
It might be said that natural karma played a role in transporting the image of Katie Noonan as one of the two brother-and-sister lead singers of the ARIA-award winning group, george. After scoring huge success with their 2002 debut album Polyserena, and its wonderful 2004 follow up, Unity, george took a break from their burgeoning career to pursue an assortment of personal musical projects. Katie release a jazz album with her new band, Elixir, a classical album with her mother and a solo album that reached number 6 on the ARIA chart. After signing to Sony BMG, Katie decided to record a Beatles inspired album with some of the world’s best Jazz musicians in New York with the result being Blackbird - The Music of Lennon & McCartney which was released on November 1st. Katie talked to Justin Middleton for this exclusive interview.
I asked Katie to give us an explanation of how the album formed and how she feels about it now that it has been released. “I am really proud of it. I felt like it was a wonderful chance to celebrate the great song writing diversity and beauty of Lennon and McCartney and to give it a different perspective, combining it with the freedom of jazz improvisation. The idea popped into my head about a year ago, I was living in Sydney and I was asked to put together a proposal for a fellowship. I just thought ‘what can I do to combine my two main loves of pop and jazz’ and the perfect pop is The Beatles. They are concise and very precise and perfectly structured music with fantastic melody, lyrics and chordal movement. So that kind of structure of pop I believed would mix well with my in-the-moment spontaneity love of jazz.”
“So then I thought Joe Lovano (Grammy award winning saxophonist) would be perfect to work with and he suggested this absolute dream band to work with and I honestly thought it would never happen. Even to work with Joe Lovano was a dream come true but to end up having Sam Keevers, Joe Ferla (Grammy award winning engineer), Ron Carter (Grammy award winning double-bass player w’ Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Cannonball Adderley, Dexter Gordon, Wayne Shorter), Lewis Nash (played w’ Diana Krall, Betty Carter, Branford Marsalis), John Scofield (played w’ Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock) was unbelievable. I didn’t realise how stressed I was until I finished the rehearsal and felt this enormous and very heavy weight lifted from my shoulders because a) they were nice people and we got on well and b) the group was right.”
With such a world class band and a very expensive studio, I asked Katie how smooth the actual recording sessions were. “We made the record in two days, pretty much a day and a half. The first day with John Scofield we did 8 tracks from 12 to 8pm and that was with a lunch break! It was relaxed. It was intense but relaxed at the same time. Everything was a first take except for 3 songs and I have never had that before. We were originally going to do 14 songs for the record and then we got through them so quickly that we were also able to add Michelle. At first I thought Michelle and If I Fell were too similar and then I had this great experience walking through Central Park. I was asking Sam Keevers if he thought we should do Michelle or If I Fell and just as we turned the corner there were 20 guys all singing at the top of their voices ‘If I fell in love with you’ and standing around this Imagine monolith thing in Strawberry Fields. I didn’t even realise we were there and we just accidentally walked right through it. So we cut Michelle and then when we got through everything so quickly we thought let’s just do it. And it ended up sounding great.”
“Early on I did limit all the songs to Lennon and McCartney and that was just a self imposed rule because there are so many good Beatles songs I had to cut the list somehow. I love George Harrison but his style is really quite different so to stick to continuity I’d stick with Lennon and McCartney. And it is pretty McCartney heavy too but I just picked the tunes that felt right and lyrically and melodically inspired me. The noticeable omission is Sgt Peppers, there’s nothing from that record and I started from Hard Days Night which was their first all original record” Katie explained when I asked how she chose the final songs that ended up on the album.
With a bunch of album launch shows set for December I asked Katie if she was excited about playing these songs live and also why there wasn’t a Perth show planned. “The studio at the Opera House is one of my favourite rooms and hopefully we are going to do a live filming too so we can do a DVD thing. My Australian band is fantastic, I really love them and am very proud of them. There aren’t any album launch shows planned in Perth at the moment but I am really trying to change that. It’s been difficult with venues and the time of year but we are going to try and play in Perth. Otherwise I will be back in March, early April to do a series of shows with WAAPA doing this material. I will be doing some teaching there for about a week and doing some shows with the students. I don’t do a lot of stuff like this but it’s really fun to do.”
Album Launch Dates:
Tue 9th & Wed 10th December - The Studio, Sydney Opera House NSW
Thur 11th December - Prince Of Wales Hotel, St Kilda VIC
Fri 12th December - Adelaide Festival Theatre, SA
Fri 19th & Sat 20th December - Cremorne Theatre, QPAC QLD
Sun 21st December - Bangalow A and I Hall, NSW
Blackbird - The Music of Lennon & McCartney is out now. For more info visit www.katienoonan.com