Sonny II: The Music of Sonny Sharrock

Editor's Info:
Why Sonny II as a title? It could be Sonny Too or 2 or...Sonny the second! No it is indeed the second version of a long long process of recordings (the " sessionography" also shows Sonny, Sonny II, III, IV and even the beginning of V plus side recordings for over one year). This happened with no particular angle else than a deep, almost intimate feeling to play Sharrock's music as other people would do with Gesualdo, the Shaggs or maybe Bartok's own piano recordings. What I reflect here in this recording is my very personal view on Sonny Sharrock's music and I would never dare to say it is like Sharrock, the truth of his music, a version or statement. I always heard and saw Sharrock as a composer, but as a composer of gestures, body movements and force. I remember seeing him in Paris in the late 80s, his mouth full of these colourful guitar picks, each of them being played for less than a minute as they all broke permanently. Sharrock would throw them in the air and take a new one from the mouth. I collected some after the show from the floor. Each of these broken guitar picks had a shape like a piece of art - broken in two pieces, destroyed on the edge - and gave me a feeling of the music caught deep inside or a note that could still be heard. A painter goes to the Louvre and copies the masters until his own style appears in the frame and at the same time the model transforms into a subject, a position, a view. The point is not the copying itself but to restart, to reflect and to jump into the painted surface.
When I was 14 I was confronted with technique, how to master the instrument, how to hold the pick, place the fingers, how to play a scale. Of course there were so many masters and guitarists I could go to and listen (from Tal Farlow to Freddie Green, from Jimmy Gourley to BB King), but one day I found a mysterious LP in a shop - »Monkey Pockie Boo«. The photos showed a huge black guitarist with his wife Linda, grabbing the instrument like I had never ever seen it before. In Sharrock's hand you felt the instrument could also be transformed into a bunch of smoking wood and iron pretty soon. That wasn't Hendrix, that was something else, something no theory or exercise books ever mentioned. Of course at that time I was already aware of the fact that in written music the subjectivity of one's inner sound and gesture was missing (Listen to Bud Powell's recordings of Bach). Then I started to hang all the LP covers I had that showed a guitarist's gesture. Jim Hall held his instrument this way, Charlie Christian, Al Casey, Pat Martino or Derek Bailey in a completely different way. Who you are when you start is a mystical question and I always have to come back to it. Now, almost twenty years after these experiences I felt that I was now ready to tell this story. I started to collect all the albums I could find of Sonny Sharrock, listen again to his recordings from the late 60s and to his last ones. All of them said the same thing to me which is something beyond knowledge, perhaps it's a mystery. Was it just a guitar or maybe just music? One thing my intuition tells me clearly: in my eyes Sharrock always has been the only free jazz guitarist, the first and last one. Why? Because no one ever dared to free himself to this extent. Everything in him was ready to break conventions, to explode, to burn...your fingers are not fluent enough? - Sonny would just run the fingers all over the place and the neck, up and down, aside, behind, under etc. Recently I checked out Marc Ribot's web site which has filed photos of musicians and I saw that in every second photo Marc had a different guitar in his hands. I KNEW EXACTLY what he meant. Who never tried an old archtop from Framus, Hofner, Harmony or Silvertone or somebody else does not understand. The other day we played a show with Steven Bernstein, Max Nagl and Brad Jones where I was using an old Gibson ES 175 almost acoustically throughout the whole gig. During the break Vernon Reid ( Living Colour) came to see us. His first comment is still ringing in my head: "Ah, these big guitars are so great but they have too much history!" I wonder which history - like ghosts inside the body of the instrument? - probably yes.
The more I try to explain things here, the more I feel I can't really reach this point of a physical presence of a piece of wood with tied strings on it. That is probably the reason why I just shut up and went to a small studio in Vienna to record Sonny Sharrock's music day after day, piece after piece. I recorded over 30 of his original compositions and I listened over and over again, not to hear myself, but in order to find out if someone else could also hear what I hear in this music. All the mistakes are not mistakes, they are windows to the tripe of that music and piece of wood. Wrong is right, less is more and here is how Sonny Sharrock changed my ears and gestures.

by Noël Akchoté