Sonny Sharrock Obit
coates
the Sharrock obit, and instead it was done by Pareles, the usual
pop/rock/other writer for the NYT? And that it came several days after
the news of his death was public? And that Rodney's obit was by Watrous
and appeared the day after his death?
--
john coates For Human beauty knows it not: nor can Mercy find it!
new york city
Glenn Lea
Anybody notice that Watrous, the usual jazz writer for the NYT, didn't do
the Sharrock obit, and instead it was done by Pareles, the usual
pop/rock/other writer for the NYT? And that it came several days after
the news of his death was public? And that Rodney's obit was by Watrous
and appeared the day after his death?
Makes sense. Watrous probably didn't consider him to be jazz and did
nothing. It took Pareles a day or two to notice the lack of coverage,
put his article together and get his editor to run it. At least it
ran. The Boston Globe article didn't appear until today, a week after
his death. But then, they only do jazz articles on Fridays.
Personally, I'd rather read an obit by someone who appreciates the
artist. Consider what Watrous might have written.
A Village Voice profile of Sharrock a couple of years ago was titled
"This Is Not Jazz". The title came from a story Sharrock told about a
concert at which someone ran up to the stage and pounded on it with
his fist repeatedly shouting "This Is Not Jazz! This Is Not Jazz!...".
He thought it was a gas.
--
Glenn Lea
Ronald F. Roberts
that was printed in the New York Times on Tuesday, May 31, 1994:
****************************************************************
THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIES TUESDAY, MAY 31, 1994
Sonny Sharrock, 53, Guitarist In Avant-Garde and Free Jazz
By Jon Pareles
Sonny Sharrock, a major figure in free-jazz guitar,
died on Thursday [May 26] at his home in Ossining, N.Y. He was 53.
The cause was a heart attack, said his manager, Mary
McGuire.
Mr. Sharrock was a pioneering guitarist in the free-jazz
movement of the late 1960's. His guitar solos streaked and
clanged, using blistering speed and raw noise to create music
that had both the openness of jazz and the power of rock.
He performed with many important musicians in both the
jazz avant-garde of the 1960's and the downtown New York
improvisation scene of the 1980's, and he has been cited as an
influence by guitarists from Carlos Santana to Elliot Sharp.
First Love: the Saxophone
Mr. Sharrock was born in Ossining and sang in a doo-woop
group as a teen-ager. He decided to become a jazz musician
after hearing Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" in the late 1950's.
Because he had asthma, he ruled out playing his favorite
instrument, the saxophone, and instead took up the guitar in 1960.
His idols were saxophonists, however, and he worked to transfer
the expressiveness of improvisers like John Coltrane, Ornette
Coleman and Albert Ayler to his guitar. He developed a personal
vocabulary of overdriven amplifiers, high-speed tremolos and
percussive picking on muffled strings. Like Ayler, he often built
solos atop resonant melodies based on folk and blues.
Mr. Sharrock moved to New York City in 1965 and worked as a
sideman with musicians including Pharoah Sanders, Cannonball Adderley
and Miles Davis. In 1966, he recorded the influential album "Tauhid"
with Mr. Sanders, and he went on to record with Wayne Shorter and Don
Cherry; he appears, uncredited, on "Yesternow," from Miles Davis's
1970 album "A Tribute to Jack Johnson."
"The Terror and the Beauty"
From 1967 to 1974, he worked regularly with a group led by
the flutist Herbie Mann, which also included the singer Linda Sharrock,
who was then his wife. In the mid-1970's, the Sharrocks started their
own group, Sharrock. They were divorced in 1978.
In 1980, Mr. Sharrock began working with the producer Bill
Laswell, who introduced him to New York's experimental downtown
improvisers. He appears on Material's 1982 album "Memory Serves,"
produced by Mr. Laswell, who also produced Mr. Sharrock's albums
"Guitar" and "Seize the Rainbow." Mr. Sharrock was a member of the
high-powered improvising group Last Exit with Mr. Laswell on bass,
Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums and Peter Brotzmann on saxophone.
He also led his own groups, which performed regularly at jazz
and rock clubs, and he recorded albums in the United States and Europe.
"In the last few years," he told an interviewer in 1991, "I've been
trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in
one song. I know it's possible."
Mr. Sharrock is survived by his wife, Nettie, and his daughter,
Jasmyn, both of Ossining.
***********************************************************************
An additional note for those of you not familiar with the NYC metropolitan
area: Ossining, N.Y. is a town approximately 30 miles north of New York
City.
From what I am aware of, I believe Jon Pareles did a good job of
summarizing some essential aspects of Sonny Sharrock, guitarist, in this
obituary.
Do any of you out there, who listened to rebroadcast, a few days ago,
of a Sonny Sharrock interview on NPR's (National Public Radio's) Fresh
Air program have any comments or any additional points?
--
Ron Roberts "I wish [bebop] had been given a name more
r...@pruxp.pr.att.com in keeping with the seriousness of purpose."
- Earl Bud Powell
Walter Davis
r...@pruxp.pr.att.com (Ronald F. Roberts) writes:
>
>Do any of you out there, who listened to rebroadcast, a few days ago,
>of a Sonny Sharrock interview on NPR's (National Public Radio's) Fresh
>Air program have any comments or any additional points?
>--
joyful (I guess for some reason not what I expected). The
line that I remember dealt with the fact that he did start
out with the sax and modelled his playing after saxophonists.
The host asked him something like whether he regretted not
being a saxophonist and he responded, "I am a saxophonist"
- and noted that Pharoah Sanders always cracked up at that too.
I'm not sure what it is about the guitar and sax, but it
seems like many guitarists I've liked at different points
in my life have said that they try to play like the
sax, including Mark Knopfler, Richard Thompson and now
Sharrock. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
-walt
Walter Davis WALTER...@UNC.EDU
Department of Sociology WDA...@UNCVM1.OIT.UNC.EDU
Institute for Research in Social Science
UNC - Chapel Hill (take your pick)
Mark Sullivan
WDA...@uncvm1.oit.unc.edu (Walter Davis) writes:
>I'm not sure what it is about the guitar and sax, but it
>seems like many guitarists I've liked at different points
>in my life have said that they try to play like the
>sax, including Mark Knopfler, Richard Thompson and now
>Sharrock. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
>
(Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Ornette Coleman). There are several reasons
for it: probably the main one is the huge impact that saxophonists have
had on jazz generally. They account for a huge amount of the traffic
on RMBN because they've been such exciting soloists and such influential
composers and bandleaders. And there are some timbral similarities,
especially if you're playing the guitar with distortion and emphasizing
single-note lines. Also--and I know this will annoy some fans of
mainstream jazz guitar--for a long time jazz guitar was perceived as
a kind of non-progressive backwater. Look at Coltrane's career, and
name me a guitarist at the time playing with that kind of energy,
and whose work seemed to be constantly reinventing itself, pointing
out new directions for everyone else at the same time. That was what
made John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra so exciting: it seemed to
have the energy and intensity previously only found in music with
horns, and suggested a new, contemporary direction for improvised
music to take (which I'm willing to concede has turned out to be
a pretty fruitless path, but at least he was *trying* to do something
new).
Mark Sullivan
ali0...@unccvm.uncc.edu
Thomas Ford Brown
>seems like many guitarists I've liked at different points
>in my life have said that they try to play like the
>sax, including Mark Knopfler, Richard Thompson and now
>Sharrock. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Mark Knopfler? I always thought he sounded more like a banjo player.
Walter Davis
tomb...@cats.ucsc.edu (Thomas Ford Brown) writes:
>In article <16FC912A...@uncvm1.oit.unc.edu> WDA...@uncvm1.oit.unc.edu (Walter Davis) writes:
>>
>>I'm not sure what it is about the guitar and sax, but it
>>Sharrock. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
>
>Mark Knopfler? I always thought he sounded more like a banjo player.
>
a sax, not me. I got over that stuff long ago anyway.
Sean M O Donnell
>>>I'm not sure what it is about the guitar and sax, but it
>>>sax, including Mark Knopfler, Richard Thompson and now
>>>Sharrock. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
I would suspect that it has something to do with phrasing. If you are drawn
to the way horn players phrase, which is tied to how much air one's lungs
can produce, then you'd probably like a guitarist who favors shorter lines
also. (Recognizing that a guitarist can just ramble on if they want to.)
Sean
>>
Bill Duke
In article <2svjgf...@uwm.edu>, Sean M O Donnell (s...@csd4.csd.uwm.edu) writes:
>I would suspect that it has something to do with phrasing. If you are drawn
>to the way horn players phrase, which is tied to how much air one's lungs
>can produce, then you'd probably like a guitarist who favors shorter lines
>also. (Recognizing that a guitarist can just ramble on if they want to.)
>
>Sean
You're right. Horn players can only ramble on for as long as they
can blow. Unless they know circular breathing -- then they can
ramble indefinitely. (Who can forget Roland Kirk playing that
l-o-o-o-o-o-o-ng note. Did it every time I saw him. (Very
impressive, too. Not terribly musical, but impressive.)