Workers United EP, Dan Pitt, Fall Tour
October - November
Hi all!
I hope you are all having a great start to fall!
Here’s a brief view of some notable events coming up (click on them for more details). I’ll be talking about some of these events in this newsletter.
Oct 11 - Workers United EP Bandcamp release
Oct 12 - Noah Franche-Nolan Trio at La Fabrique St George
Oct 20 - New York’s Nathan Chamberlain and Noah Franche-Nolan Duo at Brentwood Presbyterian Church (Entry by donation/No reservation needed)
Oct 24 - Haxän Live Score with Juno Nominated Meredith Bates at the Cinemateque
Oct 31- Toronto’s Dan Pitt and Noah Franche-Nolan Quartet at Frankie’s Jazz Club
Nov 1 - Dan Pitt and Noah Franche-Nolan Duo at the Roedde House Museum
Nov 3 - Dan Pitt and Noah Franche-Nolan Duo at Brentwood Presbyterian Church (Entry by donation/No reservation needed)
Nov 7 - Noah Franche-Nolan Trio at Buckingjam Palace (Calgary)
Nov 8 - Noah Franche-Nolan Trio at The Sterndale Bennet Theatre (Lethbridge) (tickets available later this month)
Nov 9 - Noah Franche-Nolan Trio atThe Basement (Saskatoon)
For the rest of my upcoming performances, please visit my performances page.
*Please note that I have linked a few Bandcamp records in my newsletter. Today is Bandcamp Friday, an event where Bandcamp waives their revenue share on an album sale and gives it all to the artist. If you like what you hear in the links below and would like to purchase some of the music, I highly encourage you to purchase it today.*
Workers United
I’m very excited to announce the upcoming release of my new EP Workers United. This EP consists of selected musical works from my score for New York-based filmmaker Mihye Kang’s upcoming documentary Painting of Solidarity. The film focuses on the unionization of the Chicago Art Institute workers during the COVID lockdowns. I spoke about the compositional process behind creating this music in my last post. Please feel free to read that post if you haven’t already.
This EP means a lot to me, not only because of how proud I feel about the music that I (piano/organ/synths/production/mixing), Feven Kidane (trumpet), Adrian Avendaño (drums), and Sheldon Zaherko (recording engineer and mastering) made, but also due to the subject matter at hand. As an artist, and as one who is employed by arts education institutions as a private contractor, I am well aware of the lack of worker rights in my employment agreement. Private contractors, at least in the art world, rarely get benefits, sick days, and are rarely unionized. This leaves us in vulnerable positions whenever an unfortunate life event happens, such as significant personal illness, housing insecurity/crisis, or a family member who requires our long term and constant care.
When you begin to imagine the process of longterm aging, and the impact that it has on our abilities to work enough hours to make a living in our increasingly expensive country, the outlook of being stuck in non-unionized private contractor work begins to look grim. Pair this with institutions whose primary focus is on maximizing revenue and expanding infrastructure before insuring that their employees have the basic worker rights that we have come to expect in our country, and it begins to look inevitable that us workers must come together to ensure a better future for ourselves: One where our art institutions employers invest in our long-term security, the way they do in other work sectors.
If any of this resonates with you, I believe the music on this EP will equally resonate with you. Workers United comes out next friday on Bandcamp. You can pre-order the album now and get access to the first track Collective Power.
And if you’re interested in learning more about the Art Institute of Chicago Workers United (AICWU), please feel free to read up on their work here. The artwork of my album was created by Lya Finston and is the AICWU’s logo. You can find Lya’s work here.
Collaboration with Dan Pitt (Oct 31st - Nov 5)
I’m also very excited about my upcoming collaboration with Toronto based guitarist and composer Dan Pitt. I met Dan in Toronto perhaps 7 years ago now. We first connected when we both began playing in Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger Project. We toured the music in Western Canada, recorded a great Canada Council for the Arts funded record, and played a beautiful album release show in Gallery 345 (a beautiful venue in West Toronto that had to close down during the pandemic).
Over the Pandemic, Dan and I would call, hang out in parks (when it was safe to do so), and send music to each other. When I moved back to Vancouver from Toronto, we began sending each other musical ideas. I wrote a series of songs for my friends during the pandemic, one of which was called Transient Continuo and was written for Dan and Harry to play. This song eventually made it onto our first documented collaboration: Portraits From the Interior World.
You can check out the lead sheet of the song and listen to it in the link below:
The project was a lengthy endeavour, involving the careful editing and re-structuring of multiple takes to create our first crack at an electro-acoustic experimental album.
What I admire most about Dan is his commitment to his own distinctive artistic voice. It is almost an act of defiance against our profit driven world to commit so much effort and time into making unique and uncompromising music. The economic landscape of the arts industry makes it incredibly hard to do so, and yet Dan has managed to put out multiple records over the past year, tour his projects, and develop multiple musical concepts, all while staying incredibly committed to his unique musical vision. Dan is about to release a new Quintet record, which you can pre-order below, and I highly recommend you check out the rest of his music if you enjoy the single from his latest record.
Later this month, Dan and I will be collaborating again to present a string of concerts in Vancouver, and to record a new duo album. I’m really excited to collaborate and hang out with Dan once again! In anticipation for our upcoming work, I conducted a small written interview with Dan.
Interview with Dan Pitt
For those who are unfamiliar with your work, how would you describe your creative practice and output?
I would say that I am a guitarist and composer who is interested in creating music that isn’t limited by style and genre. While I feel like a lot of my music is defined by jazz due to my influences, the musicians I play with and the community I work with, I don’t necessarily feel like I’m always looking to write a jazz album or anything of the sort. I would say more so my music is based on using jazz and improvisation as the foundation of what I do as a performer and composer.
You have a distinctive sound as both a guitarist and composer. What concepts and aspirations are you striving for in your music? Are there any notable sources of inspiration that have influenced your work so far?
I’m not too sure I have a straightforward answer to this but when I write, I want it to be something I enjoy listening to just as much as I enjoy playing it. I think this has had a big impact on my studio albums and I’ve tried to be extremely critical about how my tunes play on records as well as how we treat them in live settings. I always try to be conscious about space and density in my music and this new album hopefully reflects that.
I think for influences there are several that come to mind regarding recent work. Paul Motian has always been a big one for the bands he leads and the music he creates. Others would include, Tim Berne, Mark Hollis, Bill Frisell, Ben Monder.
Your fifth album, Horizontal Depths, is coming out on November 1st. This is your quintet’s second record. How does this record evolve from Wrongs, your first quintet record?
For “Wrongs” it kind of felt like it was “now or never” for making that record. We were six months into the pandemic and I thought it might be the last thing I put out. So we took a bunch of tunes I had been working on and rehearsed a bunch and recorded them. Some of those tunes I had been working on for years throughout my studies.
For this album, the music was very much for this band. I tried to compose as much material as possible for this group plus a few arrangements from other pieces. It seems the general consensus among the band is that this record is more focused and more written than the last. I think that’s good because it felt like I had a better understanding of the band and how everyone plays.
For the composers out there, could you please pick a song from your new record and talk us through how you approached writing it?
To be honest, I feel like I’m never good at answering these but I’ll give it a shot. “Echo Park” is a cool one that almost was written exactly in the order that you hear it. I was really interested in using some kind of echo delay to make it sound like I’m playing more than what’s actually going on. I then wrote a loose melody over top. I was experimenting with a lot of different meters for band members. Like the guitar and alto are playing 5 beat patterns while the rest of the band is in 4 and we meet up every 20 beat cycle. I’m not sure it worked out like that perfectly but that was the idea. For the second part it was to do the opposite and go into 5 but break away from the rhythm. I ended up changing meters quite a bit here to fit the phrasing. Finally for the end, the rhythm switches to 4 for just a high energy tenor feature.
You’ve managed to have a steady creative output since you started your career as an artist and bandleader. This can be quite a challenging endeavour, especially while managing the economic realities and day to day responsibilities of being a working artist (and music educator) in Canada. How have you gone about continuing both your creative practice and output? What resources or philosophies have been helpful to you along the way?
It’s really nice to mention this. Honestly, I keep creating because I want to and also because I need to. I’m fortunate to be a part of some great groups and collaborations but most of my music and work comes from my own projects. I think for a while my mindset was that if I stop creating, I stop music, which may be a good or bad way at looking at it depending on your view.
I’m also thankful to have a wonderful supportive partner who has really encouraged me to work on music and put records out. I also am extremely grateful to have received financial support from the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. It’s amazing to have access to so many support opportunities and to have been awarded a few. While grants are becoming extremely hard to get, they are amazing to have to fund records, studies, tours, etc.
What do you most look forward to during your stay/ string of shows and recording work in Vancouver later this month?
I’m looking forward to connecting with a new city and new people. I’ve known a lot of great musicians in and from the area. I’m also really excited for this record and getting to see how it evolves from our previous collaboration.
Once you have toured Horizontal Depths and we have completed our next record, what projects do you look forward to working on in the near future?
I have a few projects I’m looking to get off the ground next year. I’m playing in a few trios that are kind of unusual instrumentation with everyone using pedals or some kind of electronics. I’m also thinking of writing a large ensemble record as a possible further expansion of my two main bands. We’ll see about that one. I also have a new band that I’m wanting to start that focuses on electro-acoustic music and is influenced by a lot of post-rock, post-punk stuff from the UK in the late 80s.
Trio Tour (Nov 7-9)
Speaking of performances, you can catch my trio, with Nicholas Bracewell on drums, and Jodi Proznick on bass, on Saturday October 12 at La Fabrique St George from 2-5PM. This will be our warm up gig for a small tour that we will be going on from November 7 - 9th. We will be playing music from my Cellar Live Record Within the Stream, some standards, and some new compositions.
Our tour consists of:
Nov 7 - Noah Franche-Nolan Trio at Buckingjam Palace (Calgary)
Nov 8 - Noah Franche-Nolan Trio at The Sterndale Bennet Theatre (Lethbridge)
Nov 9 - Noah Franche-Nolan Trio atThe Basement (Saskatoon)
If you are in any of those cities on those respective days, please consider joining us. And if you know anybody who lives in these cities and would be interested in our music, please share this information with them.
Reminder: Haxan Live Score (Oct 24)
(An image from Benjamin Christensen’s Haxän (1922)
Finally, if you are interested in my Haxan Live score performance at the Cinematheque with Juno-nominated violinist Meredith Bates, which I discussed in my last post, please feel free to check out the ticket booking website.
That’s all for now! Thank you for reading this newsletter and for your continued support and interest in my work. I always love hearing from you all, so please feel free to reach out for whatever reason.
Noah