Search - Sonny Sharrock :: Into Another Light

An introduction to a master

Alex Johnston | Dublin, Ireland | 04/09/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I first heard Sonny Sharrock on the Material album "Memory Serves", where behind all the thumping percussion and boinging bass was this unholy noise struggling to get out. I didn't know it at the time, but it was perhaps the first recording Sharrock had made in years, after having given up music in the early 70s to work as a chauffeur and with mentally disturbed people (as unlikely guitar hero career paths go, this beats even Peter Green taking up gravedigging.) Years later I found this album, with its totally black cover (none more black, if you will), and bought it eagerly - the first Sonny album I'd ever seen. I gradually realised, from the funereal packaging and compilatory nature of it, that it was posthumous. And when I listened to it, I was very sad, because Sonny Sharrock will now never make another album.It's a collection of highlights from three or four of Sharrock's late 80s/early 90s recordings, such as "Ask the Ages", "Seize the Rainbow" and "Guitar". The focus is on Sharrock's ecstatic/frenetic guitar, that unique buzzing tone, scurrying around fistfuls of notes, spitting noise into the gutter and swooping into the sky as and when the mood takes him, which is often. He was a true master, not so much inspired by Hendrix as parallel to him. There's excellent support from Pharaoh Sanders, Nicky Skopelitis and others. Probably not the best place to start, since many of his other albums are now readily available, but if you want to get an idea of what he was becoming when he died, this is one way of doing it."