Ask The Ages - Sonny Sharrock (1991)
A quick story: I was a kid who was really into metal and kind of into jazz (my guitar teacher got me onto it). VH1 had a modern jazz showcase show called New Visions Jazz. On that show one time was “Bill Cosby and Friends” (so maybe that’s why it’s not on YT anymore), where Cosby sort of conducted a band that featured Jack DeJohnette on drums and some cat named Sonny Sharrock on guitar. They were working through a pretty standard 80s-modern jazz/funk tune, and then the rest of the musicians quieted, Sonny Sharrock stepped to the front trailling some mad feedback behind him, and changed my life forever.
Sharrock destroyed me with a massive, spitting, wailing, screaming solo laid down over the mostly smooth funk groove the rest of the band was laying down. I’d never heard anything so free and fun and awesome.
Sadly, by the time I was old enough and the Internet existed enough for me to track down his music, Sharrock was already dead at 53. But this last record is his magnum opus.
Produced by Bill Laswell (o_O) and featuring Pharoah Sanders (O_o) on sax and the veteran rhythm section of Elvin Jones (O-O and Charnett Moffett, Ask The Ages is a rock-solid slab of great not-quite-spiritual, not-quite-free jazz, an impressionistic soundscape that rages and sings and ministers and shoves.
