A Gambler’s Hand is a suite of pieces for sometimes-amplified string quartet and drums, largely composed but with improvisational sections, inspired equally by the great string quartet tradition (Beethoven and Bartok in particular), the idea of a third stream uniting jazz and classical forms and approaches, Sean Noonan‘s evolving drum language and varied compositional interests, and his inclination to stir diverse elements together into something wildly imaginative that also turns out to be unexpectedly coherent.
The music draws on a diverse range of compositional styles, from Neoclassical and 20th century American experimentalism (Nancarrow, Cowell) to downtown contemporary (Zorn), as well as punk and free jazz. The relationship of the drums and strings developed from Sean’s experience of hearing/playing music from the drum position – conceptually and even literally, the strings are positioned as extensions of the drummer’s limbs: “There are many unique sonic amalgams a drummer experiences sitting behind the drum set that are not heard by the listener. I wanted to capture and exploit these qualities and emulate them in my string arrangements and in the process of mixing the album. So I positioned the two violins far left and right, the viola mid-left, and the cello mid-right. The drum set faces directly towards the quartet. I thought it would be quite interesting to intertwine or overlap the strings and percussion and treat it all as one organism.” The string players Sean chose all have experience in improvisation, and it shows: “I want to praise these great musicians….I knew it wouldn’t be easy to find players with the right background and the level of concentration to execute and interpret my written compositions and on the turn of a dime be able to improvise in a free-form manner.”
A Gambler’s Hand is the music for an original story of Sean’s, a dreamlike tale about an obsessive gambler who eventually finds himself immured inside a wall and lives out his lonely existence there. The music parallels the moods and liminal psychic states of the story’s first person narrator, but the recording is wordless: the narrative elements are left to the listener’s imagination to find in the music. (Excerpts of the story, in a ritualistic sort prose owing something to Beckett and the theatre of the absurd, are included in the booklet.)
Sean Noonan – drum set, percussion, composer, conductor
Tom Swafford – violin
Patti Kilroy – violin
Leanne Darling – viola
David West – cello
Tracklist
Please note that the below previews are loaded as 44.1 kHz / 16 bit.Total time: 00:52:00
Additional information
| Label | |
|---|---|
| SKU | SGL15972 |
| Qualities | DSD 512 fs, DSD 256 fs, DSD 128 fs, DSD 64 fs, DXD 24 Bit, WAV 88.2 kHz, FLAC 96 kHz |
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| Recording Location | Brooklyn Recording, Brooklyn, NY |
| Mixing | Simon Kummer |
| Recording Engineer | Andy Taub |
| Instruments | Cello, Drums, Percussion, Viola, Violin |
| Release Date | June 2, 2025 |
Press reviews
Lucid Culture
Menacingly surreal, often assaultive, drummer Sean Noonan’s latest album A Gambler’s Hand is a feast for fans of dark, challenging music. Part indie classical, part chamber metal and part art-rock, with the improvisational flair of free jazz at its best, it’s a category unto itself – and one of the best albums of 2012 in any style of music. Noonan is a contradiction in terms, an extrovert drummer who’s also extremely subtle and an expert colorist…Because much of it evokes a muted, sometimes out-of-focus horror or dread, Noonan plays with vastly more care and precision than the unleashed ferocity he’s capable of, utilizing every open space on his kit along with all kinds of furtively rustling percussion to enhance the disquiet. There are three main themes here that the quintet carries through a deft series of variations; a sad, off-center, atonal canon; a ferocious, macabre march based on a tritone chord, and a dirge…The ensemble finally reach the pummeling crescendo they’ve been hinting at all along, sliding and screaming and scraping to keep from being imprisoned forever behind that wall….It ends somberly, but more quietly than you would expect after such visceral horror.
Allmusic
…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….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 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.
Jazz Times
The string arrangements are reliably bold, frequently beautiful and remarkably free of cliché…But perhaps his masterstroke here was recruiting top-notch new-music cohorts like violinist Tom Swafford and violist Leanne Darling, who are steeped in the disciplined Euro-classical canon but live and breathe the intellectual flex of jazz. Be it the obsessive syncopation of “Caught in the Act,” the lush timbre-meld of “I Feel the Clouds” or the chamber stomp of “Courage Unleashed,” this is starkly original music that is different from Noonan’s previous starkly original music.
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