Maverick science meets its match with The Noonan Trio’s first album, Inherit a Memory (Street date: October 18, 2024 on Neuma Records). The combo explores the outer boundaries of musical radicalism, speculatively blending new music, free improvisation, and rhythmic storytelling. With influences ranging from Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s audacious Theory of Morphic Resonance and Formative Causation to the pioneering works of Conlon Nancarrow, Frank Zappa, and drummer Milford Graves, Sean Noonan’s distinctive style blurs the lines between drumming and narration, offering a fresh perspective on just about everything. Featuring stellar pianist Matthew Bourne, honored with the “Jazz Innovation” prize at the BBC Radio Jazz Awards, and bassist Michael Bardon, celebrated for his “unorthodox approach to music-making,” Inherit a Memory mirrors Dr. Sheldrake’s notion that patterns of activity transcend traditional concepts of space and time, where music operates more out of habits than rules. Altogether, The Noonan Trio posits a deceptively real, fun, and emotionally unrestricted new world of the highest order. “Morphic resonance is a process whereby self-organizing systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. The hypothesis also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance…Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.” – Rupert Sheldrake, The New Science of Life (1981) Likewise, this music is about the great What If. Modern Drummer Magazine highlights Sean Noonan’s independent spirit: “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 drumming.” Rhythmic storytelling evolved through various collaborations with Marni Nixon (legendary Hollywood songstress), Malcolm Mooney (singer from CAN), Jamaaladeen Tacuma (bassist for Ornette Coleman), Irish American folk singer Susan McKeown, and the Malian Griot Abdoulaye Diabaté. These cross-genre songs explore the ensemble as an extension of a drummer’s limbs by orchestrating rhythmic language derived from the drum kit.