There is not much footage of Sonny Sharrock, but
what exists is revealing. If you go to Youtube and watch Sonny “Live at The
Knitting Factory from 1988” you get a pretty good idea what this amazing talent
was like. He appears on stage, a middle-aged, slightly portly, jovial
African-American gentleman cradling an electric guitar. His accompanists begin
a throbbing, jazzy beat and Sonny smiles and closes his eyes. He isn’t
particularly worried about playing a song, or structuring a solo. He is a bird
standing on a branch, waiting for the right triangulation of bait, breeze and
inspiration to lift him into flight. It happens and, eyes still closed, smile
switching to a grimace of concentration, he takes off. Sonny Sharrock’s solos
are not technical marvels, but rather highly emotional excursions into his
psyche. He claimed that he never really wanted to play guitar, rather that he
was a frustrated horn player chasing the elusive sound of his hero John
Coltrane. This schism is evident in his playing as he voices solos that are fat
and chordal in tone, but leap into wild single-note improvisational runs, much
as Coltrane did, especially in his final period. Sonny had a long history of
learning his style, starting in the 1960’s appearing on Pharoah Sanders Tauhid, and (legendarily) some
uncredited playing on Miles Davis’ guitar feast Tribute To Jack Johnson, then joining Herbie Mann’s groundbreaking
band for the latter’s strongest run of albums. He toiled in the jazz
underground in the 70’s releasing several amazing, avant-garde records, but
seemingly disappeared until bassist Bill Laswell tracked him down and mentored
him out of obscurity and into the spotlight where his reputation as one of the
most thrilling and unique voices in jazz increased until his untimely death
from heart failure in 1994.
Sharrock’s sound and catalog are not easy to get
your arms around. His early work on the Herbie Mann albums is hard to spot because
of the nature of his solos. One has to train their ear to listen for him,
because his early work tends to blend (self-consciously one would imagine) into
the overall framework of the songs. By the time of his difficult to obtain 70’s
solo work, he is fully immersed in avant-garde stylings and though those albums
contain some of his best playing, sometimes the music was too extreme for many
listeners. Once he came back in the 80’s he branched out in many directions (and
on many labels) including some heavy metal style playing with the band Machine
Gun. Like other enticing figures skirting the edges along jazz, rock,
avant-garde, and free-form, Sonny Sharrock is like a rare orchid: sightings are
seldom, but unforgettable.
This difficulty in stylistically pinning him
down is what makes 1991’s Ask The Ages the
essential way “in” to Sonny Sharrock. It is a beautiful, hypnotic, intense album
that fulfills the promise of a guitar
player who plays his guitar like Coltrane played his sax. Produced by Bill
Laswell and Sonny himself, Ask The Ages reunites
Sharrock with Pharoah Sanders and throws jazz greats Elvin Jones (another
Coltrane alumnus) on drums and Charnett Moffett on bass into the mix. The
results are completely thrilling as Sanders and Sharrock take turns soloing in
a variety of sympathetic styles. Each of the 6 songs is a universe of complex
rhythm and spectacular soloing to discover. Sanders fills the role of Coltrane
well on some numbers like “Who Does She Hope To Be” but each song finds its
center within Sonny Sharrock’s completely un-copyable style of guitar playing. Take
the final number “Once Upon A Time” where he plays beautifully melodic single
lines over his own crunchy power-chording. It is a thrilling exercise in
musical freedom. It feels set loose from the bonds of genre, geography or
financial concern as the musicians bravely explore the outside of modern music.
This is something the label Axiom specialized
in, and we can thank Bill Laswell for creating a place for Sonny Sharrock and
many other groundbreaking musicians. Although it lasted less than a decade in its
original incarnation, Axiom was one
of the great labels of the modern era, and virtually everything they released
is worth hearing.
It’s really hard to compare Sonny Sharrock to
any other musician because of his utterly singular take on soloing, and his
lack of adherence to any “school” of jazz thought. He brings to his music the
same thrilling individuality and untrained freshness that Billie Holiday,
Charlie Parker or even Keith Moon brought. The excitement of finding an artist
so in love with their instrument and the idea of making music that even their
lack of training will not stop them is one of the fundamental reasons I listen
to music. It is the promise of human individuality and meaning given flesh.
-
Paul
Epstein
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