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Sonny Sharrock


7/4

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Sonny is my hero, straight up. The two pillars of his recordings for me are Ask the Ages and Black Woman--the former maybe the most flawlessly epic "trad" free jazz album of the 90's, the latter one of the most jagged and brutal "free" or "guitar" albums period.

Sonny is one of the few musicians I've ever heard from whom I've liked pretty much everything (even, to a lesser degree, the very poppy Highlife). I do recall, though, Sonny somehwere putting down Paradise, and I agree with a vengeance--it runs the gamut from pap to shit, with all of ten minutes across the album of genuinely cool stuff.

Wish there was more of Sonny's early, pre-distortion, semi-hollow, walking on glass phase in circulation. There was that one Sonny/Sunny Murray duet track circulating a while ago that sounded fantastic. I'm happy, I guess, with his occasional emergence on other peoples' albums and his handful of leader dates from the late 60's.

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Herbie Mann's Song Book

Memphis Underground

Windows Open

The Inspiration I Feel

The Evolution of Man

Concerto Grosso in D Blues

Stone Flute

Live at the Whiskey A-Go-Go

Memphis Two-Step

Herbie Mann '71

Hold On, I'm Comin'

Edited by Joe Bip
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Herbie Mann's Song Book

Memphis Underground

Windows Open

The Inspiration I Feel

The Evolution of Man

Concerto Grosso in D Blues

Stone Flute

Live at the Whiskey A-Go-Go

Memphis Two-Step

Herbie Mann '71

Hold On, I'm Comin'

Thanks, I didn't realize there were that many--I was just listening to Hold On, I'm Comin' recently--Sonny Sharrock with David Newman, what a band.

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I got all the Atlantic ones on vinyl cheaply but haven't gone any further. I'm just not a huge Mann listener. Haven't listened to them recently but if memory serves, Sharrock stays pretty much in the background on a lot of the Atlantic Mann discs. I've made a habit of getting as many things as I can with Sharrock. I generally love his sound, and the only ones I have that are painful to listen to are Live in New York and Highlife, mainly because of the keyboards.

I love Linda Sharrock, too, although I haven't heard anything she's done in years.

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I love Linda Sharrock, too, although I haven't heard anything she's done in years.

Her last CD, Confessions, received the 2005 Hans Koller Award.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf9jM7biCGY has her with bassist Claude Tchamitchian and pianist Stephan Oliva, her musical partners in recent years.

Sharrock_on_stage_big.jpgLinda_Trio_rehearsing3_big.jpgLinda_Trio_rehearsing4_big.jpg

Edited by mikeweil
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I kinda like Highlife, "All My Trials" esp'ly, however wrongheaded the pop production values, keyboards particularly, may seem, he really puts his heart into it and the band grooves. Any thoughts on how much of the later albums success (guitar and Ask the Ages for example) is Laswell's doing. I saw him live around that period and it was pretty scattered...

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  • 2 months later...
  • 2 years later...

The Sharrock solos on Mann's albums, as wild as they are, are turned way down - in person, people would be heading for the exits.

Ben Ratliff: Mm-hmm. Had you ever thought that you were going to provoke such reactions, though? I mean, we were just talking about a couple of outrageous things that were written and said about you in the early days. ...Apparently on a radio show, Ira Gitler made the comment that he wanted "to put Sonny in a bathtub with his amplifier," which is a bit extreme. [sonny laughing] And we were reading through a couple of old reviews in "down beat" that, while having, you know, sort of quite a bit of respect for you in giving one of your albums three and a half stars, the reviewer proceeded to say something about the fact that he would rather walk out on your solos than stay... I mean, it's hard for me to believe that, you know, people would have that reaction.

Sonny Sharrock: Yeah, well, you know, it's not hard for me because I was there and I used to see it. It didn't bother me, it didn't bother me, and I was always amazed it didn't bother Herbie. He dug what I was doing, he liked it being in the band, he never once in all those years told me to play any differently than I do, not that I could or would, but, you know, it never came up.

http://www.sonnysharrock.com/info.asp?pgs=wkcrinterview

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  • 8 years later...

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