Noonward Duo (ALBUM RELEASE)
Performing a wide range of original compositions by Alex Ward and Sean Noonan along with free improvised music. You might even experience a cover song or two!
Alex Ward - Multi-instrumentalist British clarinet/guitarist
Sean Noonan drums/vocals
Modern Drummer Magazine "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".
Rhythmic storyteller Sean Patrick Noonan is a modern-day sonic griot, composing and conducting with a pair of drum sticks original multi-stylistic music, fusing discoveries from harmolodic jazz-rock to avant-garde chamber music. As a drummer, his compositions serve as an extension of his limbs, mapping out polyrhythmic language on the drum set using Sensory Percussion that is later structured with collected tone rows (Alban Berg), multi-temporal rhythms and aleatoric comprovisation.
Combining a love for jazz and African rhythms fueled a 2008 trek to Mali gaining a first-hand experience of West African griot traditions which culminated in the multi-cultural album Boxing Dreams (Songlines Recordings), one manifestation of Noonan’s amorphous Afro-Celtic jazz-rock project Brewed By Noon, which released 5 disparate albums between 2006 and 2011. The wandering theory is later expanded with Pavees Dance, an upcoming release on Rarenoise Records that fuses free funk pre-rap beat poetry by Malcolm Mooney, from CAN. and Jamaaladeen Tacuma (Ornette Coleman). That nomadic muse has led to a wealth of unexpected directions, resulting in the production of over 25 dynamic albums.
The New York Times “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."
Alex Ward was born in 1974 and is based in London. He works in composed and improvised music, and areas which combine the two. His involvement in free improvisation dates back to his early teens when he met the guitarist Derek Bailey, with whom he played on many subsequent occasions including Company Weeks 1988, 1990 and 1994. Since then he has gone on to perform as a clarinettist, and increasingly since 2000 as a guitarist, with a wide range of improvising musicians including Steve Beresford, Lol Coxhill, Thurston Moore, Joe Morris and Weasel Walter. Amongst his most regular improvising partners are Steve Noble (including Noble's long-standing improv power-trio N.E.W.) and Dominic Lash; and he has played in ensembles led by Simon H. Fell, Eugene Chadbourne, Duck Baker, and Luke Barlow (with whom he runs the label Copepod), as well as being a member of Charles Hayward and Charles Bullen's This Is Not This Heat. From 1997 to 2001 he co-led the rock band Camp Blackfoot with Benjamin Hervé, and in 2005 he released a solo album of his songs entitled "Hapless Days". (His two subsequent solo releases "Cremated Thoughts" and "Proprioception" are albums of clarinet improvisations, from 2008 and 2017 respectively.) Other current projects as a composer and/or leader include Forebrace, the Alex Ward Quintet/Sextet, the ensembles Items 4 & 10, and Dead Days Beyond Help.
Line-up:
Sean Noonan - drums
Alex Ward - clarinet/guitar
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