(Modern Creative, Chamber Jazz, Avant-Garde) Sean Noonan - A Gambler's Hand - 2012 [Songlines], WEB, FLAC (tracks), lossless

Drummer Sean Noonan's A Gambler's Hand is an innovative musical suite that explores the world of a compulsive Irish gambler who finds himself trapped inside a wall. The project was conceived during a period when Noonan lived in a basement apartment and had a mysterious next-door neighbor; a man he never saw but could often hear screaming and pounding on the walls. Noonan thought perhaps his music and drumming would comfort the man, so he tried to communicate with him through the drums. This experience, combined with Noonan's ongoing interest in folklore and the work of playwright Samuel Beckett and the theater of the absurd, led Noonan to create this surreal musical tale, as well as a thirty-minute silent film where Noonan plays the gambler.
The project's musical configuration is also unique. Noonan has selected four of contemporary music's most talented and versatile string players, who bring his compositions to life with aplomb and create compelling improvisational interludes. However, instead of taking the traditional role of the drummer and sitting behind the band, Noonan sat in front of the group so the five players formed a circle. Noonan says, "I thought it would be quite interesting to intertwine or overlap the strings and percussion and treat it all as one organism." And, indeed, the group plays throughout with a superb cohesion and sense of one-mind creativity.
Each of the ten songs on the CD are full of beauty, with standouts including the luscious title track, which creates a wonderfully moody atmosphere—there's nothing like strings to depict the inner quiver of human emotions. "Caught in the Act" is full of urgency and passion, with Noonan's drums driving the strings to a heightened fury and flurry, and "Lully" has a lovely melody line, with the strings creating both a sweet poignancy and a nightmarish undercurrent. "I Feel the Clouds" is calmer, depicting a brief interlude of contentment in the gambler's tortured existence, and the CD ends with the exquisitely fragile "Monster of Solitude," going further into the crevices of the gambler's emotional world.
Noonan and the group are to be commended for this tremendous achievement, an imaginative and ingenious work that combines the power of storytelling with top-notch musicianship. The subject matter is also quite brave: Noonan goes right into the roots of loneliness and compulsion, the walls that we all get trapped in and the ways we try to express ourselves from within those flat, suffocating spaces. It's always inspiring when an artist takes a chance on a unique vision, and it's especially so when they succeed as beautifully as Noonan has on A Gambler's Hand. (Florence Wetzel)

Those expecting a direct follow-up to Sean Noonan's 2008 album Boxing Dreams are in for a surprise on A Gambler's Hand. Here he's traded punk jazz's wailing guitars, skittering beats, funked-up basses, and frenetic visceral energy for his virtuosic drumming with a string quartet. Just as he was able to cohere the various dynamic elements of Boxing Dreams into a focused series of smaller narratives, here he takes the textural, sonorous, and harmonic qualities of strings and combines them with the propulsive and dynamic possibilities of his drums to create an extended single narrative. A Gambler's Hand -- based on a short story-- is soon to be a film for which this recording will serve as a score. It crosses lines between jazz, third stream, and classical music even as it observes them. Noonan embraces the seams between modernist and avant music's compositional strategies from the 20th century; he finds his way to slot them into 21st century compositional notions and modern jazz's improvisational schemas. What's more, Noonan and his string quartet -- Tom Swafford and Patti Kilroy, violins; Leanne Darling, viola; David West, cello -- are hardly academic in their approach. The drummer is a musical terrorist at heart. That said, this is not a mess of atonal skronk and scree (though dissonance does make itself properly known in places), but a series of well-conceived and expertly arranged and performed pieces that reveal not merely an inner logic, but an external one as well. The basic story -- of Pavee, a gambler who is locked behind a wall -- may not tell itself literally, but the logic at work in the way these pieces interact and the logic with which they move from one to another is inescapable even in a casual listening encounter. Noonan's sense of drama is canny, but hardly obvious. His balancing act occurs on the line where conventional notions of beauty, dynamic, rhythmic shifts, and timbral explorations are sophisticated yet full of emotion. The interplay between the more formally composed aspects of these ten pieces and the improvisational ones is organic. Humor and chaos have their place in grounding the work as a whole, but it's the tension that builds and resolves as this musical story unfolds that gives it heft. A Gambler's Hand will prove a delight for anyone interested in the fine body of work Noonan has been assembling this last decade, and for those who seek more formal encounters between jazz, avant, and classical musics. (Thom Jurek)