It’s been widely documented that Sonny Sharrock—one of the most rousing, first-wave, free-jazz guitarists, noted for dropping gravitational force bombs and whom Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore called “a massive influencer of alternative and outsider guitar”—never really liked guitars, nor ever wanted to play one. “I despise the sound of the guitar,” he said in an interview in 1992, a couple of years before his passing on May 26, 1994, at the young age of 53. But due to his asthma condition, he had to reconsider.
The only way to sound like his tenor saxophone heroes—John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders—was to make that second choice work. So by transferring some of that rage built up from inside himself, turning his amp to 4, and applying a relentless chorded attack; manipulating feedback like Reagan did Reaganomics, it presented a distorted saxophone-like line processed through electric chaos. Not circular breathing like Coltrane.
The result? Frequncies resembling an assortment of power tools designed to rip up a four-lane highway during rush hour. That buzzsaw gritty agitation told of a new type of avant-garde Black expressionism.
Listen, if Hendrix bombarded Marshall amps with that “Spanish Castle Magic,” Sharrock’s playing was consumed with scorching atonal wrath. Burning in the sky, and below it. Then, on a dime, in the next song or stanza, he’d redirect that raving chi-energy, making that same detested guitar coo ever so sweetly like a child hum-singing their first praise song in church.
When producer Bill Laswell released a remastered and enhanced version of guitarist Sonny Sharrock’s career-defining statement, Ask The Ages—originally released in 1991, featuring Pharoah Sanders, drummer Elvin Jones, and Charnett Moffett—almost ten years ago, he told me in an interview that he saw it as an opportunity for young ears. “I see it as an offering to a new generation… Everyone knows Coltrane, but maybe they don’t know Sonny Sharrock. Here is an opportunity to connect to some of the electric music. Energy music.”
Just this past April, The Messthetics, a rugged jazz-rock trio that includes bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty—one half of the pioneering D.C. post-hardcore band Fugazi—along with the versatile guitarist and effects maestro Anthony Pirog, and the muscular, bounding sound of tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, a force unto himself, did just that. Performing as The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis, this collective honored that Sonny Sharrock album live, at the Philadelphia Ars Nova Workshop’s 25th anniversary season, on April 11th this year as a tribute to the late jazz warrior.
One of the trademarks on Ask the Ages is DNA-splitting solos from Pharoah and Sonny, meeting and passing within the chaos, especially on the first song “Promises Kept” and then receding to hymn-like reductions. That inspiration, the sphere of extremes, can be found throughout the discography of another contemporary energy music collective, Irreversible Entanglements. This combustible free-jazz outfit, made up of members from Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York, dole out the rigid, terse, and relentless rocket fumes of umbrage, with vocalist/poet Moor Mother casting out words and phrases that pile onto the weighted blankets of rhythm. Which results in something Coltrane (both John and later Alice), along with Pharoah and Sonny, pursued and embodied: Spirituality in the unknown.
It was in a bar many many years ago, late ’80s-early ’90s, in Berlin that Sonny Sharrock shared with the bold, progressive producer Laswell that for Ask The Ages—a name he was inspired to scribble on a napkin at that bar after listening to “Ask The Angels” by Sonny Stitt—he wanted to reach out and work with his old friend Pharoah. He wanted to reconnect with the music of John Coltrane. That energy, that possession, that power. He wanted to get back to that level, that quality again. Make something serious.
“That kinda stuck in my head,” Laswell reflected. “I was thinking about what Sonny was talking about. You know going back in history. He was not necessarily asking permission or seeking gratification. Just some kind of blessing from the people who came a little before him. So I wrote on this piece of napkin ‘Ask The Ages’ as I was leaving the bar. And it all came out of that little moment at the bar in Germany.”
Ask the Ages, which returned both Sanders and Sharrock to that energy music indeed, was the last album released by jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock before he died in 1994, days away from inking a major label contract, at the too-early age of 53. It carries the full spectrum of the musician’s life work within those six songs. Bill Laswell prouced the album and released it via his Axiom label, with performances from Sharrock alongside Pharoah Sanders, bassist Charnett Moffett, and drummer Elvin Jones. It’s draped in sound and spirit of rarefied black excellence. Royal sounding, kingly, 34 years later.
According to Laswell the recording took seven to eight days, which included mastering and overdubs, which at the time where not the norm when producing jazz records.
“It was a little bit more of a production” he said. “But we had a budget thanks to Chris Blackwell. Jason Corsaro engineered and mixed that record. He’s a beast of an engineer and really famous for mixing drums. He pretty much defined the ’80s with bands like the The Power Station and Robert Palmer. He created that sound. He came out of the Bob Clearmountain school. He was Bob’s assistant. But he was more of an animal and still is. His sound has more of an impact and I wanted Elvin to have that. And they got along very well.”
After all these years, listening to the record all the way through again, pushing past Pharaoh and Sonny’s fastball electrical storms, Laswell was correct. Elvin freaking Jones on drums—Coltrane’s drummer on A Love Supreme, My Favorite Things, and Ascension is the mood root here, able to push everything being showcased up front. From the vocal snarling he does as he solos on “Promises Kept,” with the bigness of sound and tiny cannon booms underneath all the sheets of intonation going on, that skronking or melodic grace coming from horn and guitar. It’s Elvin just providing that rhythm support without overshadowing, loading up numerous inner rhythm patterns. All those clicks, stomps, and rolls flowing throughout the album—no matter what type of thunder and lightning is happening up front, it’s Jones pushing the entire weather pattern, with bassist Charnett Moffett following. Engaged. Lockstep and groove.
Weather the face-melting vistas in “Promises Kept,” if you dare, or the heart-rending emotion with “Who Does She Hope to Be.” Catch the fully alive and breathing Coltrane spirit on “Little Rock,” or the squelchy, blunt force energy from the guitar on “As We Used To Sing.” Pharoah comes in after, reserved, climbing a ladder with scales on the sax, hitting the upper register, quizzical, all fluttery as Jones lays primer, thick foundations, inner meter foundation from the drums while the basslines double and triple, and the rhythm section moves to an ambient stretch before returning to the head, by way of astral traveling.
Witness the cataclysmic blues on “Many Mansions.” Another Coltrane ghost worked and walked with dirge and grit by Pharoah, and then Sharrock arrives with bluesy, fire-breathing, Hendrixian guitar solo touches, returning to the head.
With the passing of Pharoah Sanders a couple years ago, Ask The Ages now summons us to think what other great heights Sonny Sharrock would have hit with the instrument he never liked. It’s unanswerable. All we know is that his final album, his ultimate statement, is still connecting legacies.
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