Brian Marsella’s iMAGiNARiUM

If you don’t already know that Brian Marsella is one of the most versatile and prized keyboardists in New York’s modern “downtown” circuit, simply look at the cast of collaborators on Medietas, the sprawling 2024 album from the collective he calls iMAGiNARiUM. There’s Cyro Baptista on percussion and vocals, Meg Okura on violin, Anwar Marshall on drums, Eyal Maoz on guitar—and that’s just a sample of the dozen-plus people that sometimes form iMAGiNARiUM. The vision is as sprawling as the lineup, as Marsella’s compositions ping-pong between noisy Zappa antics and pointillist jazz as sublime as a sunrise, between nasty funk turbocharged with complicated rhythms and spectral symphonic blues laced with flute and ngoni.

As a kid in Philadelphia, from the age of 2, Marsella was a committed classical pianist, practicing eight hours a day if he wasn’t performing. But when a severe case of tendonitis sidelined him, he realized he needed to live a life outside of music, that he needed interests and experiences to inspire what he’d eventually write. iMAGiNARiUM is a testament to that very idea, its range of musical touchstones working in service to the feelings Marsella writes into these byzantine compositions for his big band: joy, beauty, absurdity, silliness, love, and sadness. There is a sense of cosmic wonder to it all, as if Marsella—truly a dazzling keyboardist, capable of summoning so many unexpected sounds from his instruments—got out to see the world, then tried to write the universe into iMAGiNARiUM.