This is Part 2 of an ongoing series that begins here and continues here. I’d strongly recommend reading Part 1 before proceeding!
If we’re starting from a place of “All Sonny Sharrock is good Sonny Sharrock, or at the very least interesting Sonny Sharrock,” then his early recording career — which from a certain partisan viewpoint, could be looked at as a few towering peaks amid a sea of footnotes — starts to seem a hell of a lot more compelling. Maybe the trick is to view the “wild free music” side and the “kinda weird” “Comin’ Home Baby” side as yin-yang complements rather than bizarrely disparate poles. And that’s not even taking into account the wealth of fascinating early Sonny that doesn’t quite fall into either category but draws selectively on both. So here’s a guide to some of my findings on this period, written from the perspective of a superfan who just had to hear it all.
The below covers the years 1966, when Sonny debuted on record, through 1972, when he made his last widely available recording before entering a semi-dormant decade. I’ve used Tom Lord’s Jazz Discography as a reference, but I’ve also included mention of a couple sessions not listed there and likewise have not included a couple sessions listed there but that seem to have negligible or even nonexistent Sonny contributions. And I may eventually continue on through the second half of Sonny’s career, which obviously contained so much greatness, weirdness and all the rest — picking up with 1975’s Paradise and some earlier radio recordings that paved the way for it — but the end of the Mann period seemed like a sensible bookend for this particular dive. Here goes!
Pharoah Sanders, Tauhid (rec. Nov 15, 1966)
Marzette Watts, Marzette and Company (rec. Dec 8, 1966)
Byard Lancaster, It’s Not Up to Us (rec. Dec 18, 1966)
Tauhid is a rightful classic, and what an auspicious debut on record for Sonny Sharrock. He adds some wonderfully gritty sandpaper strumming to the opening of “Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt,” but the key Sonny moment here is the solo that erupts around 3:50 into “Aum,” which opens the long medley that concludes the album. (Oddly, while on the Impulse version that’s currently on streaming services, he’s buried in the mix until this point, on the Anthology Recordings reissue embedded below, he’s cranked way up all the way through — a very welcome corrective!) It’s a sputtering, squealing tangle of notes, brief but unforgettable, that forecasts his lack of interest, at least at this time, in fulfilling any kind of traditional role on his instrument. Interestingly, he drops out as Pharoah works up to his gorgeous “Venus” theme, which Sonny would carry like a musical talisman for the rest of his life, recording it on both 1990’s Highlife (a version that also featured the catchy, jubilant “Upper Egypt” theme, a sort of spiritual-jazz standard) and 1991’s Faith Moves, a duo with Nicky Skopelitis.
Multi-instrumentalist Marzette Watts’ ESP-released Marzette & Company session is a fascinating and often overlooked early free-jazz document that nicely contrasts fierce blowing with handsomely reflective ensemble themes. Unlike on Tauhid, Sharrock is audible pretty much throughout the record. On opening track “Ia,” he hurls spiky lines at the soloists and claims a riotous feature of his own around the 5:15 mark — like a turbocharged version of the “Aum” feature, it’s pure serrated provocation, more concerned with insistent rhythmic sputtering than any kind of melodic content. Really the full flowering of “the buzzsaw, the rip.” (See Part 1.) Gorgeous to behold.
His feature on “Geno,” heating up around 4:10, is sparser but just as perversely inventive and rubs beautifully with J.C. Moses’ drums and the dual basses of Henry Grimes and Juini (a.k.a. Juni) Booth. He also goes at it with Moses, Grimes and Booth starting a little after the 6:00 mark of “Backdrop for Urban Revolution,” working up to a sustained buzzing, ear-grabbing whirr around 6:45, and then later gets into a nice free dust-up with the leader on bass clarinet and Clifford Thornton on cornet. All brilliant stuff and, for my money, much more satisfying than Sonny’s fleeting contributions to Don Cherry’s more celebrated Eternal Rhythm from a couple years later.
Sonny met Philly multi-instrumentalist Byard Lancaster at Berklee, where Sonny briefly studied (he once called himself the “absolute worst guitarist” there) in 1961 and ’62. Lancaster’s debut album didn’t come out till ’68, but it was recorded in ’66, just after the Watts session. In a funny twist, a decent portion of the record, especially the tracks on which Lancaster plays flute, end up sounding not that dissimilar from Sonny’s collaborations with Herbie Mann — see a track like “Mr. A.A.,” with its jaunty, sing-song theme. There’s some nice lyrical Sonny playing behind the leader on that track and some cool textural guitar on “Last Summer,” but the real draw here for the Sonny aficionado is “John’s Children,” the first recorded Sharrock composition and an early version of “Many Mansions,” a memorable standout on his final album Ask the Ages, recorded around 25 years later. It’s hard to compete with the later, Pharoah- and Elvin Jones–equipped version, but this is an excellent slice of hard-swinging drone-doom-blues featuring the powerhouse rhythm section of bassist Jerome Hunter, a pre–Weather Report Eric Gravatt on drums and Kenny Speller on congas (perhaps a relative of Abe Speller, who drummed for Sonny in later years?). Sonny doesn’t solo, per se, but digs in nicely as Lancaster’s solo develops, adding buzzy, strummy, almost sitar-like texture in the left channel.
“Satan,” co-credited to Hunter, Lancaster and Sharrock (then credited under his birth name of Warren), is a nine-minute textural odyssey that reminds me quite a bit of what Sandy Bull was doing a few years before on a track like “Blend,” though with a more ominous bent. Real dark raga vibes on this one, especially when Sonny digs into his strumming and Hunter starts bowing furiuosly. Essential and, as the name would suggest, very, very metal!
Herbie Mann’s Song Book: Complete Bossa Nova (rec. sometime in 1967; no Lord listing)
Herbie Mann, Windows Opened (rec. Feb 18 / April 2, 1968)
Herbie Mann, Memphis Underground (rec. Aug 20-23, 1968)
Herbie Mann, Concerto Grosso in D Blues (rec. Nov 11, 1968)
Herbie Mann, Stone Flute (March 18-20, 1969)
Here we start our trip down the Mann hole. (I believe Sonny’s official debut on record with Mann was in October ’67, on sessions for the Glory of Love album, but I can’t make out any significant Sonny presence there.) The Song Book album is interesting — apparently a Mann production, featuring members of his band, but without any actual Mann playing on it. Barney Kessel plays more conventional (or maybe better to say: conventional at all!) guitar elsewhere on the album. On “Little Boat,” a guitarist that I’m pretty sure is Sonny contributes soft chording (he may have hated comping but he did it often in the Mann band) and then comes to the fore after Ayers’ solo for (if it is in fact him) one of his most lyrical early moments on record. He’s not playing “against’ the tune at all here — he sounds a bit cautious but entirely setting-appropriate, and that sort of plucky, almost flamenco-like tone of his, which really comes to the fore on a Black Woman tune like “Peanut,” is definitely present here. (Again, I’m only about 90% sure this is Sonny, but if I had to bet, I’d guess it is — would welcome any second opinions on that.)
On “Comin’ Home Baby” he gives himself away more, getting into that trademark gritty friction amid moments where he almost sounds like Chuck Berry — again, his statement here is striking but not in any way a deliberate provocation. “Summertime” features another unusually jazzy Sharrock solo, though when he gets into his patented trills and hiccups and, later, haywire slides, there’s absolutely no mistaking it’s him. Overall, a really fascinating look at Sonny as he was just finding his footing in Mann world, before he went full-on noise. Browse for yourself here:
Windows Opened is a solid record overall, combining familiar funky, groovy Mann-erisms with some clear nods to Second Great (Miles) Quintet–style post-bop, maybe most apparent on the reading of Wayne Shorter’s classic “Footprints.” As usual, Sonny takes his turn here after the leader and Ayers, again starting out in a lyrical and reverent zone and making his way to his inimitable trills but never quite boiling over. The title track, an uptempo burner, finds Sonny nicely juggling moody subtlety and spiky eruptions — overall, he hasn’t quite gone full “mask off” here, but you can feel it coming.
The version of “Hold On, I’m Comin’” — the Isaac Hayes and David Porter–penned soul classic made famous by Sam & Dave — on Memphis Underground is, frankly, insane. On the bottom, you’ve got a tight, somewhat unspectacular funk groove laid down by the house rhythm section at Memphis’ American Sound Studio. Larry Coryell (obviously a trailblazing guitarist in a much more conventionally shredding early-jazz-rock vein, though also a musician keenly attuned to the possibilities of proto-noise-guitar, as evidenced by “Communications #9,” his wild Jazz Composer’s Orchestra collab from a year prior) wades in after Mann around the 2:40 mark and lays down a tasty fuzz-tone solo — fleet-fingered, soulful, with a nice arc of building excitement. In short, he “understood the assignment” here in the most straightforward way. Then, after Ayers takes his turn, Sonny surfs in on a cloud of pure, noxious noise, a whirring beast of sound that only lets up to splinter into jagged shards and latter erupt into a laser-gun barrage that sounds like the strings are being ripped off the instrument. All the while the rhythm section just keeps chugging away on the cyclical form, creating an almost comical contrast. Sonny just keeps right on roaring through the end, as Coryell comes back and rocks out with him a bit, while Mann and Ayers also get in on the action.
It’s moments like these when I’m struck by the open-mindedness of Herbie Mann as a bandleader — not to say that he should necessarily be given a massive pat on the back for making space for one of his sidemen, but it’s just striking how much room he leaves for Sonny to simply be his brash and, superficially at least, utterly incongruous self. What a track like this does is encourage you to push beyond typical notions of what does or doesn’t “work” in a piece of music. The piece succeeds simply because it’s a document of everyone involved playing an honest role, and again, you get to feel the real friction of Sonny’s aesthetic in a whole other way than when he’s playing with, say, Marzette or Pharoah. A total mindfuck, and I love it. (I found myself wondering after spinning this what Coryell thought of Sonny, and was delighted to find this.)
Concerto Grosso in D Blues is a cool jazz-meets-classical statement that augments most of the Windows Opened band (Ron Carter steps in for Miroslav Vitouš) with an orchestra, brass ensemble and string quartet. It’s a really striking record regardless of Sonny’s involvement, but a mid-track romp on the title piece where Carter, Ayers, drummer Bruno Carr and Sonny eventually go fully free is an unexpected delight. Sonny eventually solos over pure-texture accompaniment by Carr and Ron on bowed bass, and here he presents a sort of low-volume, low-density version of his trademark disruptive aesthetic, ramping up in intensity as the orchestra comes back in. I definitely can’t think of any other occasion where we get to hear Sonny Sharrock tangle with an orchestra, and this extended feature is really worth a close listen or 10. “Wailing Wall,” from the same record, also moves from structured and refined to something more open in the middle — Sonny improvises beautifully here alongside Ayers, Carter and Carr, finding a compelling sort of lower gear for his aggressive trilling and exhibiting impressive dynamic restraint.
There’s less Sonny to savor on Stone Flute but more moody goodness is in store on “Miss Free Spirit.” Vitouš is back on bass here, with Mickey Roker taking over on drums. The track feels like a Mann response to something like “In a Silent Way” — at once funky, spacey and abstract. (Incidentally, there’s no credited keyboardist, which is weird because there’s some very appealing sort of ambient-jazz keys in the mix here.) You can hear Sonny sort of tiptoeing into the mix around the 7:00 mark, and then when he’s left alone in the spotlight shortly after, he offers one of his sparsest solos on record, uncharacteristically flowing with the prevailing vibe rather than disrupting it. The effect is magical and it really sets the table for Sonny’s involvement in Miles’ Jack Johnson sessions the following year. Also worth checking out is “Don’t You Know the Way (How I Feel About You),” where Sonny doesn’t solo but ably carries the tender melody.
Don Cherry, Eternal Rhythm (Nov 11-12, 1968)
Sonny Sharrock and Sunny Murray, untitled duo (Nov 1968)
Pharoah Sanders, Izipho Zam (Jan 14, 1969)
Sonny Sharrock, Black Woman (May 16, 1969)
We’re doubling back on dates here a bit, as Eternal Rhythm was recorded before Stone Flute, apparently partially on the same day as Concerto Grosso (both were tracked in Berlin, so it checks out). Here we find Sonny back the Free Zone for a few sessions. The Cherry session is a potently eclectic one: Part I moves quickly from flute-driven, almost chamber-ish mood setting to an uptempo free tangle where, at around the 3:30 mark, Sonny opens fire over drummer Jacques Thollot’s chaotic pulse. It’s a thrilling but curiously brief eruption, and a quick scene change into a new theme follows. Sonny rears up again around the 4:45 mark of Part II, trilling and buzzing furiously under a busy tangle of horns, but the context of the music never quite makes space for him as much as on, say, the the Marzette album.
At what was apparently the same installment of the Berlin Jazz Festival, we have a remarkable six-minute live duet between Sonny and free drumming pioneer Sunny Murray, never officially released but available on YouTube and elsewhere. The sound quality is poor, but the music is as rousing as you’d hope, with Sonny trilling toward infinity and then entering pure bedlam mode over Murray’s trademark cymbal whoosh. He leaves some space for Murray to bash and crash away alone for a while before zooming back in with his beloved tempestuous sonic divebombs. Why these two never collaborated again is beyond me, but this brief match-up is a treasure. The crowd apparently agreed, as they let out a huge cheer when the piece is over.
I discussed Izipho Zam a bit in an earlier Pharoah-centric post, but I’ll add here simply that this record is a thorny masterpiece, every bit as exciting as the better-known Tauhid. There’s a lot more Sonny in the mix here than on that earlier session, and on “Balance,” you can feel an increased confidence in the way he rises up to meet Pharoah’s shrieking solo with a trilling wall of sound, peaking around the 5:20 mark. The combined intensity of the pair, blowing alongside tuba player Howard Johnson is almost unbearable, in the best way possible, Sonny just constantly turning up the heat — he really earns his “godfather of noise guitar” designation here. Sonny lets up a bit but then around the 9:00 mark, the inferno flares up yet again. There’s no need for a play-by-play here — it’s just pure fire music at its finest and you need to hear it.
Sonny trills along unassumingly for much of the nearly half-hour title track, but then, right around the 23:00 mark, the music erupts completely, with Sonny’s buzzsaw, slide and sonic-splinter rampage leading the charge. Again, glorious cathartic chaos. Essential.
Black Woman is, of course, a five-star, 10/10 classic, where Linda Sharrock’s vocals combust beautifully with Sonny’s incendiary sonic sorcery. The whole album is one big highlight, but the two bookend tracks, “Black Woman” and “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black,” are just absolutely arresting, with the personal relationship between Sonny and Linda lending a tender subtext to these utterly extreme expressionist soundscapes of rumbling guitar and wailing vocals. Milford Graves on drums is a huge asset on the latter piece — I love his thudding, tom-heavy intro, some of the most “time-adjacent” playing I’ve ever heard from him on record. (When I spoke with Graves back in 2015, he called Sonny “The loudest person I ever played with.) It’s worth highlighting that the three tracks in the middle expand the album’s palette significantly, from the mindblowing flamenco-gone-free-jazz of “Peanut” to the rapturous almost operatic “Bialero” (featuring billowing piano finery from Dave Burrell) and the acoustic trance-folk solo reading of “Blind Willie” (which would turn up again on Guitar in a much more fleshed out version).
Throughout this record you can really hear how much Sonny had been yearning for his own platform, and he really made the most of it — it’s absolutely the defining statement of his early years, and offers a completely different spin on the “terror and the beauty” brand of spiritual jazz as practiced earlier by Pharoah & Co. Sonny and Linda’s version is rougher, more folklike and less urbane — whereas something like “The Creator Has a Master Plan” has an aura of incense-scented sophistication about it, you can almost envision “Portrait of Linda,” with its succession of dancing, cyclical themes and joint vocals from Sonny and Linda, as a campfire singalong that gradually turns into some frenzied ritual. Pieces like this also showed Sonny as a real connoisseur of homespun melody, clearly having been influenced by Albert Ayler in that regard. (When Ben Ratliff told Sonny in 1989 that many of his themes reminded him of Ayler, Sonny answered, “Oh, certainly. Goddamn, that man wrote those diatonic themes based on the pentatonic scale that are just incredible. I was very taken by that.” Earlier, he had said to Richard Scheinin, speaking of Black Woman, “I was hearing, at that time … these melodies that are, I guess, really rooted in folk melodies and in the pentatonic scale, and I just had to play these melodies, you know.”)
Herbie Mann, Live at the Whisky a Go Go (June 6, 1969)
Herbie Mann, Live at the Whisky: Unreleased Masters (June 7-8, 1969) [released 2016]
Roy Ayers Quartet, Unchain My Heart (July 6, 1969; contains two 45s: “Unchain My Heart” and “All Blues”)
Summer of Soul soundtrack (July 27, 1969)
Herbie Mann, Memphis Two-Step (Nov 1970)
I’ve discussed some of the Whisky material in Part 1. Suffice to say, if you’re only familiar with Black Woman and haven’t heard Sonny and Linda perform the title track and “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors” live with the Mann band, these tracks will likely be a revelation. Beyond the two Sonny-and-Linda-centric cuts, the expanded Whisky material (recorded at the same stand that yielded Mann’s original Live at the Whisky LP) gives a good sense of what Sonny’s customary role with the Mann band was — play a background role and then emerge for select surprise attacks. Every one of his solos here, from the register-jumping buzzsaw airing on “Untitled Jam” (around 5:14) to the slow-burning, part-lyrical/part-abrasive statement over uptempo swing from Vitous and Carr on “Tangier/If I Were A Carpenter” (around 17:00) is a total blast.
Sonny’s solo on the Unreleased Masters version of the fairly elementary funk-blues “Philly Dog” (starting around 6:30) is a complete and utter triumph — roughly three-and-a-half minutes of Pandora’s box madness, with a healthy application of reverb giving Sonny’s perverse, jagged, precariously prickly slides, squeals, whirrs and blooms of noise a pronounced miasmic quality. It probably has the edge on Sonny’s marginally more reined-in but still masterfully disruptive “Philly Dog” solo from the original Whisky album, which starts at 10:20. Sonny sounds almost fed up with the instrument by the end — as though he’s wrung every possible brand of cacophony out of it and would maybe rather just be wielding a power drill.
Interestingly, Sonny solos right after Mann — not his usual position in the lineup — on the Harlem Cultural Festival live take featured on the Summer of Soul soundtrack, where he gets going around 3:17. He builds here to a blast of pure static, with sonic sparks flying off in every direction, as the rhythm section chugs along. The barrage goes on almost uncomfortably long. No one else besides the leader solos on the tune — you have to wonder if Mann felt that following that act would have been impossible.
The Roy Ayers Quartet material from earlier in July of 1969, originally released on a pair of 45s, is a fascinating oddity. Much like the Herbie Mann’s Song Book session from two years earlier, this features the members of Mann’s band but without the leader (and sans Steve Marcus as well), performing some of the same repertoire they were already playing with the Mann band, and shows Sonny playing a somewhat more integrated role in the group than he does on the proper Mann material.
During his solo on “Comin’ Home Baby,” Sonny intriguingly holds on to a bit of strummy chording, alternating that laid-back approach with a few spiky, scraping runs. And on “A Man and a Woman” and “Scarborough Fair,” he doesn’t solo at all, handling the delicate version of the theme statement and some dreamy comping on the former, while on “Scarborough Fair,” he also plays the straight man, outlining the tune during Miroslav’s stirring solo.
Extended takes on “If I Were a Carpenter” and “All Blues,” though, find the band exploring their own brand of state-of-the-art postbop, again in a very Second Great Quintet mode. Sonny doesn’t exactly comp during Ayers’ solo but offers angular yet tasteful commentary. His own solo lets us hear what would happen if instead of just laying down a groove, as they often did when Mann was present, the band waded into the unknown with Sonny — the result almost recalls something like Tony Williams’ Life Time session from a few years prior, with all the players interacting intuitively in a freeform setting. “If I Were a Carpenter” is similarly loose and intriguing — what’s especially interesting is that while Sonny absolutely sounds like himself here, he seems far more relaxed, less compelled to “shatter” the surrounding setting, because the band is playing in a much more supportive and responsive way. It’s almost like he’s relieved of the pressure of being the grand upsetter and can just concentrate on subtler, more gestural lines. The restraint and tastefulness of Sonny’s presence on these two tracks are really a revelation if you’ve only ever heard Sonny go fully nuclear in the Mann orbit. (Note: Sonny is also credited on one track on Ayers’ Daddy Bug LP, recorded in bits and pieces in the spring and summer of ‘69, but I really can’t pick him out in the mix, and weirdly, though he appears on the cover of Ayers’ Stoned Soul Picnic, he doesn’t actually play on that LP.)
I’m skipping around a bit chronologically here but just to close the book on the Mann era, I want to highlight one final track from a later Herbie album. “Kabuki Rock” is a total riot — a driving, three-guitar Asian-inflected surf-rock riff fest. I love the track in general — honestly, what other “fusion” sounds like this? — but on the Sonny tip, it’s valuable for giving us another look, as the Memphis Underground session did, of Sonny working alongside more conventional guitarists of the day. Richard Resnicoff and Eric Weissberg (of “Dueling Banjos” fame!) do most of the heavy lifting here, and honestly it’s hard to tell who’s playing what, but at some point, Sonny’s unmistakable buzzsaw gestures start to pierce through the mix — he doesn’t solo so much as add this unhinged commentary, like sprinkling a bit of madness on an otherwise fairly no-nonsense, earthbound track. (I haven’t yet brought Robert Fripp into this discussion, but let’s not forget, as we marvel at this last inspired Sonny/Herbie team-up, how much the timbral abrasiveness and calculated incongruity of something like Fripp’s “Sailor’s Tale” solo from 1970’s Islands clearly, and apparently purposefully, recalls Sonny’s work with Mann.)
Speaking of Sonny playing in Mann-led bands alongside other guitarists, there apparently was one final example of this, featuring none other than Duane Allman. Info is sketchy, and shouldn’t be treated as definitive, but apparently in April ’71, Duane Allman, who would actually appear on Mann’s Push Push, recorded later that year, recorded one track with a Mann group featuring Sonny. The tune was none other than “1953 Blue Boogie Children,” Sonny’s own composition, which turned up later on Paradise, and though the Lord listing says that Allman replaced Sonny on the session, this seemingly authoritative account, based on contact with other participants in the session, states that both guitarists were present. (Apparently, things weren’t as harmonious here as they were between Coryell and Sonny. “Duane loved guitar players. I only knew two people Duane didn’t like: Jimmy Page and Sonny Sharrock,” Allman Brothers drummer Jaimoe once said. “He played on the Herbie Mann Push Push sessions [in 1971] with Sonny and he hated him and the way nothing he played was ever really clear.”) Sadly, the Mann/Allman/Sharrock session remains unreleased, along with a handful of other tantalizing Sonny sessions mentioned in the Lord discography, including an October ’66 live performance with the trumpeter Ric Colbeck — also including the eye-popping roster of Byard Lancaster, Bennie Maupin, Sirone, Sunny Murray and cellist Joel Freeman — that, if found, would be the earliest Sonny we have on record.
Wayne Shorter, Super Nova (Aug 29 / Sept 2, 1969)
Brute Force, Brute Force (Sept 16-17, 1969)
Miles Davis, Jack Johnson sessions (Feb 18, 1970)
Steve Marcus, Green Line (Sept 11, 1970)
Late ’69 and early 70 found Sonny entering the Miles Davis orbit, most notably in a session that would famously end up being excerpted on Jack Johnson. Before that, though, he turned up along with Mann bandmate Vitouš on the strongly Miles-adjacent Super Nova, led by Wayne Shorter, featuring Chick Corea (playing drums and vibes instead of piano), Jack DeJohnette and Airto Moreira among others, and recorded only around a week after Bitches Brew. Present here too, crucially, was John McLaughlin, who would also be part of the Jack Johnson session Sonny attended, making these two rare and fascinating instances when we can hear maybe the two most revolutionary jazz-adjacent guitarists of the era working alongside one another. Super Nova is an absolutely wild record, sounding sort of like the Second Great Quintet with a whole lot of period-appropriate textural ornament. The sonic field is extremely busy, but on the opening title track you can clearly hear Sonny’s prickly, fragmented bursts sounding out in the left channel as McLaughlin shows off his more fluid, agile style in the right. Though interestingly, there are moments, such as around 2:10, where McLaughlin joins Sonny in that sonic-sea-urchin zone. The two have the floor fully around 2:45, and while McLaughlin takes the lead, Sonny’s commentary is essential, almost goading McLaughlin in spots into a more haywire zone.
Sonny is intermittently detectable throughout the rest of the record, but seems slightly marginal here except on closing track “More Than Human,” where I believe McLaughlin sits out and Sonny keeps up a constant trilling, sputtering commentary in the right channel, mixed surprisingly loud. (At times here, he almost seems to foreshadow Derek Bailey’s mature style.)
As Sonny heads know, on the original Jack Johnson album, he only appeared in a snippet of “Yesternow” (I believe originally uncredited?). You can clearly hear him around the 19:00 mark of that track. But thanks to the comprehensive Miles archival boxes, we can zero in on the original session that this bit was chopped out of. The track to dial up is “Willie Nelson - insert 2,” where Sonny is in the mix right from the beginning, dousing what would otherwise be a crisp jazz-rock-funk groove — with McLaughlin holding down the riffier side of things — in psychedelic sound goo. He’s using a massive amount of reverb here and seemingly delay, and at times (around 1:20, say), it sounds as if his guitar is being sucked into another dimension. It’s all absolutely batshit and beautiful, and a clear precursor for the outlandish six-string conjurings of Mary Halvorson, Nels Cline and other avant-guitar luminaries.
“Willie Nelson - insert 1” is similar and except that Sharrock’s sound is less aggressively treated. (There are some weird, bloopy noise interludes here, starting around the 4:30 mark, that might be Sonny’s doing but could also be generated by Chick Corea on treated keys.) It would have been cool to hear the Sonny/Miles collab go further — clearly Pete Cosey was thinking along similar lines as Sonny — but at least we have this exquisitely weird example.
Brute Force is an odd one. This was the R&B/funk band led by Sonny’s childhood friend Ted Daniel along with his brother Richard Daniel on keys. (See here for some important background context on the Sonny/Ted relationship, in a lengthy as-told-to interview by Clifford Allen.) Herbie Mann produced this session as well, the band’s only recording. Sonny is present in spots throughout the record but actually featured only rarely. On “Right Direction” and “Do It Right Now” for example, he’s clearly audible, throwing in gnarled, spiraling runs over what are essentially straightforward, vampy, vocal-driven pop tunes. The prior track, where Sonny brings the buzzsaw to the fore during the free-time interlude around 1:10 and chugs furiously as the tune reaches its conclusion, is a definite standout here, as is “Monster,” where he solos for the bulk of the tune, trilling and sputtering aggressively over an uptempo groove — near the end, the band joins him for a wild free-jazz coda.
A similar crescendo emerges toward the end of “Ye-La-Wa” (around the 12:00 mark), with Ted Daniel and saxophonist Stanley Strickland getting in on the action. Overall, Sonny seems a bit mismatched on this session — maybe even more so than on the Mann material because of the vocal-centric-nature of the tunes — but his presence makes for a heady, genre-colliding funk-meets-free blend that probably couldn’t have sprung up at any other point in musical history.
Green Line is truly special, an obscure, eclectic one-off that teams Sonny with Mann compatriots Vitouš and Steve Marcus, while adding in esteemed Swiss drummer Daniel Humair. Every tune here brings a different vibe, and it’s all compelling, and not just for the Sonny element. “Melvin” feels Mann-adjacent, with its bottom-heavy funk groove — interestingly here Sonny overdubs his solo, adding his spidery ascending lines and buzzsaw runs over his own workmanlike rhythm guitar. Despite the grooving feel, this is a nastier, scrappier sound than we’d hear in the Mann band, and the overall effect is beautifully perverse, almost proto–No Wave.
“Green Line” is bashing, ecstatic freebop, pointing ahead to the post-Ornette sound of Keith Jarrett’s American Quartet. Vitous’ overdubbed arco solo leads things off, followed by a screaming treasure of a Marcus tenor solo. Not to be outdone, Sonny steps up with pure abstract sound shapes, bathed in reverb, at times almost sounding like a rockabilly guitarist on acid, over a tumultuous free pulse by Vitous and Humair. Again there’s an “only in 1970” feel to this track — just totally genre-transcending, post-psychedelic freeform revelry.
“The Echos” [sic] is a real buried treasure. Like “John’s Children,” I’m almost positive this Sonny-penned track is an embryonic version of a later Sonny piece — in this case “Devils Doll Baby” [also sic!], one of my favorite pieces from Guitar from 15+ years later. It’s built around a simple back-and-forth sing-song melodic theme, playful and folklike. Across 11 minutes, the band turns it into a kind of free-jazz rallying cry, punctuated by full-band rests. Humair’s bashing drums are key here, as is Miroslav’s muscular, interactive bass presence. What I love about the feel here is that it could be described as free jazz but it bears very little resemblance to the “wild free music” that Sonny was playing with Pharoah & Co. a few years prior. It’s a whole other thing, and hearing his serrated emanations ring out over a less aggressive and overwhelming but equally gritty sonic tangle is a real treat. One thing that comes through here is how sympathetic of a collaborator Vitouš was to Sonny, gamely meeting his frantic intensity head on and tastefully alluding to the guitarist’s theme — throughout all these early years, their partnership was even more consistent than Sonny’s was with Mann, as the bassist was also present for the many satellite excursions such as this. “The Echos” definitely belongs on a short list of essential early Sonny recordings.
Sonny Sharrock, Monkey-Pockie-Boo (June 22, 1970)
Recorded earlier that same year, Monkey-Pockie-Boo feels in a many ways like a rawer, more spontaneous sequel to Black Woman. It was recorded in Paris while Sonny was on tour with Mann, and the rhythm section is the French team of Beb Guerin on bass and Jacques Thollot on drums. Opening track “27th Day” is bracingly abstract — on the first half, Sonny matches Linda’s eerie wails, screams and croaks (presaging some of her more recent vocal experiments) not with guitar but with slide whistle (!), as the rhythm section churns away. The guitar does come out around the 9:00 mark, and the balance of the track is total sonic exorcism, showing that the otherworldly power of the Sonny/Linda team-up was still very much intact. When Sonny steps up to solo, his contribution is sparse and almost meandering at first, rising up to shattering peaks.
After the solo vocal intro, the second track, “Soon,” credited to Linda, is pure aggression, a conscious throwback to the “wild free music” days of ‘66 — you can definitely feel Sonny and Linda reveling in the more open setting here after having spent considerable time in the Mann orbit. This is clearly one of Linda Sharrock’s masterpieces — the fact that, as a vocalist, she matches the intensity of the Sonny blowtorch and keeps upping the ante over the course of nearly eight minutes is honestly staggering. The title track is something of a curiosity, featuring the couple vocalizing on what sounds like a more spontaneous version of their campfire-free-jazz singalongs on Black Woman. Overall, this one isn’t the equal of Black Woman — what could be, really? — but it scores extra points for its dire extremity and live-in-the-room feel.
As a quick coda to Monkey-Pockie-Boo, here’s a breathtaking live clip of a version of that band (with Don Moye in for Jacques Thollot on drums) playing “Peanut” from Black Woman — with a vocal coda that I’m pretty sure is the title track of Monkey — on French TV in October 1970. What really comes through here is the contrast between the tight arrangement of the head and the cathartic outpouring of the improv section, not to mention the sheer fearlessness of Sonny and Linda’s respective approaches. Beyond radical.
And that about does it for the early phase of the Sonny Sharrock discography! There is one more Mann session on the books, a brief live rendition of “Hold On, I’m Comin’” from the Newport in New York fest in ’72, but Sonny doesn’t solo there. Obviously his aesthetic would evolve enormously in later years, particular once the Laswell era got underway in earnest circa the early ’80s. Hopefully will be able to find some time to survey all that soon — as there’s just as much obscure buried Sonny treasure from those years, beyond the more well-known material. In the meantime, thanks for reading!
If you enjoyed this post, head on to Part 3!
Well done, thank you!
Bravissimo! More music to learn and love. Thank you Hank…