Patricia Brennan on Vibes, Electronic Compositions and 'Floating' Over Rhythm
Interview: a long conversation with the Veracruz-born Brooklyn percussionist whose solo albums embrace a new rhythm-and-improvisation future for the marimba/vibraphone family
Over the past few years, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan’s music has advanced into an obsession in my head, soundtracking both joy and sorrow. What began as intrigue with the complicated, electronically-enhanced quietude of her 2021 debut, the solo Maquishti, intensified in late 2022 upon the release of More Touch, a quartet album on which Brennan’s vibes and marimba (and numerous tools of electronic manipulation) were joined by bassist Kim Cass, Cuban percussionist Mauricio Herrera, and the mighty Marcus Gilmore on drums. Where Maquishi gleams with a post-techno digitalia crafted in open sonic spaces somewhere between Eno and Mille Plateux’s, More Touch is an abstract groove wonder, splitting time between a deep pocket and the beautifully high-and-outside. Likewise, the early December 2022 show at the Jazz Gallery to celebrate the quartet’s album-release, was a jazz-beat hoot, an opportunity to ponder how the group’s complex polyrhythms underpin Brennan’s harmonics and pedal-informed textures. Or maybe it’s the other way round. In either case, I wished the gig was at a club where dancing folks show their appreciation, cause I am sure they would’ve.
About a week later, Patricia Brennan, who was born in Heroica Veracruz, Mexico but now resides in Brooklyn, found the time to have a long chat by ZOOM. A New Yorker since 2009 and a teacher at NYU’s music school (where she received her own master’s in jazz studies), Brennan has been a mainstay in the city’s improvised music scene for a decade, working with the likes of Mary Halvorson, the Anna Weber/Angela Morris Big Band, Vijay Iyer, Matt Mitchell and others. As you’ll read, she’s classically trained, but inherently experimental-minded, with a simultaneous respect for the past and thirst for the future, while conscious of the massive changes taking place all around us. (Spoiler Alert: she wants you to dance too.) Brennan' also has a great sense of humor, laughing throughout, and gracefully suffering the interviewer’s lack of technical knowledge in the world of composition and the marimba family].
So having been slowly editing the transcript for length and clarity since approximately New Year’s, and as Brennan’s More Touch quartet is playing at the Vision Festival this week, I thought that no time could be better to present this interview with one of New York improvised music’s rising stars. Watch her space.
In whichever way you want, tell me how you came to music? How did you start playing music? And then maybe end up at how you came to the marimba..
I started piano at about three years old, and part of it is because where I am from, Vera Cruz, is a very musical town. There's lots of influence from different cultures, a strong Afro-Cuban community there, and of course the local music, son jarocho, and there's folkloric marimba, there's tons of different groups and styles and because it's a port of entry to Mexico, it’s almost similar to New York in some way, adopting culture from all these different groups of people that have decided to make it their home. It’s one of the oldest cities on the continent, founded in 1502, so immigration has been happening there ever for a long time, really embedded in the fabric of the local culture of the city.
My first memory was seeing music and hearing music. So it was kind of by default that I was going to want to play an instrument. On the other hand, my paternal grandmother was a concert pianist. She used to practice in our home — that used to be her home, and she left her piano there. So she used to come over and practice, and I would see her play piano. And of course, as a little kid, you just wanna do the same thing. So that's what started me on piano lessons when I was about three.
I haven't been in Mexico for almost 20 years, but when I was living there, the way music education worked is that you have conservatories in some of the major cities, like Mexico City or Vera Cruz. Now, I think there's more conservatories throughout the country. But basically it's a whole system where you enter from a very young age, similar to Eastern Europe. There's a systematic approach to education where from when you're six years-old, you're supposed to take a very organized curriculum until you’re 17 years-old, and then you're supposed to be ready to enter the actual conservatory for your degree.
I was lucky to live in a city that had one of those conservatories. As soon as my mom saw I was interested, she enrolled me there. And that's kind of what gave me some guidance, as far as more formal training. Part of this conservatory curriculum is that when you're the equivalent of first grade, you have to choose a secondary instrument. So that's when I chose percussion. I did that because my dad plays percussion in a Cuban son group. He's an engineer, but does this just for fun.
I just was always attracted to the rhythmic aspect of music whenever I saw a band. I remember always gravitating towards the drummers or the percussion, something about it that's just visual and visceral. It kind of leads eventually to one of the reasons why I wrote the music for this particular Quartet: I wanted to connect to that feeling that we get when we listen to dance music, to groove music. You can't explain it, but you just wanna move. So that was something that I never forgot, one of the first feelings I remember that music gave me. So I was like, “percussion is gonna be my second instrument.” <laugh>. That's how I started to get into it. Mostly it was orchestral percussion, which does include the marimba, but it's concert marimba not folkloric marimba. I was exposed to outside of the conservatory. My friend Mauricio [Herrera], the percussionist in the Quartet, [grew up] in Cuba, and it was kind of similar, where you have the conservatory, but outside there's the popular music education. So outside I would play with my dad's band, or play in a son jarocho band or folkloric marimba pieces, but my formal education was kind of going parallel to that experience.
Before we go any further, this is a question that I'm sort of embarrassed to ask because, considering how long I've been writing about music, I don’t know the answer but should. What's the difference between a vibraphone and a marimba?
OK, that's a really good question. One main difference is the material they're made of. A vibraphone is made out of metal, or a metal fusion, mostly aluminum. That's one of the big differences. Marimba and xylophone are made out of wood, or now sometimes synthetic wood. The other instrument in that family that's made out of metal is the glockenspiel. The difference between the glockenspiel and the vibraphone is very noticeable because of the size and the tone and so on. The second big difference is the vibraphone is the only metal percussion instrument that has a sustain pedal, and that really changes the game. The xylophone or marimba is kind of like a snare drum. You just hit it, and then it ends. Actually in Europe, a lot of glockenspiels have pedals. So if you see it, you might think it's a vibraphone, but the keyboard is way smaller. When you play it, you know — it's a very, very high pitch. But yes, the material and the pedal are the two big differences between the marimba and the vibes.
Another technical (maybe slightly embarrassing) question about your instrument: When I saw you play the other night, you were playing with four mallets, as opposed to two mallets, which I’ve seen other marimba and vibes players play. How does that work? Is that where your own particular style comes in? Is that something that lends itself to how you want the music to sound? Is that a choice you make learning the marimba, or when you're learning orchestral percussion?
You know, you just opened a whole can of worms here <laugh>. When I got into jazz, or I eventually found that path, it was because I always wanted to write my own music and improvise (whatever that meant at the time then). And it happened to be, at that time, I had a jazz vibraphone teacher who I saw improvise and write his songs, so I was like, “oh, that's what I wanna do.” However, when it comes to vibraphone, I feel like there's almost two different pathways: you have the people that come from the classical percussion background, and the people that come from the tradition within jazz itself, who never necessarily played marimba or orchestral percussion, but maybe played jazz drums or played piano and then just switched to vibraphone. So there's two different pathways to get into it. The four mallet thing comes from classical percussion. And I was a classical marimbist. Actually one of my last specializations towards the end of my career in classical percussion is I specialized in marimba, I used to do competitions and things like that. And marimba repertoire is by default four mallets. If not six or eight mallets even. It could get intense. <laugh>
One of the reasons why I wanted to improvise and write music is when during my classical marimba training, one of the main composers and pioneers of the instrument is the Japanese marimba player Keiko Abe. She basically is one of the first percussion soloist that existed; before [her], percussion was considered the back of the orchestra or just the back of the band. People wouldn't think of somebody like Evelyn Glennie, for example, as a rock-star soloist but as a percussionist, you know? So Keiko Abe was the first one to kind of define that role on marimba. She was a solo marimba player that traveled the world playing with orchestras as a soloist, giving solo recitals, writing and improvising her own music, with her own language that she developed. So she plays with four mallets, or six mallets. She's written for six mallets as well. So it kind of comes from that tradition, starting in the 1930s and ‘40s, and then just continues to develop.
So by default, when I play mallet percussion, I don't think about it any other way, because I come from that path. For me, four mallets is normal, the natural choice because of my training. Part of it also focuses on technique, on tone, on nuance, which also you can kind of hear reflected on my solo record. One of my goals was to bring that mindset into, I don't wanna say jazz, but you know, the improvisatory world where we usually don't see that with this instrument. Like I said, you open a can of worms because this is kind of an argument I've been having with people.
It's like, we see it in pianists, we see it in guitar players, we see it in other instruments, but somehow in vibraphone within the jazz lane, we have it as a different category. We don't think about texture, we don't think about tone. It's more limited to just the language itself — what we play on the instrument. That's why in the tradition you might see mostly two mallet players, because it comes from a different path. It's more about the actual language of jazz, and then the vibraphone happens to be a medium of expression. It's a new instrument in a way.
And classical percussion in jazz as well, I consider it to still be in development as far as getting to that point where you can see a jazz pianist play a solo, and then go into the piano to play the strings, and do all those things which for us is normal now to see in a [classical] piano concert. But maybe at a vibraphone concert, not so much. So I feel like there's a little bit of disparity of development, of how we perceive the instrument. Not so much in the development of the players, but just how we think about it. So it's been my goal to open the window, like, “You can do this as an improviser on this instrument.”
You have all these possibilities. But also now with the second record, with an ensemble, showing the nuance of the role of a vibraphone as a leader in a band, and how you can be rhythmic, textural, linear, more traditional. And also, how the way to improvise is not just linear. I can solo like a pianist, I have four mallets, I can dig into chords, so it really changes the whole perspective of how to improvise on the instrument. So I've been kind of merging both lanes, to hopefully expose listeners to a different way of perceiving the vibraphone in improvised music.
It’s interesting to hear you speak of mixing of traditions, the sounds you make, the language you develop, the tools you use, the electronics. Because as you said, it’s an instrument you don’t hear out front very often. And for a very long-time in the “jazz” tradition of the vibraphone, it was, like, Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson who defined what the instrument was supposed to sound like in this context.
Yeah. And I have utmost respect for them. It's just a different approach. They came from that tradition itself. It is language, it's harmony, which is also important. But for me, it's, “Okay, well, I see other instrumentalists do it.” Like, one of my favorite musicians is the pianist Sylvie Courvoisier. And I was like, “I wanna do what she does, but on vibraphone.” I wanna get those sounds that she's able to get. I wanna make sure that this instrument gets to that place where piano, guitar, all these other instruments are already, as far as people being accustomed to [the different ways it’s played].
You've been in the United States for 16 years. What initially brought you to New York? My assumption is you graduated and were like, “I wanna do music for life, and this is a place where I want to go and do music.” Am I guessing correctly?
Kind of. <laugh> In a way, it was a complete accident as to how I ended up in the States. Before I moved here, I had a job in an orchestra in Mexico. I was assistant timpanist, fifth percussionist in one of the major orchestras down there. I was 18 years old, and just like, “I don't see myself doing this for another 30 or 40 years in order to retire.” I was having a lot of questions. And again, coming from classical percussion training and seeing, you know, like some of my idols at the time, like, “Well, they're touring the world, they're playing their own music, improvising…I wanna do that. I don't wanna be stuck.”
I was trying to find a way out, and my original plan was to go to the Netherlands, where a lot of my percussionist friends were going to some really good percussion programs. But everything changed, because…long story short…I was on tour, in New York, with the Youth Orchestra of The Americas. And one of the percussionists in that orchestra went to Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. And he was like, “You have to play for my teacher, he's free on Saturday, and we have a day off. Why don't we go to Philly, and you go play for him.” So we did that. I played for this teacher at Curtis, and he's like, you should fill out an application and see if you can come next year. So I did that. It was very random. I didn't make anything of that. I didn't know what Curtis meant at the time either. Eventually he called me and said, “You wanna come?” That's when I started to find out more — that it's a full scholarship, that the school has this reputation. They literally funded everything. Everything was covered by them. So there really was no question for me. I wanted to leave, and that was my ticket out.
I wasn't planning on going to a classical conservatory because I already had an urge of wanting to improvise. But that's what I had at the time. My goal when I moved to the States was to pursue that however I could. I found this jazz vibraphonist that used to come to Curtis and give some classes during the semester. His name is Tony Miceli, a Philly-based vibraphonist. Our teacher at Curtis had the idea that if you ever have a job in a pop orchestra, you should have a basic maneuvering of changes. So he invited Tony to give classes there. My goal was to get to fulfill that urge, which led me to go to a jazz program for my master's. That's when I moved to New York, to study at NYU. I did my master's in jazz there, and part of it is because at the time, Stefon Harris was teaching there, and I started studying with him when I was still living in Philly. So when I was looking for a master's program, he was already there. I was like, “Well, I'm gonna go to NYU.” <laugh>.
From day one, I wasn't interested in doing orchestral percussion anymore. I had to find the steps that will lead me to this pathway. Another program that I did was the School For Improvisational Music in New York City, which is a program run by trumpeter Ralph Alesi, where I met a lot of musicians I ended up working with in later years, like Vijay Iyer or Michael Formanek. So again, I was just trying to create my own opportunities to meet people, to play for people, to get a degree in jazz,. Because for whatever reason I thought that above any other experience, cause I never really had an experience of jazz education as an undergrad. So that's the path that led me here.
Tell me how you started developing your own sound. I especially want to know how you began to incorporate electronics. There's something very particular about your voicings, especially on your first album, Maquishti. They’re spare, elongated, beautiful, but then with electronic layers, extending some notes and tones. How did you start working on getting your sound to where it ended up?
A lot of it has to do with the fact that even though I'm a vibraphonist, or vibes percussionist, I always think as a percussionist, and percussionists always think about color: How do we highlight things? How do we enhance things as a musician in a particular context? And then, any sound is valid — from a tile, to a drum, to a marimba. I played pieces with so many ranges of “instruments,” from flower pots to metal pipes. We think about sound a little bit differently than other musicians, other instrumentalists. When I was playing vibraphone, I always had moments where I felt limited. I missed that lower range that I could access on marimba but wanted to have on vibraphone. Or those textures that I could get from tiles.
“How can I get that on this instrument?” This is one of my goals. One of my mentors, one of the first people I started playing with, the drummer John Hollenbeck, once told us to make a list of every sound that you can create on your instrument that's non-traditional. So maybe I can slap a rubber band, and see what happens, or play with a binder-clip and see what happens, or with the end of the stick, and so on. So I really got into that mindset and that connects to the mindset of a percussionist, just thinking about color as a part of your pitch collection. It's not just the 12 tones, but expands it into this other aspect. So the electronics come in because of that same need. I couldn't get it any other way acoustically. So let me try expanding with guitar pedals or electronics and see if I can get that. For example, one of the first things that I got was a whammy pedal, because that would allow me to go two octaves lower, it gave me access to that lower register on the instrument that I couldn't have before. Some of those particle pedals I use on this new record, create those metal-pipes, crystally types of colors, that [when] combined with the tone of the vibraphone, creates a really unique tone.
So that's how I got into it, from that need of, “I'm hearing this and I can't get it this way — how can I do it?” Thankfully, the amplification system for the instrument has been around for a while, and I was like, “This is perfect.” I can use it through guitar pedals and keep exploring. Now it's just an endless journey, because there are so many pedals and electronic possibilities, it's pretty insane. But it's fun every day. Like, “Let me try something new <laugh> I haven't done before.”
When I started using pedals I started to talk to a lot of guitar players, asking, “What does this pedal do? How do you use this one?” And the first thing that I noticed is a totally different reaction on vibraphone. It's a totally different effect. So I had to start to learn how to deal even with something you see tons of YouTube videos on, because it doesn't apply at all to my instrument. <laugh> It just has its own personality. But one of the things that I like about that too, is that it really allowed me to develop a personal language, because even though I may have the same pedal as a hundred guitarists, I can only get this one thing because of my instrument or the setup. So it narrows it down to a very personal approach. I started to really connect to that too.
Tell me about your writing process, about how you compose. Especially the differences in your approach between your solo record, Maquishti, and your quartet record, More Touch. I was thinking as I was listening to the quartet play at the Jazz Gallery, that the newer material makes sense in my head, but the solo music, I don't understand how you came up with that at all. The simplest comparison to me is with Brian Eno's ambient music, not a usual set of musical progressions but a randomness that doesn’t feel random. Tell me a little bit about your writing process on that first record. What were the things that you were reaching to try to convey?
So that record, the general motivation was, in a way, almost educational, for each piece to feature a particular concept or aspect. For example, the first track on that record is “Blame It.” One of my favorite composers is Morton Feldman. And one of the things I love about his music is the use of space. Same thing with Tōru Takemitsu, using space to highlight other elements of music, either resonance or harmonics, or just silence itself. And using silence as an active part of the music, rather than just what we're taught in school. Resting. So on “Blame It,” I think the only thing I do electronically is just like a little reverb on the notes. There's a certain haunting aspect to silence, and I wanted to infuse the tone of the instrument with a certain airiness. Like, if you were a singer, you can immediately access that. But with the vibraphone, I'm gonna hit the note and it's gonna sound how it's gonna sound. So how can I add that airiness to the tone? So that was my choice from the electronic aspect. The composition itself: there's some sections in that piece that will be, like one system. The material in this system is open for manipulation, for improvisation. However, it's not the usual improvisation. My limitations are, let's say, a series of five chords. I'm only allowed to play those five chords the way they are, but I can organize 'em in different ways to create some kind of a motif or alternate lines using that material. So I had that improvisational approach in that piece. But it's technically through-composed, and the goal with that is pace and silence. It's a polyphonic composition where there would be one main melody, with either gestural responses or counter-melodic responses, and my goal was to kind of highlight those elements. Like the main melody I'm gonna highlight with my type of stroke or dynamics. Also, how I move through that main melody, the big arc of the main melody with all those things in between. There's no time signature. It's more up to me what the pace is based on that sort of natural feel of how music moves at that level, at that slow pace. Which we can all feel — you kind of feel when the next note is about to happen.
So that is the first piece: that concept of space, time, silence, and then the emotion comes from that ghostly air, which is reflected in the electronics. Every piece [on Maquishti] has that kind of background.
There's another piece, “Point of No Return,” where I use binder-clips, on the vibraphone. That piece was highlighting the nuance of acoustic texture. So a lot of people thought I was doing that electronically, but actually, I had two binder-clips in my hand . And there really isn't anything other than just a little delay on the pedals. That goes back to figuring out the different sounds on the instrument: clipping binder-clips on the bar so it completely mutes it, but still creates a kind of tapping-on-a-piano-string sound, but holding it with your hands. You hear a click. So I experimented with some of those things in that piece. That also is pretty through-composed. There's a whole head to it, and there's a solo section in the middle, and then the outro, the mallets come in, going back to that raw, natural approach to the instrument, just striking and over the mallet, as simple as that <laugh>.
The last piece on the record (“Derrumbe de Turquesas”) is a marimba piece. It's a chorale. That one is completely through-composed, there's no improvisation on that one. However, I would say the improvisation comes, for me, in the interpretation of that piece. How I connect those chorale phrases.
Another one that's a fun one is the “Away From Us,” that kind of seems trance-y electronic piece. The inspiration was the orchestral work by Ligeti, and using that concept of micropolyphony where the sheet music of that piece is just two systems with a bunch of whole notes in it, but those whole notes actually have a pathway based on a core progression. I just kind of use one pitch of each chord, so there's still that sense of tension and release within them. My idea was to create either this giant organ or giant orchestra movement, with the sustained sound. So I was like, “Well, I can use bows to do that.” But with the bow itself, acoustically, the sound dies too soon for me to actually create that buildup effect. That's where the pedals came through. I used a delay pedal and a reverb pedal in a subtle way, so it wouldn't be too muddy. But the delay pedal allowed me to overlap those sounds and create that polyphony aspect. So again, this has a whole narrative behind it, the goal of creating this particular result. The trickier part was how do I move through those whole notes on the page where it feels organic, doesn't feel stagnant, and where I can still be aware of that tension and release between those pitches through the core progression. It was actually really challenging, because you can easily lose the sense of movement. Just stay in one pitch for too long, or move too quickly through a particular rub of dissonance of two pitches. So it was a very challenging piece to play. That's another one that might sound random, but if you really pay attention to how each pitch comes in and out, there’s a dense fabric that was being created, and there's some pictures that kind of poke in and out of that dense fabric in that piece.
The trickier ones are the fully improvised pieces on that record. I always try to think about how I think when I improvise. I didn't plan anything. However, as musicians, we're just exposed to structure. I equate it to somebody that's a good public speaker, [and] if you're a good writer. Like, I think Barack Obama, for example, is a really great public speaker. He's a great writer, well-read. So all those things eventually kind of come into place when he’s improvising a speech. In a way, for a musician, even though it was a free improvisation, I'm still aware of microstructure when I'm going through it.
Maybe I was trying to get in touch with a certain emotion that I wanted to convey in a particular piece. Maybe this one feels a little bit raw, if I start with a big chord, where is this gonna take me? It already feels aggressive, so let me kind of build on this narrative a little bit more. The free improvisations might sound like a piece in a way, but actually it's because I'm aware of those elements. And in that case, the pedals were a result of whatever was being called for in that moment, what texture, what color I was hearing. And again, going back to what I was saying earlier, it became another note on my instrument that I had access to at that particular moment.
Hearing you describe it piece by piece, it feels so diverse in how you approach it. Whereas, when I listen, it feels like a single long classical piece with movements.
I recorded 23 tracks in that session, so there's a whole other record that hasn't been released. But when I was choosing through all of the tracks, I was really trying to be conscious of creating a big arc through the whole record. I wanted it to have exactly the experience that you were describing, for a listener to get through the whole record as if it was one piece. Even though all the pieces have a different concept or different motivation, there is a common denominator, which is sound exploration, and connecting to those fundamental elements of music: silence, and sound, and even rhythm. I play “Magic Square,” which is “Square by Magic” on the second record, it’s the same piece, but one is solo, one is with the Quartet. On the solo record, I do a little solo intro and use some effects in that. But once I start, the piece is full-on vibraphone, cause I'm just focusing on the rhythm and improvising on those rhythmic structures.
Earlier you were saying why you decided to play in a quartet, particularly with two drummers, that you wanted to explore a little bit of that rhythmic quality of that body music and dance aspect of improvisation. Can you talk a little bit about how all that came together? How you chose the Quartet? And what you wanted to convey with this record? It's a magnificent dance-jazz record for me.
I'm happy to hear that, because that's what I want: for people to dance with it. <laugh> I was joking during rehearsal [at the Jazz Gallery] that we should open the tables and have people dance a little bit.
I always wanted to do this type of record but I didn't know exactly how. I think eventually it came together, I'm gonna do this quartet. But I always had that feeling, like I was saying earlier, and for me in general, like my first record, it's about connecting to those general feelings that you don't have to be a musician to be able to connect with. Groove is one of those elements of music, or rhythm. Anybody on the subway or whoever, accountants, doctors, you hear a good groove or a good drum-beat, your body naturally is gonna want to do something. Those moments of reflection that we can all connect to on a deeper level rather than just on a technical musical level. So with this record, it was just exploring more of that first feeling that I got when I was a little kid. I just wanna move. I just wanna dance. Why am I looking at the drummer? Why am I always gravitating towards that? That was one of the main goals.
So I started to think, “Well, this is a band of drummers.” Obviously I wanted to have a bass player, but I needed to choose somebody that was a drummer that played bass — not literally, but who thinks about rhythm the same way a drummer or a percussionist would. I immediately thought Kim's the person. I met him through my husband originally, because they're both from Maine and when Kim moved to New York, we did a session totally randomly. (We actually played “Magic Square” at the time, I remember.) And just hearing his solo record, I was like, this guy is insane with how he thinks about rhythm, which is unusual for me, seeing that in another instrumentalist that's not a drummer or a percussionist. So that was a no-brainer, Kim has to be the bass player for this band.
The percussionist was important because in that tradition, [the role] is very fixed. It's almost like tabla for example, where there's fixed compositions. In Afro-Cuban rhythms, even though there is improvisation, it's like fixed grooves. There's a strict tradition as to how you do things, or what groove you play over, and what clave goes with what, all kinds of structural rules. So I wanted somebody who knew the tradition very well, but that was able to open it up, and even tweak it, or adjust it to whatever is happening. I met Mauricio Herrero many years ago in New York, because we had common friends, and also he lived in Mexico, so he knew lots of my friends from back home. We had that connection and I always knew he was in New York. And I remembered he did this record with Aruan Ortiz, an amazing Cuban pianist, and Andrew Cyrille. That record is totally Out. Aruan is playing completely free, but adapting some kind of Afro-Cuban groove into it. And then Mauricio happened to be on that record. It’s really hard to find percussionists being exposed to that particular aspect of improvised music. So Mauricio again was a no-brainer, because he's definitely been exposed to avant-garde jazz, to an idea what that is. I can work with that.
I met Marcus Gilmore in 2013. We were part of this big band that Vijay Iyer put together (we never did a record, we just had a few shows). And Marcus is such an incredible drummer. Since then I was like, “I wanna do something with him.” Not only because he's a great drummer, but he knew about Afro-Cuban tradition, he knows about other drumming traditions and not just jazz, but he's also an incredible jazz drummer. He can groove, he can swing, he can play free. He has all those qualifications. For this record, I needed all of the above. So I thought this is a perfect opportunity to work with Marcus. It's also rhythmically challenging. I wanted to see how somebody like him could play around with those complex rhythmic structures and completely open it up. That set that you came to at the Jazz Gallery, we opened things up even more. And that's what I love about this band. This deep, complex structure with the idea to almost float over all of this, and still keeping our ground throughout the compositions.
With the compositions… It's all about rhythm, all about groove, from a very specific perspective. Most of the drum beats and the pieces are written. It's a pet-peeve of mine when I go to a session and people tell the drummer, “just play eights over it,” or “play 16 over it.” <laugh> This is a percussion quartet, everybody has a specific layer that contributes to the composition. The drummer is one of those layers. A specific drum beat is attached to each of the compositions — it really makes the composition what it is. So, for example, “Space For Hour” has several drum beats written into it. The first one is almost like creating an acoustic delay on a back beat. So it kinda stretches it a little bit. I was thinking about, if you were to put the drum to a delay pedal, how do I actually write that? So that’s an example of a concept of how I write something rhythmically, that could give the sense of the people starting to feel a groove. But it's weird because it feels like it gets stuck in a tunnel or something. Unstable but stable at the same time, which is weird.
There's a lot of that in this album where it's not an obvious groove. “Convergence” is another one where the bassline is actually also the bass snare part on the drum set. I wanted to add a half-note triplet in that bar over a four/four [beat] to kind of create that elasticity. Rhythm for me is like… Sometimes I explain it to younger musicians that you have a space of time, and you can do anything you want in that space. You can play in nine, or in four/four, that's just a block of time, and you can stretch or play however you want in that space, as long as you land on the next block. So a lot of that concept comes into this record, especially with these musicians. They take those perfect liberties to the maximum. I love that because I also wanted them to have fun, to have that challenge and be informed, and just stick to a structured limited rhythmic situation.
And they all think that way too, which again, goes back to why I chose them, I know they all think about rhythm and space and time in that manner where they can just float. But I also know they're following that structure and we can join *here*. That happens sometimes in the show where all of a sudden we all hit together and it's beautiful. It's just so fun to play in a group where I have that amount of freedom, but also we're all aware of what's going on structurally.
At the show, it definitely felt both free, but also deeply interlocking. Besides the Jazz gallery, have you all played this music before live?
Yeah, we did a show right before the recording. I didn't want to just meet to record, and that's it. I really wanted to have a little moment of just hanging together, playing together. So we booked three days of rehearsals to just play, hang-out for a second, get to know each other on a human level. And also, musically, instinctively, how we react to things. Those rhythmic structures, how do we float over it, and trial-and-error type of things where we take it too far and don't land in the same spot <laugh>. Just use that moment to explore. At the end of those three rehearsal days, we did a show right before the recording session. It was a very limited-seating show. Also, when I started writing the music, I did a few shows, not with Marcus. My husband [Noel Brennan] is also a drummer, and we did a few shows with him playing drums. My husband works through a lot of the music with me, so he knows the music in and out. We kind of think about rhythm the same way too.
The reason I ask about past performances of this music is the fact that it lends itself to movement, to dancing. You speak about having these connections to rhythm and how audiences react to rhythm, and you have designed this music for audiences to, on some level, have this reaction. Yet you are playing it in places where audiences are prohibited from having that reaction. Tell me a little bit about your feelings about this set of dance grooves being listened to sitting down.
I guess one way of answering that is I expect people to react how I will react to it. When I go to a show, whatever the show is, I dance, I move, that's who I am. That's who I grew up. Where I grew up, you dance no matter where you are. So, for me, whether I'm at Jazz Gallery or wherever, I would do the same. <laugh>. But I think it really highlights how we listen to music as an audience, and I think we forget that music was created for that visceral, physical reaction to it. I mean, you'd be surprised at how many musicians don't even know how to dance. <laugh>
In a way I'm also trying — unconsciously, in a way, I guess — to let people know it's okay to feel what you're feeling. You can move your feet, you can move your head, you can move if you feel something, it's okay. And then even when I go as an audience member to a show, once I do it, people start doing it, which is interesting. It's almost like you're not allowed to. Even jazz itself, it used to be that people danced, people moved. I don't know what happened in the trajectory of people listening and experiencing this music. It became this separate, this foreign thing, rather than a real internal experience, from an emotional perspective or physical perspective.
I guess I could choose venues that are more conducive to that, but my unconscious expectation was that, as a listener, you will experience music how you were supposed to. I think it highlights an issue that's bigger than me and my record: how, if you go to any show, even at jazz festivals, people are sitting down in chairs or they're on the grass or whatever, and it's like, “come on, there's something happening here.” It's something more to think about, generally, as a listener of music. People are just sitting down and then think there’s a usual etiquette they have to follow, when you don't. Maybe I should make an announcement or something like that… <laugh>
I 100% think you should. And then we should book you into a club where there are some seats, but also plenty of room to dance.
Yeah. I want people to do that, and not just with my record. Going back to the human connection to music, we all react to music that way. It's deep down there for some people, but it's there.