Clean Feed presents patrick brennan in collaboration with bassist & composer Lisle Ellis as part of its Clean Feed Festival 2007 at the The Cornelia Street Café in NYC. This is their first public performance in this format since their 1998 recording saunters, walks, ambles for CIMP records. This performance is also a celebration of Clean Feed's recent release of muhheankuntuk by patrick brennan's sonic openings under pressure ensemble.

Some press ABOUT the saunters, walks, ambles CD: And skips, and leaps and broods. But, what really distinguishes this duet session isn't legs as much as ears. Listeners interested in the art of subtlety should run, sprint, dash to get this human and humane date. - SIGNAL TO NOISE A rather misleadingly laid-back title for an album of such focus and intensity, - PENGUIN GUIDE TO JAZZ ON CD

ABOUT Lisle Ellis:

Lisle Ellis is a multifaceted creator whose work reflects his interests in music, visual art, computers/technology, and community. As a composer and improvisor-bassist his oeuvre spans three decades and two countries and has brought him international recognition as an artist with an exceptional vision. Some critics consider him to possess an important voice and to have made a significant contribution to the field of experimental music. Recent years have also brought him attention as a creator of computer/electronic music and as a visual artist.

Ellis's distinct instrumental voice has been heard in a multitude of concerts on the world stage in the company of legends of the avant-garde such as Paul Bley, Peter Brotzmann, Andrew Cyrille, Joe Mcphee, and Cecil Taylor; leading contemporary players Marilyn Crispell, Dave Douglas, Fred Frith, and John Zorn, and on more than 40 recordings for international labels such as Black Saint, DIW, and Hat Art, and New World.

Currently, Ellis's principal interest is in developing an electro-acoustic architecture he calls string-circuitry-confluence. Secondary to that are projects such as his long standing trio with Larry Ochs and Donald Robinson called What We Live, Di Terra, an Italy based trio with Alberto Braida and Fabrizio Spera, and duos with pianists Paul Plimley and Mike Wofford. http://www.lisleellis.com/

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ABOUT patrick brennan & sonic openings under pressure: EVERY INSTRUMENT A DRUM sonic openings under pressure makes precise yet adventurously rhythmic jazz by John Chacona

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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."

That journey has brought brennan and his quartet sonic openings under pressure to Erie for a series of workshops and a performance on Sunday evening as part of the Erie Art Museum's Contemporary Music Series.

brennan describes himself a loving to play Charlie Parker backwards, "But I don't have any feeling that I need to do that when I present 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.