The origin story, many of the technical details and some of the music on this album flummox me. But that doesn’t stop me from recognizing Patricia Brennan’s Of The Near And Far as an astonishing work of art, and indeed some of this music is among my favorite of 2025.
Vibraphonist, marimbist, and Patricia Brennan is a composer and improviser who plays vibraphone and marimba. She is widely recognized as one of the leading players of those instruments and leading composer and peformer in modern improvised music. A native of Mexico, trained at Juilliard, she was recently named “Mallet Instrument Player of the Year” by the Jazz Journalists Association and was voted the rising star vibraphonist in DownBeat’s 2022 and 2024 critics polls. Her 2024 release Breaking Stretch was widely critically acclaimed.. She has played live and on record with numerous groups and ensembles, including guitarist Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis, which is where I first became aware of her.
She’s also an amateur astronomer, and she translates that interest into the seven inspired compositions on Of The Near And Far.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the sky and the stars,” Brennan says. “If you really look closely, everything can be connected through geometrical shapes. I became curious as to how I could translate that into music in the same way that I’ve translated numbers into rhythmic structures in the past. This album confirms a wild theory that I had, that I could find symmetry harmonically or melodically by superimposing two symmetrical shapes – one from astronomy and one from music.”
That’s about where I find myself out of my depth, but no matter. What she came up with is pretty amazing. She’s assisted in her journey by some leading contemporary jazz players: pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, guitarist Miles Okazaki, bassist Kim Cass and drummer John Hollenbeck, plus a quartet of string players: violinists Josh Modney (who goes by just “Modney”) and Pala Garcia, violist Kyle Armbrust and cellist Michael Nicolas, and the electronic musician Arktureye.
The seven tracks are mostly named for and inspired by constellations. Some are utterly surreal and spacey but others more down to earth. So to speak. Some of them, anyone who knows a little about astronomy or astrology will recognize. “Aquarius” is suitably shimmery and aqueous, with a beautiful guitar-vibraphone duet — surrounded by swirling strings and a gently insistent beat — at its center. “Aquila,” the eagle that carried Zeus’s thunderbolts, is a bit more spiky, the guitar and vibes improvising as electronics twitter around them, and then become overwhelmed by soaring string before an airy denoument. “Lyra,” inspired by the doomed love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, foregrounds the strings in a dramatic arrangement inspired by the chaos of the underworld.
The program opens with “Antlia,” named not by the Greeks but in the 18th century. It’s an exciting and engaging piece with the angular feel of machines and clockworks inspired by the thinking of Enlightenment philosophers. My favorite is “Andromeda,” named for the constellation of which our Milky Way’s closest neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy, is a part. The edgy, rock-fusion composition is inspired by the eponymous princess who was chained to a rock in sacrifice to a sea monster to appease the god Poseidon; the piece’s dramatic climax was inspired by thoughts of the predicted eventual collision of Andromeda and the Milky Way some millions of years hence.
There’s more, but if it sounds of interest, you should discover for yourself. With Of The Near And Far, Patricia Brennan secures for herself a place in the pantheon of stellar composers and arrangers across genres.
(Pyroclastic Records, 2025)
