Stories To Tell

A lively brew of world music, blues, rock, soul, and jazz ingredients, based on Celtic and West African song-forms, featuring top NY downtown players Marc Ribot (guitar) and Mat Maneri (viola).
– Mark Werlin, NativeDSD & AllAboutJazz

American drummer-bandleader Sean Noonan has described his Brewed by Noon project as “tribal rhythms by an Irish griot” and added “My goal is to adapt folklore in a modern jazz context, merging storytelling and folk music from bardic and griot traditions.” The basic concept isn’t particularly novel in jazz: what happens when “wandering” folk melodies and grooves from different cultures are communally re-created through improvisation. But the ingredients, the brewing methods, and the spirit of the resulting music, are indeed different.

Recuperating from a near-fatal car accident in 2003, Sean began developing a new project that would blend jazz-punk with west African folk music, and got together again with Senegalese bassist Thierno Camara, an old friend in whose Waaw Band he’d performed years before, to write some new tunes. The first Brewed by Noon album was released independently in 2005, a quartet featuring guitarist friends Aram Bajakian and Jon Madof. He expanded the range of possibilities for this second record by seeking out new collaborators: brilliant downtown jazzers Marc Ribot and Mat Maneri, percussionist Jim Pugliese, Malian vocalist Abdoulaye Diabaté (a griot or hereditary praise singer and younger brother of Kasse Mady Diabaté), as well as Irish gaelic folk/rock singer Susan McKeown and classical and soul vocalist Dawn Padmore (herself of Liberian parentage). The music was created with the assistance of a commissioning grant from the American Composers Forum.

The stories Sean and his band tell in these 10 pieces are exceptionally diverse. There are elements of blues, rock, soul, jazz and improv in various combinations, adding in Celtic and west African song-forms, lyrics, melodic content and instrumental approaches, but all transformed in the process of development. From the funky metaphoric love song to a “Pineapple,” to moral fables about a lost baby elephant in “Esspi” and the presumptuous lord “Massana Cissé,” to the grinding out-rock/jazz interplay of “Scabies” and the spooky hospital lullaby “Dr. Sleepytime,” to the Irish/Malian duet “Noonbrews,” Stories to Tell kaleidoscopically refracts its participants’ cultures, talents and musical experiences into an ecstatic, intoxicating vision, one constantly supported by the energy and direction of Sean’s drumming. And New York, the symbolic melting pot where it all transpired, is paid homage to in the musical rollercoaster “NY.”

The recording was creatively mixed to surround; heard in that format, the often complex instrumental and vocal interplay stands out in great detail even as the listener is immersed in the music.

Sean Noonan’s Brewed by Noon
Sean Noonan, electro-acoustic drumset
Marc Ribot, Aram Bajakian, Jon Madof, electric guitars
Mat Maneri, viola
Thierno Camara, electric bass, vocals (5), percussion
Abdoulaye Diabaté, vocals (2, 3, 5)
Susan McKeown, vocals (3)
Dawn Padmore, vocals (8)
Jim Pugliese, percussion
Thiokho Diagne, djembe