Artist: Sean Noonan
Title: The Aqua Diva
Label: Sean Noonan Music-7
Street date:June 1, 2018
www.seannoonanmusic.com
1. A Sunny Day 6:52
2. When My Band Goes with Me on the Road 3:15
3. As the World Spins Around Me 5:00
4. Butterflies Away 3:26
5. Don Knotts 4:52
6. Elijah Rocks 5:02
7. Smoking Man 5:52
8. The Aqua Diva 7:11
9. Where Would I Go 6:16
10. Make her great again 3:24
Sean Noonan:drums/vocals/composition/producer; Alex Marcelo:piano; Peter Bitenc: bass
Diko Shoturma: tracking engineer; Michal Kupicz: mixing/mastering
Kaja Gwincinska: photography; Matthias Gleixner: design
Recorded April 22, 2017 at Atlantic Sound Studios, Brooklyn, NY
All compositions and lyrics: SPNoonan (ASCAP)
Rhythmic storyteller Sean Noonan composes and conducts original multi-stylistic music with a pair of drumsticks. His “wandering folk” theory captures the elusiveness of ever-evolving world music traditions and reorients them through his own distinctive lens, fusing his discoveries from harmolodic jazz-rock to avant-garde classical music. The far-ranging sounds of Noonan’s wide-spectrum music combines the loquacity of an Irish bard, the narrative rhythms of Samuel Beckett, and the raw physicality of a street-smart boxer. The treasures that he finds along the way are filtered through his distinctive vision to become the unpredictable.
Noonan has produced an explosion of more than 20 unclassifiable releases, featuring Malcolm Mooney, the original singer of the German rock band Can; composer/violinist/violist Mat Maneri, composer/guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and the Malian griot Abdoulaye Diabaté, featured on Noonan’s Afro-Celtic album Boxing Dreams.
Bassist Peter Bitenc and Alex Marcelo—jazz legend Yusef Lateef’s pianist of choice—who were featured on the 2016 release Memorable Sticks, once again join Noonan on his new release The Aqua Diva, which is rooted in a wide spectrum of American musical, cultural, and lyrical themes. Noonan recasts a tune named for the iconic TV personality “Don Knotts”with experimentalist composer Conlon Nancarrow, in a 12-tone additive rhythm composition. “Where Would I Go” is a folk song adaptation of “Wayfaring Stranger,” and “Elijah Rocks” is a traditional spiritual.
Noonan, an Irish-American drummer with a theatrical bent, scripts tracks 1, 4, 8, and 10 like the plot of a soap opera series. T.A.D. (The Aqua Diva) is stalked by Butterflies, who is jealous of Bubbles for having an affair with T.A.D. The saga ends with Butterflies murdering them in a swingers club’s swimming pool. Noonan’s original story has a direct correlation with his Zappanation Rock Opera, which was inspired by Frank Zappa and Edgard Varèse; it recently premiered in Germany. Read about it here: https://seannoonanmusic.com/zappanation-rock-opera; read The Aqua Diva lyrics here: https://seannoonanmusic.com/the-aqua-diva-album-lyrics.
"Independence might be the ruling concept of this drummer/leader’s career. It defines a common relationship not only among his hands, feet, and voice, but between his art and almost everything else in drumland."
—Modern Drummer Magazine
"The drummer and composer Sean Noonan approaches postmodern jazz and world music from the same angle of self-discovery. … He manages to make his pieces speak coherently, and in a unified voice." —The New York Times
Reviews for Noonan’s 2017 record, Man No Longer Me:
“…prime time Sean Noonan. The sound of an artist in his imperial phase. Intense, daft, tricksy, virtuoso, addictive: an absolute trip from a ‘modern-day sonic griot.’ ” —The Quietus
“As if the early Pink Floyd had a free jazz session with The Mars Volta in Africa.” — Intro Magazine
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