Portrait of Sonny Sharrock in Three Colors, All Incomplete

in Desperation and Noise: Brad Nelson Staff Blogs by Brad Nelson — August 10, 2009 at 8:00 am | 0 comments

I didn’t like the instrument very much, I didn’t like the sound of the guitar.

—Sonny Sharrock, from a 1993 interview with Ed Flynn

PRELUDE.

I find it very difficult to feel much of anything anymore.

ONE.

Sonny Sharrock played guitar like some people of unfortunate dispositions fire weapons: with a sort of controlled madness, where they may aim at clouds or at buildings or at other objects distinctly unmoved by bullets, but they aim regardless, certain of their intent to undermine physics. Most of the time, these people do end up leveling horizons. And there’s a distinct sense that wherever the shots landed was where they belonged.

To clarify: Sonny Sharrock was a free jazz guitarist of violent power.

SONNY SHARROCK: “BLACK WOMAN” (FROM BLACK WOMAN)

His first two records as a bandleader, Black Woman and Monkey-Pockie-Boo, were released in 1969 and 1970, respectively. They are both very short and do not really transpire on this planet, especially Monkey-Pockie-Boo, which acts as though Black Woman adequately prepared you for the new ways of floating discovered in its malevolently bowed bass and genuinely abused guitar.

Then-wife Linda Sharrock is all over these records, trying to expel some very awful thing within her. She screams, wails, uncovers nerves you thought had numbed over.

Sonny shared credit with Linda on 1975’s Paradise, which is a very broken disco record, in which funky, marketable backbeats marry with Linda’s syllabic moans and Sonny’s guitar nightmares. It is not a record to listen to when you feel suspicious of the furniture in your room and your own hip movements.

SONNY & LINDA SHARROCK: “APOLLO” (FROM PARADISE)

After Paradise, which, according to Sharrock, “should stay a collector’s item, should never be re-released,” though it was, in 2005, for the whole world to once more stare at its essentially malformed skeleton, he took a sabbatical from recording, returning only once in 1982 to record his “French” record, Dance with Me Montana, which, according to Sharrock, is “horrible… maybe I did my worst record.”

SONNY SHARROCK BAND: “MY SONG” (FROM SEIZE THE RAINBOW)

Then came Bill Laswell and Last Exit and Guitar, which is a solo guitar record constructed entirely from meditative dreams, and Seize the Rainbow, which is hard steel, though its hard steeliness is severely limited by the same terrible drum production that neutered most popular metal of 1987.

Given my reservations about the drum production on Seize the Rainbow, I do not even wish to address Highlife.

SONNY SHARROCK: “ONCE UPON A TIME” (FROM ASK THE AGES)

His last record, Ask the Ages, features Pharaoh Sanders and Elvin Jones. Yes, it does ascend the Heaven ladder.

TWO.

Sharrock died of a heart attack at age 54. This episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast commemorated how Sharrock strangled his guitar until it resembled how glass sings upon breaking.

I first watched it at age 10. I probably wondered why so much time was dedicated to vicious noise, why all attempts at comedy were avoided or thwarted. This was ten years before I knew Last Exit and of their attempt to sonically replicate a giant wind generator into which the population of the world is thrown.

THREE.

When you listen to a genre long enough and have successfully avoided reading any of its histories, less out of laziness than a sincere desire to preserve the mystery, you start to imagine the artists at its forefront as damaged in some essential way and that this damage was instrumental in forming their sound.

The people in free jazz, for instance, seem the sort of fellows who do not answer the phone when it rings. They have already communicated their piece to the world. It exhausted them, this expelling of their souls into the thick heat and smoke and penetrating the heads of those who happened to inhabit their space (who also, it should be noted, regard their phones with understandable suspicion, they have just felt the bare innards of other humans by way of very unstable music, they were introduced to the cave and have traveled too far inward to recognize their lighted point of origin as anything but threatening, a.k.a. how do we interact with others anymore without just screaming). They are now quite wary of the veils that traditionally accompany human interaction.

This is the dream. This is not real in any sense. For all I know all arbiters of free jazz had prodigious social lives. But for me, with music, the myth is always more important than the reality. Those Folsom prisoners would have sacrificed the guards at Johnny Cash’s altar given the adequate weaponry, they were so moved by his music and how he had opened his heart for them to live inside forever.

So Sharrock, for me, is someone who broke open his skull and discovered mountains there. Who spent his career making them vibrate. Who does the same to me.

Who makes me feel.

“Don’t forget the feeling. The music is about feeling.” ….It’s gotta be about inside, you’ve gotta go in, and you have to think like Coltrane, you know, and just say, “I’m gonna blow my heart out in this horn — every night,” and that’s what music should be about. That’s what it should always be about. …. Sometimes I see players that think, and you can tell they’re thinking of the next phrase to play or the next thing to do, the next little cute trick, and that’s sad, man, you know. That’s not makin’ music; that’s puttin’ together puzzles, you know. Music should flow from you and it should be a force; it should be feeling, all feeling, man.