Jazz Articles about Sean Noonan

About Sean Noonan

Album Review

Surreal, comic, wistful, and whimsical, Sean Noonan's The Aqua Diva provides a unique journey into a world that is part Tom Waits, part Mose Allison, part Frank Zappa, and a whole lot of Sean Noonan. Noonan articulates and sings odd ditties and lyrics which introduce us to the Aqua Diva, Bubbles, the Smoking Man, and other strange and colorful personas. He is joined on his musical expose by Alex Marcelo on piano and Peter Bitenc on bass. On ...

Catching Up With

Sean Noonan: Not Simply Beating a Dead Horse Drum

by Phillip Woolever
January 12, 2018

Composer and drummer Sean Noonan is an explorer, charting many edges of the compositional frontier. The term unique does not quite cover the range of his thoughtful, abstract approach to musical narrative.Edgy is often the operative theme in Noonan's repertoire, gleamed from studious sojourns to distant cultures and locales. Noonan's results take form in string-based dreamscapes or saxophone solos layered over Parliament/Funkadelic style aqua-grooves. His beats can cover science fiction, pounding punk and orchestral visions on Frank Zappa.

Album Review

Sean Noonan: Man No Longer Me

Read "Man No Longer Me" reviewed by Matt Hooke

by Matt Hooke
December 25, 2017

From the first bass notes of “Man Vs. Machine" the opening track from Sean Noonan's Man No Longer Me it's obvious that this isn't your average jazz fusion record. The Irish American Noonan combines West African rhythms, with jazz harmony, and the absurdist humor and attitude of Frank Zappa, making this release a welcome respite from the tepid “Berklee Funk" that often populates jazz fusion. The album is based on the loose concept of a man's transformation into ...

Album Review

Sean Noonan: Man No Longer Me

Read "Man No Longer Me" reviewed by Friedrich Kunzmann

by Friedrich Kunzmann
December 2, 2017

Drummer and self-declared Storyteller Sean Noonan's body of work draws from a variety of different music and poetry of past and present. Having explored various musical cultures in the past, Noonan feels as much as home with cutting edge distorted punk riffs as he does with mellow Jazz Fusion or even chamber music. On his most recent outing Man No Longer Me he combines his entire catalogue of approaches and fuses it to a homogenous whole. Spoken word arrangements meet ...

Album Review

Sean Noonan: Man No Longer Me

Read "Man No Longer Me" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
November 27, 2017

Man No Longer Me is about the transformation of a man who gets tickled by a sunbeam one morning on a mountain top and who, as the story progresses, wanders and gets lost in a desert and transforms into a coyote. All clear, so far? New York avant-garde drummer Sean Noonan's incoherent, barely musical ramblings were born from “harmolodic jazz, bleeding-edge rock and avant-garde classical music. “He is a modern day ...

My Favourite Things

Sean Noonan e il Questionario di Proust

by Paolo Peviani
September 28, 2016

All About Jazz: Il tratto principale della mia musica. Sean Noonan: “Questo, questo." “Sì?" “Questo è il CONTRARIO di noioso" (come ha detto qualcuno su http://louderthanwar.com/sean-noonan-cantus-domus-stargaze-haldern-pop-2016). AAJ: La qualità che desidero nei musicisti che suonano con me. SN: Che abbiano sempre voglia di rischiare e che non abbiano paura di esplorare nuovi territori musicali. AAJ: Come musicista, il momento in cui sono stato più felice. SN: ...

Album Review

Sean Noonan: A Gambler's Hand

Read "A Gambler's Hand" reviewed by AAJ Italy Staff

by AAJ Italy Staff
May 10, 2013

L'impiego di un quartetto d'archi in ambiti jazzistici e di improvvisazione non è più una novità già da parecchio tempo; sono molti infatti musicisti e compositori che hanno contribuito ad abbattere i muri che separano sempre più debolmente i vari settori della musica contemporanea (basti pensare a Kronos Quartet e John Zorn tanto per fare un paio di nomi). Eppure, il batterista Sean Noonan riesce ancora a sorprendere con questo suo lavoro, una suite per batteria e quartetto d'archi che ...