A drummer and composer whose
music enthusiastically defies category, Sean Noonan prefers the title
"Rhythmic Storyteller" - an apt description for a modern-day sonic
griot who spins imaginative yarns in the ancient tradition of wandering
minstrels while weaving captivating narrative tapestries via his unique
polyrhythmic language. On Tan Man's Hat, the second release by his harmolodic
jazz-rock ensemble Pavees Dance, Noonan draws inspiration from the soul to the
stars with his stunningly adventurous collaborators: original Can vocalist
Malcolm Mooney, bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma (Ornette Coleman's Prime Time),
guitarist Ava Mendoza (Unnatural Ways) and keyboardist Alex Marcelo (Yusef
Lateef).
Tan Man's Hat confronts the listener with a vibrant,
shocking swirl of sound, a dauntless tempest of varied influences: prog rock
and avant-garde classical create sparks from clashes with harmolodic
improvisation and African folk traditions, with jolting infusions of
psychedelia and campfire tales. The band also thrives on its blend of
generations, with experimental elders Mooney and Tacuma passing a still-blazing
torch to their cutting-edge compatriots.
While Noonan's "wandering folk" approach to
collecting the stories of diverse cultural traditions spans the globe, the name
of Pavees Dance is rooted in his own Irish heritage. Pavees are members of the
Emerald Isle's nomadic ethnic minority, traditionally occupied as traveling
tinkers and craftsmen, skilled at crafting items from available materials - a
gift shared by Noonan, whose distinctive compositions are a patchwork of
eclectic inspirations made new and vital in his deft hands.
"Pavees is the Irish word for a traveling musician and
tinker, a sort of gypsy who collects and creates things," Noonan explains.
"That fits in perfectly with the wandering storyteller concept I've been
developing throughout my work, merging West African and Irish storytelling
traditions. The name Pavees Dance really embodies that."
The music of Pavees Dance is enlivened by the inventive
lyrics of singer, poet and visual artist Malcolm Mooney, founding vocalist for
the iconic krautrock band Can. In collaboration with Noonan, he works with
lyrics the way that a jazz musician uses their instrument, using written
material as a leaping-off point for improvisatory flights. "Malcolm
develops or adapts lyrics on the spot," Noonan explains. "I gave him
a road map for each of the songs and then let him do his thing. He shaped his
own stories from the ideas that I gave him, which was a really meaningful way
for me to develop as a lyricist and to evolve myself artistically."
In essence, Mooney's spontaneous approach to reinventing his
own lyrics has strong parallels with Ornette Coleman's ground-breaking
harmolodic system, which bass virtuoso Jamaaladeen Tacuma knows first-hand from
his time in the legendary saxophonist's electric Prime Time band. "Being a
drummer, the bass player is like my dance partner," Noonan says. "This
music is heavily based on the drum and bass relationship, so Jamaaladeen's
voice is a dominant aspect in my instrumental writing, which is always heavily
influence by harmolodic theory."
There's Always the Night, Pavees Dance's 2014 debut release,
featured a quartet version of the band featuring Mooney, Tacuma, and guitarist
Aram Bajakian. The latter's relocation to Vancouver allowed for a reimagining
of the band, with California experimentalist Ava Mendoza (who has worked with
the likes of Nels Cline, Fred Frith, Mike Watt and Ikue Mori) to take over on
guitar while Marcelo, a longtime collaborator dating back to Noonan's notorious
punk/jazz band The HUB, to expand the sound with his singular approach to the
keyboards.
"I really wanted to keep the element of electric guitar
in the music, because the loudness and the extremeness of what you can do with
that instrument really fits Malcolm's voice," Noonan says. "But I was
writing these intricate through-composed works using tone rows and concepts
like that, so adding Alex allowed me to include the elaborate countermelodies
and harmonies that I was hearing in my head."
The complexity of the music becomes a vibrant setting for
the far-reaching stories told throughout Tan Man's Hat. The album opens with
"Boldly Going," which takes the aspirational opening message from
Star Trek to envision a journey beyond the stars on Starship Earth, an alluring
vision given the increasingly tumultuous nature of life on the home planet.
Science fiction has always provided a fertile ground for
address real-life issues by way of fantastical metaphors. Sharing that aspect
with "Boldly Going," "Martian Refugee" takes on the idea of
how to welcome outsiders via an interplanetary twist, accompanied by a playfully
skewed angular groove. While Noonan has never viewed his work as a vehicle for
"protest music," the addition of Mooney added a healthy dose of
socio-political commentary to the heady mix.
"You can never really escape from the things that are
going on in the environment around you," Noonan allows. "I would
often try to ignore those things in my music; I wanted to take people's minds
off the reality of what's happening in the world and away from the divisions
that separate us. For this project, though, it made sense to explore that
territory for the first time. Malcolm is an African-American who came up in the
1960s and '70s, and he has very outspoken positions about equality and
discrimination. Being blunt and saying exactly how he feels is just something
that comes naturally to him."
"Tell Me" expresses that bluntness with an
invigorating urgency, with Mooney spitting acid-tinged rebuttals to political
and media falsehoods and the military-industrial complex over a full-throttle
pulse. Not every song has such hot-button origins, however. The churning rock
aggression of "Girl from Another World" offers a more straightforward
alien encounter tale, while the playful "Turn Me Over" is a slice of
avant-garde vaudeville, a fairy story about a genie unleashed from the grooves
of a vinyl record.
The ferocious "Gravity and the Grave" is a true
collaboration between the two lyricists' minds, with Mooney taking a song
Noonan penned about the grave and adding the notion of gravity, providing a
tension between the rarefied air of dreams and the grounding fatality of death.
A similar acceptance of the cyclical nature of existence lies at the heart of
the serrated musings of "The End of the Inevitable." Co-written with
Günter Janovsky (as is "Girl from Another World"), "Winter
Inside" closes the album on a note of romantic melancholy, filled with
vivid imagery more evocative than explanatory.
Where the bulk of Tan Man's Hat consists of freshly-written
lyrics, the words to the title song actually date back nearly a half century to
Mooney's time in Can. The band recorded a demo version of the song at that
time, but it's never been released; Noonan composed new music, transforming the
piece into a wistful, gradually accelerating ramshackle blues.
Sean Noonan first came to the public's attention as the drummer
of the punk/jazz trio The HUB in the late '90s, quickly integrating himself
into the famed Knitting Factory scene.
His path was diverted four years later when a near-fatal car wreck in
Italy led to a long period of recovery and a dedication to combining his two
musical loves: jazz and African rhythms. The ensuing sonic wanderlust fueled a
2008 trek to Bamako, Mali, to gain a first-hand experience of West African
griot traditions alongside Malian singer/guitarist Abdoulaye Diabaté. That trip
culminated in the multi-cultural album Boxing Dreams, one manifestation of
Noonan's amorphous Afro-Celtic project Brewed By Noon.
The treasures that he finds along the paths of his
story-collecting travels are filtered through his distinctive vision to become
the unpredictable and far-ranging sounds of Noonan's wide-spectrum music, which
combines the eloquence of an Irish bard, the narrative rhythms of Samuel
Beckett, and the raw physicality of a street-smart boxer.
That nomadic muse has led Noonan in a wealth of unexpected
directions, resulting in an explosion of dynamic releases and projects spanning
more than 20 albums, most recently on The Aqua Diva, the latest manifestation
of the jazz-meets-Scheherazade fantasies created by his trio Memorable Sticks.
In 2018, he premiered his 13-piece Rock Opera Zappanation, at the International
Festival "Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz" in Sardinia. The piece,
dedicated to Frank Zappa and Edgard Varèse, reflects Noonan's affinity for two
composers who share his tendencies toward absurdist.
TRACKS
1. Boldly Going
2. Gravity and the Grave
3. Tell Me
4. Martian Refugee
5. Turn Me Over
6. Tan Man's Hat
7. The End of the Inevitable
8. Girl from another World
9. Winter Inside
Produced by Sean Noonan and Guenter Janovsky.
All music composed by Sean Noonan (except track 8 composed
by Guenter Janovsky and arranged by Sean Noonan).
Lyrics by Malcolm Mooney and Sean Noonan on tracks 1, 4, 5.
Lyrics by Malcolm Mooney on tracks 2, 3, 6, 7.
Lyrics by Malcolm Mooney and Guenter Janovsky on tracks 8,
9.
Recorded August 8-9, 2018 at Atlantic Sound Studios,
Brooklyn NY.
Diko Shoturma, Michal Kupicz: mixing, mastering.
Executive Producer for RareNoiseRecords: Giacomo Bruzzo
