Ask The Ages - Sonny Sharrock (1991)
A quick story: I was a kid who was really into metal (due to being a boy in the 80s) and kind of into jazz (due to having a jazz-obsessed guitar teacher). 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 had. 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.
§ Ed: I found it with the help of Google Gemini’s deep research feature. The track was called Ursalina (or Ursalena) and there’s a video of the very performance I’m talking about named somewhat vaguely on a YT channel for saxophonist David Murray. Sharrock starts spitting at about 4:25 in the video. Ironically, one of the sources Gemini found in its research was an earlier version of this very post.
