A Tale of Two Sonnys, Part 3: Last Exit, "Melody Upon Melody" and Wanting It All
How Sonny Sharrock's twin passions for terror and beauty played out across the later years of his career
Thanks for tuning in once again! If you’re new here, current programming on DFSBP is an ongoing meditation on the work and philosophy of my musical hero Sonny Sharrock. I’d recommend reading Part 1 (a discussion of the strange duality at the heart of Sonny’s early years, in which he operated more or less simultaneously in the realms of both radical free jazz and commercial jazz-funk) and Part 2 (a deep dive into Sonny’s entire early discography) before proceeding to the below, which takes a broad look at the new creative tensions that arose in his work once he reemerged onto the scene in the 1980s.
As we pick up our Sonny Sharrock saga, let’s open with a musical selection:
Unless you’re a Sonny die-hard, there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard “Your Eyes,” or maybe any of Highlife, the 1990 album it’s drawn from. Though the LP received some decent reviews at the time — Robert Christgau called it a “gorgeously straightforward guitar record” — it’s not a title you hear that much about these days, even in circles where Sonny Sharrock is passionately revered. It’s fairly easy to see why: “gorgeously straightforward” is not the hippest of aesthetics. Sonny connoisseurs (including myself at certain times!) love to portray him as a quintessential marauder of the guitar, the type of player who drops in, detonates the place and splits. And he didn’t exactly go out of his way to defy this image — recall his eminently quotable statement to Mike Rubin in the 1990 Motorbooty interview that “I go out onstage, and my intention is to make the first four rows bleed from their ears.”
And to be fair, his lengthy solo on “Your Eyes,” a Sharrock original that appeared on Highlife for the first and only time, does get pretty gnarly (see the chorus that kicks off around the 3:30 mark), but it’s also profoundly melodic. Throughout the track, you can hear Sonny sort of romancing the written theme, applying his trademark grit but always seasoning his lines with tenderness. On the bookend themes, where the period-appropriate keyboards of Dave Snider come to the fore, it’s not a stretch to say that we might as well be listening to smooth jazz, a statement I make completely without judgement.
Let me clarify further and state simply that I absolutely adore this track. It means as much to me as, say, “Promises Kept” or “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black” or the various versions of “Blind Willie” or any more “canonical” Sonny performance you could name. And I think it’s important that as we take stock of the man’s work, we take care to make room for the “Your Eyes” side as much as the “ear-bleeding side,” at the risk of oversimplifying his immortal genius.
After diving deep into Sonny’s early work in Part 1 and Part 2 of this ongoing project — and the odd duality of his respective involvement in “wild free music” vs. what might be termed crowd-pleasing pop-jazz — it strikes me that this binary kept right on playing out through the end of his life. In Sonny’s later years, there was no Herbie Mann–like “day gig,” no ill-fitting commercially oriented context for him to chafe against (a friction that, as we’ve seen in the earlier installments, led to some truly revelatory sonic mindfucks). Instead, when Sonny resumed his steady public music-making circa the early ’80s (after a brief blip in the mid-’70s with the Paradise band, his last creative venture with his first wife Linda), he reemerged into a context — specifically the New York downtown scene — where edginess and transgression were the prevailing norms. So much so that his most high-profile gigs (and, we can wager, most lucrative, given that they often took place at major international festivals) in the last decade of his life were with Last Exit — a.k.a., the Mount Rushmore of noise-jazz, a band whose entire raison dêtre was middle-finger extremity, and whose recordings still satisfy the desire for same like little other music out there.
Consulting his on-the-record statements, we find that Sonny had a blast playing with Last Exit. As much as his bandmates Peter Brötzmann, Ronald Shannon Jackson or Bill Laswell, he relished the band’s role of pulling up to respected jazz festivals and uncorking, to borrow a term from Kevin Drumm, a sheer hellish miasma.
“Usually the jazz cats come on,” he told Allentown, PA, paper The Morning Call before a gig there in 1987, describing the jazz-festival environment Last Exit often found itself in. “There are some trumpet players who get very serious, and wear suits and ties and play the Miles book from 1964. They get into ‘Jazz is a lady and we’re gentlemen.’ But we have another kind of image.”
That image, i.e., the group’s role as the designated upsetters on an otherwise staid jazz-fest scene, suited Sonny just fine — not hard to believe since, as we’ve seen, he spent so many nights early on playing that role (in his words “shatter[-ing] the tune”) within the Mann band. “Every night I go on and play and I feel very good about our shit,” he told The Wire’s Steve Lake during a group Last Exit interview in 1986. “Very fucking good, man.”
As good as he felt, though, Sonny eventually wanted more. Recall that during his time with Herbie Mann, just as Black Woman was coming out, he’d openly expressed a persistent desire to strike out on his own. “I haven’t been able to do my full thing,” he told Down Beat’s Mike Bourne in 1970, reflecting on his time with Mann. “Are you gonna stay with Herbie?” Bourne asked. “No, I have to have my own band,” Sonny replied. “Every day it comes over me more and more. Cause I’ve got my own music and my own way of playing, and I have to do it.”
Compare that sentiment with his answer when Ben Ratliff asked him about the future of Last Exit in the 1989 WKCR interview.
Do you see [Last Exit] as a group that will go on for a while?
Sonny Sharrock: …I love those cats, and we always have a good time playing together. After about two weeks I start to need some more structure to what I'm playing. And so I feel a need to come back, but it is a refreshing pause from what I’m usually doing because it's just total abandon.
So in 1970, there he was, feeling hemmed in by structure; nearly 20 years later, there he was, feeling hemmed in by the lack thereof — temporarily refreshed by blowing off steam but feeling that it somehow wasn’t enough. Within the anarchy of Last Exit, where “total abandon” was the rule rather than the exception, there was nothing to push against, no way to achieve the juxtaposition of extremes that he seemed to view as his ultimate aesthetic purpose.
Let’s flash back to this earlier discussion of “the terror and the beauty” as it pertains to the aesthetics of so-called spiritual jazz. At the risk of wearing this quote out, I’ll restate here what Sonny told Mark Dery in The New York Times in 1991, shortly after the release of Highlife and shortly before the releases of Faith Moves, his lush, eclectic and generally enchanting duo album with multi-instrumentalist Nicky Skopelitis, and of course the stellar post-Coltrane opus Ask the Ages.
"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!"
I’ve written before about how for me, Sonny’s earlier solo album Guitar convincingly accesses both of these extremes. Of course Ask the Ages does as well, with, say, the fury of “Promises Kept” beautifully offsetting the delicacy of “Who Does She Hope to Be?” and with a track like “Once Upon a Time” — with its seismic Elvin Jones drum rumble and soaring melodic leads — perhaps coming closest to juxtaposing these sensations in a single song, as though Sonny were drawing together two electrical cables with opposing charges like some invincible comic-book hero, sending a rush of current coursing through his body. (Andy Cush beautifully unpacked all of this in his 2021 Pitchfork Sunday Review of Ask the Ages, where he wrote, in a passage that astutely likened Sonny to Albert Ayler, “A single instant of noise could be as expressive as an entire melody; there was hardly any difference between the two.”)
On the various other late recordings, the balance shifts according to the occasion, with Highlife privileging beauty just as Last Exit thrived on terror. But it’s interesting to hear how insistent Sonny was on attending to both needs, to making sure his insatiable appetite for “each of those feelings” was fed.
I want to double back to Sonny’s reference to the Flamingos, the legendary doo-wop group who brought us “I Only Have Eyes for You,” singing at the Apollo. In interviews, Sonny constantly referred back to this era with fondness — a time, pre-guitar, when he actually aspired to be a singer. “I grew up listening to the heavy rhythm and blues of the '40s and '50s, and we had a singing group, and I was in four or five singing groups back then,” he told Richard Schenin in the 1973 WKCR interview. “And you know, I wanted to be a singer, like with the Moonglows, the Flamingos, something like that. So I sing, and Linda laughs at me when I sing, you know. So I took a chance on a couple of our records and sang [laughs].” (You can hear those fledgling efforts in “Portrait of Linda” from Black Woman and the title track of Monkey-Pockie-Boo.)
A 1990 Coda feature by Ben Ratliff included more on one of Sonny’s early singing groups. Called the Echoes, and also featuring Sharrock’s uncle, the outfit made a recording in 1957 — unfortunately never released due to the payola scandal involving famed DJ Alan Freed — and appeared at two amateur nights at the Apollo. (For more on the era, see Clifford Allen’s Ted Daniel interview — Daniel mentions Sonny’s early involvement with a doo-wop group that also included his brother and future Brute Force bandmate Richard Daniel, but it’s unclear whether this was the Echoes or another outfit.)
The influence of this era is all over 1975’s Paradise. The most pop-friendly album that Sonny and Linda ever made together, this is the only official Sonny Sharrock release from the period that he would later call his Lost Years (spanning roughly from the end of the Herbie Mann era to the start of the Bill Laswell one that birthed Last Exit and most of Sonny’s later output as a leader). It opens with a track actually called “Apollo,” bookended by a sumptuous soul groove. It also contains a wild jam called “1953 Blue Boogie Children,” where dueling Sonnys (via overdubbing) trade loopy, almost cartoonish guitar gestures over a mostly static R&B rhythm.
Sonny would venture further into straightforward blues in his later years (see the track “Money Honey” on 1989’s Live in New York), but he had bigger dreams in that area that he never fulfilled. In the Coda feature, he discussed his desire to put together a project called the Sonny Sharrock 1954 Rhythm and Blues Revue.
“It’s extremely hard to get off the ground, but one day I'm going to record that thing. The last couple of years I've put versions of my group together backed with a vocal group, but the concept is to do a total fifties rhythm and blues revue, with a big band. We'd do the whole thing, with two vocal groups, and a couple of saxophone players, and everything. … It would be as big as Alan Freed’s shows, you dig?”
See here for a charming clip of a fledgling version of the idea, featuring a guest appearance by Sonny’s younger brother Wayne. “You might never have been there, but I want you to act like and try and feel like you’re at the Apollo Theater in 1955,” Sonny tells the crowd before the band launches into a lovely version of the Don and Juan doo-wop hit “What’s Your Name?”
Obviously we never got to witness the full-on Revue he’d planned, but an album like Highlife did go a long way as far as fulfilling his desire for “sweetness” to offset the brutality that Last Exit was so adept at furnishing in the same time period.
In a 1992 Option profile by Gary Parker Chapin, he unpacked his appetite for musical sweetness when speaking about intentions behind Highlife:
“It’s a song series,” he says. “That’s what it was meant to be, and that’s what it is. Very structured, very pretty songs that I wanted to play. And I did.
“Melody is the prime thing,” he continues. “And when I say melody, I don't mean just the written melody or the head. I mean to play as melodically as possible, to try and reach those points that take me to that other world. I feel something when I start to pile melody upon melody, and I reach a point where it is totally open… the point where you go out there.”
You can hear Sonny’s rapture for melody all over Highlife, whether it’s on “Your Eyes” or his enchanting renditions of Pharoah Sanders’ “Venus” — also featured on Faith Moves — or a piece based on Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” (I wasn’t at the Apollo in 1955, but listening back to Sonny caressing these themes, I can feel a bit of what he must have savored in “all that pretty music.”)
At the same time, of course, Ask the Ages was a clear evocation of his deeply embedded love for “John Coltrane standing there, his saxophone screaming,” accompanied of course by Pharoah Sanders and Elvin Jones, two musicians who’d been by Coltrane’s side when he did just that — much as Sonny was beside Pharoah in the same time period on Tauhid.
There’s a real sense in this entire late period of reaching backward through time, trying to grab ahold of what fueled his music in the first place. He knows that somehow, this notion of “the terror and the beauty” — a seemingly contradictory idea that through his own inspired work, he showed to be perfectly harmonious — is his destiny, and he’s forever trying to achieve that perfect balance. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, much to the dismay of certain Herbie Mann audiences, he waged war on beauty, shattering conventional forms however he could; later, surrounded by all the terror a sonic contrarian could want as he stormed festival stages with world-class hellraisers Brötzmann, Jackson and Laswell, he found himself once again starved for it.
He was still sorting through all this as it was happening. At the time of the Option piece, he seemed to be reevaluating his own history. There Sonny responds to the idea that he’s been labeled over time as a “free” musician.
“The thing is,” he says, “I’ve always been structured in my playing” — Pharoah’s was never a totally free band. There was always structure in that band. There was always the melody played in a particular way. We had to learn to play those tunes in a particular way. We would play free on the solos, but there was always structure. Everyone has missed that — I’ve missed it, too. I bought that shit. I used to think I was a totally free player, but I’m not.”
I think one of the reasons I relate to Sonny Sharrock not just musically but philosophically is that I feel the same sort of restlessness — and that same sense that no label truly fits — both as a listener and a player. I’ll walk around with a free-jazz blowout or death-metal maelstrom blasting away in my headphones, and then I’ll sing along with Elton John’s “Daniel” or Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack” on the car stereo 10 minutes later. I’ll bash along to a doomy riff on drums at band practice one night and then work out the chords to a Hootie and the Blowfish song at the keyboard the next morning. I understand completely this desire to want to “go to the very end of each of those feelings,” and how if you can somehow manage to behold the terror and the beauty aligning, in whatever context — Patrick Walker, anyone? Or Alex Garland’s film version of Annihilation? — you feel like you’re glimpsing some sacred eclipse.
Of course Sonny Sharrock ran out of time soon after this period, and perhaps he didn’t make it all the way to those respective extremes he was seeking. But damn, did he make it farther along the sometimes separate, sometimes intertwined paths of terror and beauty than just about anyone else I can think of, never backing down from his twin purpose.
I take so much comfort in the fact that no caricature fits Sonny Sharrock, even now. You’ll read accounts that try to peg him as the ultimate badass of noise-guitar, which, cacophonizing alongside Herbie Mann or rampaging with his Last Exit cronies, he sometimes was! But, hey, let’s not forget, he was also the man who wrote and played “Your Eyes.” Neither was the “truer” Sonny; each was — and both were — his sincerest self, yearning for it all.
Thanks again for reading! I’m not inclined to make specific promises about future content here, but if you enjoyed the above, there may be more Sonny Sharrock where this came from…
Thanks, Hank! I love this whole series. Sonny Sharrock is one of my all time favorites - probably seen him play a dozen times, mostly at the original Knitting Factory and got to know him a bit. He was mostly playing his music from that era, the stuff on Seize the Rainbow and Highlife. A lot of it was corny (electronic keyboards - ugh) but man the sound of that guitar! The last time I saw him, he had just been signed to a major label (RCA?) and was super-excited to have his music reach a wider audience. He was working out, lost a lot of weight, looking good. Shortly after he had a heart attack and it was suddenly over. I was crushed when I heard the news on WKCR. A huge loss.
Beautiful essay!