Living together in one song: The symbiotic sweetness and brutality of Sonny Sharrock's 'Guitar'

"Remember that your improvisation must have feeling. It must swing and it must have beauty, be it the fragile beauty of a snowflake or the terrible beauty of an erupting volcano." —Sonny Sharrock

"In the last few years, 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. I remember seeing John Coltrane standing there, his saxophone screaming; hearing the Flamingos sing at the Apollo. All that pretty music! I hope I'm as greedy as those musicians were. I want the sweetness and the brutality, and I want to go to the very end of each of those feelings. ... I want it all!" —Sonny Sharrock, 1991

Sonny Sharrock's Guitar, my favorite album by my favorite guitarist, is now on Bandcamp, in a newly remastered edition courtesy of its producer — and Sharrock's frequent collaborator — Bill Laswell. (I spoke with Laswell about Last Exit and Sharrock in general during our 2011 interview.) I love Black Woman and, of course, the masterful Ask the Ages (which Laswell also remastered and reissued a couple years back, though I'm not sure that edition is available digitally), but ever since I first heard Guitar in the early 2000s, I've thought of this 1986 release as the ultimate Sharrock statement, the final word on his doctrine of "sweetness and brutality."

There are several different types of pieces on the record, but the most prevalent follow a simple structure, where Sharrock sets up a cleaned-tone simple melody or chord structure on one track and then solos over it on another track with that classic grimy distortion of his. I could be mistaken, but I don't think Sharrock ever played shows like this, i.e., using live looping or somesuch; I believe this was entirely a multitracked studio creation. But it's a shame he never went further with the concept, at least in a documented setting, because it seems to capture the absolute essence of his concept.

I'm listening to "Princess and the Magician" right now, the first section of the four-part "Princess Sonata" suite that concludes the album. The vamp Sharrock sets up at the outset has a bright, hopeful quality. The lead-guitar "voice" enters quickly, feeling out the territory, and then entering into this kind of cyclonic dance, gradually picking up momentum and grit. There are moments when his adornment of the melody starts to resemble outright defacement, and it's obvious from the many stories of him leaving audiences aghast when playing Herbie Mann and others that many saw him purely as a chaos agent. But to me, the sweetness and the brutality of this music are entirely symbiotic; it's almost as though for Sharrock, there was no greater expression of his love for sublime melody than to slather it with aural exhaust, a brittle, snarling tangle of sound-mucus.


Last Exit was undoubtedly a powerful statement in its own right, but to me, the reason Guitar is so essential is because of this central dance of song and its opposite, the most tender, peaceful lullaby and the rawest, most unhinged noise. This dichotomy was obviously a central feature of Sharrock's idol John Coltrane's art as well — he also loved to set up a haunting melody and then systematically blow it to bits. But I'm not sure that practice, that perverse and revelatory blur of clashing emotional colors, has ever been captured on record in such a distilled and concise way. (That's another strength of Guitar — it is not a long record, and the pieces themselves hover around the four- or five-minute mark; there is "free jazz" in this music but it does not sprawl; it is fundamentally an album of songs.)

Other tracks take different approaches: the bluesy "Black Bottom" piles on multiple layers, including a track of this weird sort of warped, unsettled distortion, like a river of sludge flowing slowly underneath the rest of the song, and, by the end, a second lead voice; "Kula-Mae" is the album's outright rocker, which after a brief overture, turns into a swaggering shuffle that, thanks to Sharrock's engulfing fire-bath lead, sounds like a bar band playing in hell; "Devils Doll Baby," also featuring that sludgy textural effect in the background, is a more static sound-object, a contemplation of a few evocative licks that braids the noise and the melody together so tightly that they become a single, writhing mass; "Like Voices of Sleeping Birds" (another part of the "Princess Sonata") features Sharrock using his slide to achieve this kind of mind-warping sonic wobble, a lead voice that lurches drunkenly across the stage of the sound in a kind of absurdist contrast to the tranquil chord sequence; and of course "Blind Willie," one of Sharrock's anthems, first presented in acoustic form on Black Woman and here as a kind of poetic, rumbling electro-psalm, contrasting bagpipe-like bursts of melody (Sharrock uses an odd, synth-like effect here that doesn't appear elsewhere on the album) with swampy, deliberate soloing.

Overall, the record is so insanely pleasurable and engaging that in revisiting it, I catch myself wondering why all music can't organize itself by such simple logic, i.e., you set out a very basic framework (in this case, the struggle between noise and melody) and explore its infinite variations. But few musicians have such a stark kind of conviction about what they do. It's hard not to think about Sonny without thinking about what could have been; he released another classic, Ask the Ages, in '91, seemingly to great acclaim, and, according to some sources, was on the verge of signing a major-label deal when he died of a heart attack in '94 at age 53. But I'll always be thankful that the Sonny Sharrock Doctrine was captured so aptly, so lovingly, with such shattering clarity as it was on Guitar. Everything he stood for is on this record, and as far as the feeling of music is concerned, I regard essentially as a religious text. Dive in, again or for the first time, and go with Sonny to the very end.

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*Check out Bill Laswell's Bandcamp page for more Sonny, including a newly remastered version of the very fine full-band album Seize the Rainbow and various Last Exit recordings. And head on over to the Trost label page for a Sharrock / Peter Brötzmann live duo album that's a fascinating complement to their work together in Last Exit.

*Do not miss this outstanding 2016 Sharrock feature at Premier Guitar, in which Ted Drozdowski tells the complete Sharrock story in as great of detail as I've ever read, with help from Sharrock's daughter, admirers such as Carlos Santana (who memorably states that "if you want to get a tone like Sonny Sharrock ... you have to be really willing to die"), Henry Kaiser and others. There's also a nice selection of live videos at the end.

*The quote about the snowflake and the volcano comes from this stunningly eloquent as-told-to Sharrock treatise on what it means to improvise. They should pass this out on the first day of classes at every music school in the world.

*Margaret Davis's "Sweet Butterfingers" tribute compilation, which, in its original paper zine form was invaluable to me when I was first getting into Sonny's music, is online in full, including archived interviews, tributes, obits and a discography.

 *I talked to Melvin Gibbs about Sonny when I interviewed him in 2011.

Goodbye, Ronald Shannon Jackson: drummer/sorcerer

Photograph: Dani Alvarez Cañellas

Like Paul Motian, he was a drummer who became a genre. As Motian did, he established himself as a sideman to heavy players, but it was only when his pen and his bandleading instincts came into play that he truly found himself. There's clearly a thread running from Ornette Coleman's Prime Time to the Decoding Society, the band Ronald Shannon Jackson led in one form or another from 1979 up until his death yesterday at the age of 73: the sour harmonies, the ragged rubato theme statements, the sense of funk being regarded in a funhouse mirror.

But Jackson took this concept far further than Ornette ever did. I'm listening to the title track of 1981's Street Priest right now, and its weirdness is intoxicating. This is a dance band from Mars. Jackson's patented Little Drummer Boy march pattern—rushed, tense, almost antic—giving way to a theme statement that would sound exuberant if it didn't sound like it was coming off the rails, like half the band was meandering off, each player exploring his own orbit. Electric basses thrumming, Vernon Reid unspooling merciless sci-fi shred, the saxophones not squawking in that manly free-jazz way but zipping and snaking around in the upper registers. It's cacophonous but it's also whimsical, bordering on cartoonish. (For a similar sensation, see also: the Lounge Lizards.) And it's unrepentantly of its time.

I think Shannon was looking for a new kind of hip that he couldn't find elsewhere. The results were different, much more knowingly engaged with the language of free jazz, than Miles's electric experiments. (And, it must also be said that while Miles never seemed to have much time for composition, using thematic material as a mere springboard, Shannon was a true writer, a lover of themes and arrangement, a romantic with the pen.) But there's a similar sense of a bandleader wanting to tear down the walls separating art music, popular music, folk music—to cram radical ideas into a format you could wiggle around to, to square the esoteric with the earthy. The same principle is at work in Last Exit, a band to which Shannon contributed the essential soil, the backbone of the blues.

Early last year, I went through a serious RSJ obsession, which had grown out of a specific obsession with the album Power Tools (a favorite of RSJ expert Steve Smith), a fascinating collaboration with guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Melvin Gibbs, the latter a Decoding Society mainstay. I haven't thought about RSJ or the Decoding Society much since that time, and I think that's fitting, in a way. Again, as with Motian, Jackson is an acquired taste. As drummers, the two share a certain stubbornness of aesthetic: if Motian wanted to indulge in uncomfortable sparseness or obtuse abstraction, he'd do it; if Shannon wanted to play his borderline-cornball see-saw march-funk patterns, that was what was gonna happen. But, almost as a reward for our patience, each drummer gave us an entire world of music, only obliquely related to their formative work or various outside collaborations, a brand of sorcery that could only be experienced when Motian or Shannon, respectively, was the one in charge, exerting a not-always-traceable but ever-palpable influence. (Theirs were presences that altered the physical properties of the spaces and settings in which they played.) This parallel went right down to the fascination with multiple guitars/basses, and the wizardly use of language: "Look to the Black Wall," "Owl of Cranston," "Fantasm," "Yahllah"; "Sperm Walk," "Boiling Cabbage," "Aged Pain," "Green Coronas." There's a sense in each of wanting to levitate above the stultifying normalcy that can creep into jazz, as it becomes more and more a known quantity, to reinject some of the mystery (in Motian's case) and the vibrant lunacy (in Jackson's).

I never got to see Jackson play live. I sent a few interview requests to the e-mail provided on his website and didn't hear back. But those are selfish regrets. Ronald Shannon Jackson left an enormous body of work, enough to relish and puzzle over for many lifetimes. What I really wish is that someone would undertake a Complete Decoding Society box set; too many brilliant records under RSJ's leadership are still too hard to find. No online database will get you where you need to go, RSJ-wise, but below are a few recommendations.

"Ashes," from Red Warrior (1990):


"Gossip," from Barbeque Dog (1983):


"Time Table," from Music Revelation Ensemble's No Wave (1980):



For the record, my favorite Last Exit album is Köln, which is available on Spotify. In terms of recent RSJ, there isn't much to choose from, but Wadada Leo Smith's Tabligh is outstanding. And here's some tantalizing footage from what I believe was the last RSJ live appearance, last summer in Texas. (Some valuable context here.) Drumming-wise, he sounds as good—i.e., as much a steward of the music in its delicate entirety, not just of rhythm—as I've ever heard him:


P.S. There's some relevant RSJ talk in my Heavy Metal Be-Bop interviews with Melvin Gibbs and Gentry Densley.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #6: Bill Laswell

I'm happy to report that Heavy Metal Be-Bop, my jazz/metal interview series, has returned from a little hiatus. The sixth installment, a Q&A with Bill Laswell, is live in abridged form at Invisible Oranges (metal is the focus here, of course) and in a greatly lengthened director's cut at the series's online home, heavymetalbebop.com. (HMB #7 is already in the can, though no promises re: how soon I'll be able to post it.)

As I mention in the intro to the Q&A, which you'll find at the links above, it's hard to discuss the jazz/metal connection without bringing up Bill Laswell; along with John Zorn, he's an elephant in the room. You'll find some Laswell talk—specifically, comments on Last Exit, the polarizing ’80s improv quartet he worked in with Peter Brötzmann, Sonny Sharrock and Ronald Shannon Jackson—in two prior HMB installments; check out Melvin Gibbs's thoughts here and Craig Taborn's here.

I'm not sure when I first heard of Bill Laswell. I remember that my teenage interest in Mick Harris's idiosyncratic dub-metal project Scorn (I still love the Evanescence LP) led me to the Laswell/Harris collaboration Equations of Eternity, and that a review in the sadly departed metal rag Rip tipped me off to Painkiller, Harris and Laswell's avant-grindcore trio with John Zorn.

As I got more into both jazz and metal though, I developed something of a distaste for Laswell. I remember being immensely excited when I first learned of the existence of 1997's The Last Wave, a trio record with Laswell, Derek Bailey and Tony Williams (!) under the collective name Arcana, and of Last Exit itself. Being a Bailey and Williams nut, as well as a Sharrock obsessive, it seemed that I couldn't go wrong with this material (not to mention Material, a Laswell project that featured guest turns from Sharrock and a bunch of other free-jazz heroes set against a backdrop of off-puttingly synthetic—for me, at least—’80s art-dance). But in the case of The Last Wave, the strange, boomy production, and in the case of Last Exit, a funk-oriented bass presence that struck me as a sore thumb, kept me on the outside. Records like these were classic examples of "On paper, this looks tailor-made for me, but I just can't get with it in the flesh."

Over time, though, I realized that I couldn't stay away. I wasn't going to let my aesthetic quibbles keep me from savoring some of Tony Williams's final recordings (the drummer died during the making of the second Arcana record, Arc of the Testimony), or an extended series of exchanges between musical heroes of mine such as Brötzmann and Sharrock. The more I sat with the Laswell discography (or at least the wings of it that intrigued me most), the more it impressed me. What I realized was that, like John Zorn, another artist whose own work I have mixed feelings about but whose curatorial/community-forging instincts I admire greatly, Laswell's greatest achievement has been his bridge-building, his willingness to forge connections between artists who never would've found each other (note Herbie Hancock and Akira Sakata's names on that Last Exit LP jacket above), or at least probably wouldn't have thought to document their meeting on record: Bailey and Williams, say, or Keiji Haino and Rashied Ali (who appeared with Laswell in a collective called Purple Trap), or Sharrock, Brötzmann and Shannon Jackson, who seem like soulmates after the fact but who, to my knowledge, hadn't played together before Laswell convened them. The Praxis project is another example; I'm not in love with the later material (oriented around Buckethead and Brain), but it warms my heart to read the personnel list for 1993's Sacrifist, which includes Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell alongside the dudes from Blind Idiot God. Laswell's work as an intergenre unifier is less well-documented than Zorn's (in founding Tzadik, Zorn created an invaluable umbrella entity that Laswell never managed to maintain for an extended period), but it's equally undeniable. I'm thrilled that these records exist.

And to branch out briefly into Laswell's work as a producer, the musical world owes him a great debt for helping to resurrect the career of Sonny Sharrock. Guitar and Ask the Ages are among my most treasured records, period, the two best presentations of Sharrock's heartrending magic. (Seize the Rainbow, a Laswell co-production, is an idiosyncratic keeper as well.)

Part of the fun of the Heavy Metal Be-Bop series has been interrogating some of my old aesthetic prejudices. To ignore Laswell outright would a major self-disservice. Just as I don't love all of his records, I don't agree with everything he has to say in the conversation linked above (for one, his estimation of Dave Lombardo's limited musical scope seemed overly dismissive, and even disrespectful), but I'm grateful to have had the chance to sit down with him and discuss this strange musical nexus. Tony Williams, whom Laswell knew well and worked with often, acted as a fulcrum for the conversation, and I think we ventured into a fair amount of underexplored territory re: Williams's ambitions and aesthetic goals as a rock-oriented player.

I hope you enjoy the interview. I'd like to sincerely thank Mr. Laswell for taking the time to meet with me.

Various and sundry: STATS / Mastodon / Last Exit

A few disparate musical topics to blab about this balmy Sunday evening...













STATS (above, photo by Peter Kleeman) is up and running again after a month-or-so hiatus. Very happy to be rocking in this manner once more. In two weeks' time, on March 23, we will perform as part of the hallowed Precious Metal series at Lit Lounge. Come one and all. More spring shows are in the works and new recordings are coming soon.

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I have heard the new Mastodon album, Crack the Skye, which officially appears 3/24. (It's already up for grabs in the file-sharing netherverse, but--strangely--sans the tour de force 13:00 album closer, "The Last Baron.") In fact, I've heard it like ten times. I'm utterly addicted to it. Though my reaction is extremely positive, I'm just a tad hesitant re: raving about it at this early stage simply because I remember having the exact same "Holy shit!" initial opinion of 2006's Blood Mountain. But after a few weeks, I remember feeling like I'd exhausted that album and that its appeal was distinctly ephemeral. Amid all the Crack the Skye buzz, though, I've been coming back to Blood Mountain (and Leviathan as well) and feeling pretty well-sated.

Anyway, re: Crack the Skye, a lot of the early press has cried, "Prog!" and I'm not going to disagree there. The album is one huge, epic mood piece, inviting all the usual BIG adjectives like "sprawling" and such. There's a wide array of dynamics, a smattering of Moog-ish keyboards and a continuation of Blood Mountain's heavy reliance on *sung*--i.e., as opposed to shrieked, bellowed or roared, as on Remission--vocals. The hooks on this record are simply monstrous. Nearly every song has at least one moment of grand-slam catchiness (behold "Divinations" and its solid-gold chorus here) and the singing sounds a good deal more natural this time around. It's very much a record of unabashed beauty, yet when the heaviness comes, it's massive and furious.

It's pretty safe to say at this point that Mastodon is a band for the ages. They may not be Yes and they may not be vintage Metallica, but at their best, they do provide some magical combination of the pleasures of both prog and epic technical metal. (Crack the Skye probably leans more toward the former pole.) They are pretty much the cream of Big (i.e., major-label) Rock these days, and I can't imagine a time when I wouldn't be extremely excited to hear a new Mastodon disc. I just hope I feel as psyched about Crack the Skye at the end of the year as I do now. That's all I'll say for now, but watch this space for more Mastodon coverage soon.

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Before and between my Crack the Skye intake, I have been listening exclusively to Last Exit. Throughout my listening life, there are always a ton of bands, albums, artists, periods, genres, etc. that I know at some point I'll have to check out but that I just haven't quite gotten around to. I tend to mentally refer to such a scenario as having a date with an artist.

I've had a date with Last Exit for many years. It's not that I've never heard them before. Far from it; I've had plenty exposure to them ever since a co-worker handed me a cassette dub of Headfirst into the Flames one summer during college. But I've never before really wholeheartedly embraced them like I have over the past few weeks. In many ways, I'd always considered Last Exit a dream band, boasting as it did the twin towers of guitarist Sonny Sharrock and saxist Peter Brötzmann (the latter of whom I touched on a few weeks back). But it also boasted a player who for me has long been a stumbling block, namely bassist Bill Laswell.

I could write volumes on my wariness re: a fair amount of what is often termed downtown music and especially re: two of its signature artists, John Zorn and Laswell, but I'm not in the mood to rant (nor, to be fair, have I really put in the extensive listening that would be necessary to back up my lukewarm appraisal of each man's work). I will say, though, Laswell's funk- and dub-infused improv work--not to mention his production aesthetics, e.g., on this quizzical recording--has often struck me as heavily cheesy and dated.

But after my recent Brötzmann binge, I knew that I had to reckon with Last Exit in a serious way. This recent spate of listening--which included samplings from the self-titled release, the aforementioned Headfirst, The Noise of Trouble (with a very yet awesome Herbie Hancock cameo) and the hit-and-miss yet nevertheless fascinating studio disc, Iron Path--was the first time I really felt like I was able to appreciate the band as a totality, to hear it without wishing I was hearing Sharrock and Brötzmann with a more genuinely brutal--and less hokey--rhythm section.

And whatever anyone wants to say, however violent an ensemble Last Exit was, it could also be an extremely hokey one. Laswell and Ronald Shannon Jackson often defaulted to these sproingy, two-beat, almost rockabilly-like rhythms that sounded more goofy than menacing, all but negating the savageness of what was going on up front. But again, this time around, I was trying to hear more openly, less judgmentally, and I found myself embracing these more lighthearted--and even, at times, silly--aspects of the band. Sure there's part of me that wishes they were just balls-out all the time, but there's a really special sort of quirkiness to what Laswell and Shannon do in the band that adds a satisfying variety to the improvisations.

I guess if I could sum up what I'm saying it's that I stopped viewing Last Exit as a flawed dream band and started hearing them for what they were, which is very much a product of their time. Along with the transcendent rawness of their music, there's also a kind of '80s cheese thrown into the mix, a flashy, synthetic glitz that seems to creep into almost anything Laswell touches. But just as I've come to terms with the soupy overproduction of Laswell-helmed Sharrock discs like Highlife, I'm starting to dig and accept how that aesthetic plays into Last Exit as well. Don't get me wrong: L.E. never came anywhere near the bombastic lushness of Highlife, but there's definitely an element of grandstanding, fun-loving cheese about what they do, not to mention an element of perverse playfulness, evidenced--to name two aspects--in the band's cartoonishly macho song titles ("My Balls/Your Chin," anyone?) and Shannon's cryptic avant-blues vocal outbursts.

Nowhere is *all* of this more apparent than the band's killer Frankfurt gig from '86, which is viewable in several forms on YouTube (though, sadly, no longer in the brief version so aptly tagged by Weasel Walter with the phrase "mountains of cocaine"). Note the insanely kinetic, Bon Jovi-esque camera work, which only enhances the over-the-top-ness of the music:

[Note: These two vids depict the same gig, though I believe there's little or no overlap between them. Don't hold me to that, but either way, they're in no way identical and both well worth a peep.]





The whole gamut of the band is here in these clips. First one leads off with that inimitable free-time skronk they patented, with Laswell thrumming away and Shannon skittering behind him, both expressing nervous momentum rather than any metric structure, and Sharrock and Brötzmann just teeing off on top. Then comes a horrifically brilliant Brötz solo feature, where he sounds more like a fuming dragon than a sax player. And then comes Shannon caterwauling away on some free-soul scat madness. Second clip starts off with the "mountains of cocaine" cataclysm itself, then finds its way into a wacky ride-'em cowboy stomp before kicking into some of the most disgusting death-blues imaginable. The close-ups of Sonny around 4:00 are simply priceless, and when he pulls out the slide around 4:50, what was already a puke-inducing display of badass electric rawness turns into something molten. It's thrilling and monumental. From there things descend into horseplay--Laswell's manhandling of the bass seems stilted to me--but the spell never breaks. And that's what's so special about Last Exit: The quartet's project was all about mingling the sublime with the wanky, the profound with the vulgar. They weren't what I had originally idealized them as being--namely the most uniformly fearsome band of all time--but they were brash and awesome and hilarious and staunchly unboring. Hail Last Exit (even Bill Laswell!) and damn, does all this make me wish I'd gotten a chance to see Sonny Sharrock live before he died.

PS: In my YouTube trawlings, I turned up several more excellent related vids, including two (1, 2) bootleg recordings from a 1988 L.E. gig, the first of which begins with a jaw-dropping unaccompanied stand by Sharrock. And for the truly brave, here's Carlos Santana covering Sharrock's classic "Dick Dogs" (WTF, I know). And lastly, for the die-hard Sharrock heads, behold the man gigging with his unlikeliest collaborator, flutist Herbie Mann. This one is just a glorious enigma if there ever was one: A happy, sprightly groove-jazz vibe and then Sharrock comes and just capsizes the whole thing with his frenetic panther runs. I'd heard this juxtaposition on record, e.g. Live at the Whiskey A Go Go, but viewing it is even more disconcerting.

PPS: And finally, an appropriately irreverent Last Exit interview.