’s is music of extreme dynamism supporting a vision somehow both grandiose and accessible, one fostered by each musician. His ensemble is often as disparate as his forms are diverse. It sizzles with excitement, earthy exuberance amidst the rhythmically arhythmic drive toward a goal simultaneously clear and elusive. – Marc Medwin, Point of Departure
tilting curvaceous, from patrick brennan s0nic 0penings is stylistically varied, expansive, expressive, and always engaging. Wrapped in the group’s simultaneous melodies and unusual musical paths, you can hear the elasticity and tenacity of brennan’s composition.The music pulls from classic free and avant-garde jazz history while digging liberally into further afield rhythmic motives and ideas, resulting in an absolutely delightful and engrossing album. – Paul Acquaro, The Free Jazz Collective
•
s0nic 0penings expands upon compositional “what-ifs” and the plasticities of rhythm section dynamics. In this instance, tilting curvaceous interrelates fourteen possible extensions of its core material’s potential to develop in multiple directions simultaneously.
As with Ellington, Monk, Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Henry Threadgill and many other A.A.C.M. composers, brennan generates specific sonic and conceptual environments for collective improvisation. The music’s orienting matrix is constructed from a series of melodically coded polyrhythmic cells whose connective tissue may suggest nearly unlimited transformations.
LINER NOTES BY HOWARD MANDEL:
tilting curvaceous is all-of-a-piece, s0nic 0penings’ instigator & extraordinary alto saxophonist patrick brennan informs us, emerging from a single “metagroove interface,” to be heard whole. That may come naturally to fans of creative improvisation since the breakthroughs of Ornette Coleman, say, and new constructions by composers including Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill and brennan himself.
However, as presented in 14 distinct tracks, this album is also a suite of inter-related movements — separate, comparable, able to be curated for play lists or broadcasts. Taking to it in smaller bits first may be if not the best way nonetheless inevitable, as we follow along one moment to the next. Identifying the parts of a complex/compound entity – even if, blind, we’re feeling an elephant – actually does help us get the shape of an unfamiliar entirety, which tilting curvaceous, though of an established tradition, may yet still be.
So here are elements contributing to and reflected in this greater whole: The dense urban milieu of downtown New York City, where highest skill levels, quickest wits and social adaptability are key to an individual’s survival as well as their expressive productivity. The freedom artists take to explore possibilities envisioned in their personal alternatives to conventional order. The hearts and minds of five wide-ranging, experienced, colorfully imaginative instrumentalists making their ways forward together, spontaneously and intuitively through protocols employed for generative qualities. Playfulness, humor, irony, devotion and sensitivity to the collective ideal.
To hear this ensemble state a striking connective cell, go directly to “tilting curvaceous 8.” The muscular rhythm team of Hilliard Greene and Michael TA Thompson holds strong while the horns of brennan & trumpeter Brian Groder duet fiercely in “3.” Pianist Rod Williams unfolds a second melodic cell in “4” – brennan & Groder blow in syncopation against it in “6”. “9” is restrained, deliberate and emotionally evocative. “10,” the longest exploration here, is akin to a narrative, turning on Thompson’s fine drumming.
Those are just glimpses — there’s much more happening, simultaneously, new aspects revealed in each listening. Throughout, the players like quantum particles weave together, split apart, reunite and/or remain at distances but mysteriously entangled. To try to absorb the universe of tilting curvaceous all at once challenges our ears as our eyes would be overtaxed if directed to “see” simultaneously every facet of a diamond and all the trajectories of its refractions, too. The effort is futile but we go for it, as if entranced by a spinning globe, seeking its far side.
CLEAN FEED, CF613CD, JANUARY 2023
RECORDED SEPTEMBER 12, 2021 MANHATTAN SKY STUDIO NYC BY LEON LEE DORSEY
MIXED & MASTERED BY ABDUL MOIMÊME
LINER NOTES BY PATRICK BRENNAN:
Some words about the music. It’s question generated. Its sounds emerge amid networkings of “what-ifs,” a process perpetually experimental that explores the possibilities of music’s aural & conceptual connective tissues in tandem with the potential community dynamics of ensemble interaction. As time sculpture, s0nic 0penings expands upon the plasticities of the rhythm section.
tilting curvaceous proposes a series of groove instances, or cells. Each lays out a contrasting polyrhythm coded in bass & treble so that at least two melodic lines run concurrently throughout. The entire sequence can be looped. Focus may hinge toward an individual cell. Material might be freely developed. Additional counterlines can tend to accrue. Seed patterns may be perceived & interpreted through a Rashomon of perspectives, including yet to be considered sonic design, the musicians involved and listeners. Features get emphasized, extended, exaggerated or transformed, all of which can generate a music growing in multiple directions simultaneously. What you can hear on this recording are ever evolving, multiple branches of this variegating, yet “single,” composition.
