A Gambler's Hand

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.

...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.

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.