Sonny Sharrock - Ask the Ages

that live session is beautiful, thanks for sharing

great record

Took me a while to figure out what David Berkman was doing on this thread.

Not sure where to put this but a big piece in the NYT today on Linda who had a stroke a long time ago and can’t speak but is somehow still making records and performing:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/arts/music/linda-sharrock.html

Saw that. Interesting Mike Rubin written article on Linda

During surgery for an intestinal blockage in 2009, Sharrock suffered her stroke, and spent the following two years in and out of the hospital. In 2012 she was visited in Austria by the jazz bassist Henry Grimes. “She was sitting on the couch while he played,” Rechtern recalled, “and I heard her very softly singing into the music.”

Intrigued, Rechtern began gradually coaxing Sharrock to perform again. “She started to develop first this growl sound, this cry, because she couldn’t articulate,” he said. “Out of the blues and this typical sound, she found this explosion.”

Beginning with “No Is No” in 2014, Sharrock has released five recordings in Europe since her stroke. Her recent music is more in the spirit of the free jazz she made with Sonny than her somewhat more conventional work with Puschnig, though her vocal range is understandably not the same.

Thanks for posting that BB interview!

Could have sworn there was a thread about Sonny Sharrock and The Savages---anyway some Sonny thread where there was a query and we agreed that it was the Black Woman/WKCR line-up---however, the knowledgeable Mike Rubin, who once ran worthy printzine Motorbooty, thinks otherwise, as he says in the xpost amazing Linda update:

Released on the Vortex subsidiary of Atlantic Records, the trailblazing “Black Woman” failed to find a larger audience. A few years later, the couple put together the Savages, a working band that could play out regularly. The group included steel drums and Latin percussion and gigged at downtown venues like the Tin Palace and lofts like Studio Rivbea, said Abe Speller, the band’s drummer. The Savages recorded a soundtrack to Sedat Pakay’s 1973 short documentary “James Baldwin: From Another Place” and performed a live set in 1974 on WKCR, which are the only surviving souvenirs of their existence. Speller recalled the band holing up to rehearse before entering a studio in December 1977 to record a four-song demo tape, but the group failed to score a label deal and eventually fizzled out.