Eilliott Sharp - guitars, reeds?
solos, duos and trios w/
Jacob Lindsay - Ab, Bb, bass and contrabass clarinets
Damon Smith - double bass
Over a decade ago Mr. smith and Mr. lindsay played a concert featuring their "rock" band with guests jack brewer, joe biaza and E#. This will be their second meeting.
E# BIo and press:
BIO:
Composer/producer/sound artist/multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp leads the groups Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane. His compositions have been performed by the Symphony of the Hessischer Rundfunk, the Ensemble Modern, Continuum, Kronos Quartet, and Zeitkratzer and collaborators have included qawaali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, playwright Dael Orlandersmith, cello innovator Frances-Marie Uitti, sci-fi writers Jack Womack and Lucius Shepard; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; jazz greats Sonny sharrock, Jack deJohnette, and Oliver Lake; turntablists DJ Soulslinger and Christian Marclay; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jahjoukah. His orchestra piece "Calling" was commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk to open the 2002 Darmstadt Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik and the CD won the January 2004 German Critics' Prize. He has recently completed the score to the feature-film "Lo Que Soño Sebastien" by Guatemalan writer and director Rodrigo Rey-Rosa featured at Sundance Film Festival in 2004. His composition "Quarks Swim Free" was premiered at the Venice Biennale in September 2003 and performed by his group Carbon. More about Sharp's work may be found at http://www.elliottsharp.com and a complete discography may be found at: http://home.arcor.de/nyds-exp-discogs/index0.htm
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ELLIOTT SHARP: RELEVANT QUOTES
"The finest recorded mesh of 'downtown' artjism and pure rock drive that you're ever likely to hear" CHEMICAL IMBALANCE
"The longest fingers on the NY improvisational scene" NY NEWSDAY
"explosively rhythmic power ...one of downtown's most important groups for nearly a decade ...one of the scene's most fertile composers" NY TIMES
"Urban, not urbane, the group CARBON, led by Elliott Sharp, clanks and grinds ...the band creates a distinct world of sound, part tribal, part twentieth-century industrial ... sounds like no other music ever made." NY TIMES
"A jubilant slam dance on the fault line between order and disorder ...acid wit and high spirits, tapping energy from psychedelic rock, free improvisation, hardcore, speed metal, 'out' jazz, and blues." GUITAR PLAYER
"Sharp's startling looks were upstaged only by his outrageous inventiveness on guitar and woodwinds. Hooked up to a computer, sometimes playing tag with pre-sampled sounds, Sharp's doubleneck guitar work had a gutsy, ragged power and a strong sense of purpose. The improvisational instinct of jazz, the power of rock, and the organizational complexity of classical music all figured into this blend that blew in from Manhattan." INSIDE CHICAGO
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VELOCITY OF HUE REVIEWS:
Time Out NYC - January 1-8, 2004
Elliott Sharp - The Velocity Of Hue
Many words have been used to describe the distinctive oeuvre of downtown guitarist-composer Elliott Sharp. Gentle and soothing, however, aren't among them. That's not to say there isn't any subtlety in the pummeling calculus-core onslaught of Sharp's late, lamented band, Carbon, or in the vexing ferocity of his concert pieces. But in both of those settings, power and exuberance have played a far greater role than gentility and songfulness.
Admirers of Sharp's amplified din might wonder, upon hearing The Velocuty Of Hue, if the guitarist forgot to pay his Con Ed bill. Velocity's short, soft improvisations for solo acoustic guitar draw equally upon Blind Willie Johnson, John Fahey, and string-playing traditions from Korea, Africa, and India. Sharp employs a gorgeous warm-toned instrument modified with a Dobro bridge, which affords him still more string to bend.
Even stripped down, his music is anything but simple. On tracks such as "The Face Of Another" and "Nebel," he combines fingerpicking and delicate rubbing with slide and e-bow: Deep, resonant sustained notes sing out elegantly over tactile chirps and pings. "Euwrecka" spins out like an incandescent pinwheel, sending tiny harmonic sparks flying into the ether.
While it may seem like a radical departure at first, Velocity ultimately remains true to Sharp's careerlong investigation into the science of sound. If much of his previous work has found beauty in extremes of intensity, he reverses course here, creating a cumulative intensity from extremes of beauty.
Steve Smith
The Wire
"This is an album of solo acoustic guitar. Elliott Sharp by habit and intellectual compulsion has grasped all the expectations such a bare description evokes and confronted and confounded them. Steel guitar blues stands at a pole of gritty hard won authenticity utterly inimical to the art music schoolings of someone like Elliott Sharp. Bluesmen learn their lessons from life, not from Morton Feldman. These recordings could fall into one of two traps. The virtuoso Sharp could merely reproduce and inhabit the well-established clichés we have learnt from moody soundtracks to cowboy dramas, desert road movies, and lazy advertising. Alternately he could deconstruct, subvert or satirise the same clichés by way of the same virtuosity. If all you want is to see one man play his guitar you would be pleased - even if far too easily. VELOCITY OF HUE, therefore, is all the more wondrous for transcending such crowd-pleasing follies.
While Sharp's knowledge of global musics must inform his playing, the overall effect is of an intrinsically American, intrinsically blues, and specifically guitar derived, music. The playing is elegiac, lyrical and passionate, and uses several extended techniques of finger-tapping, harmonics and fretboard noise as well as a subtle sinuous acoustic feedback to extend notes at will. Few other players have managed to liberate the language of steel blues so completely - one is reminded of Leo Kottke's more surreal passages. A track like Icontact slides and smoulders, constantly unstable, and seeking resolve, while the bright opening drone of Euwrecka evolves into a skittering lattice of brittle energy and the delicate harmonics of Otolith glister like gold dust waiting to be panned out of a desert creek. Most of all, though, the music has an extraordinary saturated living colour, as the title track (and its title) Velocity Of Hue so succinctly suggest."
NICK SOUTHGATE - THE WIRE 2003
BBCi music:
Elliott Sharp, The Velocity of Hue
(Emanem)
...impressive technique and great sensitivity to the moment...
Elliott Sharp is the definitive Downtown New York musician. Equally at home free impovising with John Zorn, playing down home dirty blues with veteran guitarist Hubert Sumlin or writing for string quartets, he's been one of the most hardworking yet maybe undersung talents on the scene.
Having said that, Sharp's music's always left me a bit cold; maybe it's a consequence of the genre-hopping he's managed so expertly, but there's never seemed to be an identifiable voice that glued all these things together.
Here he's alone with an acoustic guitar, still displaying a kaleidoscopic range of references, though the intimacy of his method makes this the most personal record I've heard from him. Blues picking and plangent folky bits straight out of Bert Jansch or Mike Bloomfield rub up against more abstract explorations on 14 short pieces.
While on electric guitar Sharp often seems to be content to trot out avant rock hysterics through a haze of distortion, the acoustic instrument reveals a player of impressive technique and great sensitivity to the moment. "Euwrecka" is a fantastically focussed display of stamina; the guitarist hammers his way through a sequence of minimalist riffage with hypnotic results.
Elsewhere Sharp conjures up a resonant, desolate strain of abstract blues which imagines a collision between the dustbowl atmospherics of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas and the fragile beauties of Hans Reichel's FMP records.The ever reliable Emanem are to be congratulated for putting out a record that's a bit of a departure for them and one which for me anyway, confirms Sharp as a major improvising talent. Worth a listen.
Reviewer: Peter Marsh
ALL-MUSIC GUIDE 2003 - THE VELOCITY OF HUE
"On first contact with this album, two surprises. One: Elliott Sharp on an Emanem CD. This free improv label is known for its roaster of mostly European artists. So to see such a rambunctious American with a rock and blues background on the label is rather unusual. Two: the 14 tracks are all solo improvisations on (gasp!) acoustic guitar. But the shock is pretty easy to get over with once you hit the 'play' button. Sharp has tailored three handfuls of short virtuoso pieces (only four of them cross over the 5-minute mark) that draw from the Blues, the folk finger-picking tradition (Leo Kottke), East-Asian playing (I hear a lot of Chinese traditional pipa music in these fast cyclical motifs), and something indescribable that is pure Sharp. Emanem has released solo acoustic guitar albums before, by Derek Bailey, John Russell, and Roger Smith. This one is very different and could appeal to a considerably larger audience, because, through all the extended techniques and improvisation, the music remains strongly anchored in the Blues. It has that distinctive modal feel and the longing melodies that keep you coming back to it. Highlights include the fast-paced The Skeptic, the short but touching The Face of Another, and Recognition where Sharp plays his modified Godin Duel Multiac bottleneck-style. Definitely not what you?d expect from either Sharp or Emanem, THE VELOCITY OF HUE is like opening a present you thought you had guessed; after the short disappointment of not finding what you expected in the box comes the thrill of realising it?s much better."
FRANÇOIS COUTURE
On the edge
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John L Walters
Friday November 14, 2003
The Guardian
Elliott Sharp's The Velocity of Hue (Emanem, £13.99) is an acoustic guitar album that avoids the cliches of the genre. Sharp, whose Terraplane project is currently touring the UK, is better known as an incendiary electric guitarist, combining good technique with a dangerous streak.
The more domestic, acoustic instrument is not the easiest vehicle for forceful invective. Sharp's achievement on this completely solo project is to find a new palette of sounds and gestures that hint at other areas of music - blues, flamenco, South American, contemporary classical - while staying within his own distinctively weird sound world. And if you're into quantity, there's nearly 70 minutes of rippling solo Sharp to wallow in.
Dusted Reviews
Artist: Elliott Sharp
Album: The Velocity of Hue Label: Emanem
An album of all-acoustic solo guitar improvisations might not be the most surprising thing these days, but when you notice that it's downtown demigod Elliott Sharp featured on this recording (an Emanem disc, no less!) your eyebrows can't help but raise a bit. Can the electronics freakery Sharp is known for in bands like Carbon and Terraplane yield a sensibility supple and intelligent enough to sustain such a demanding performance? Can Sharp hone and focus his almost bafflingly diverse compositional and improvisational interests, given to polytonality and polymetric explosions of Mandelbrot-like complexity? On the strength of this recording, I'd say he absolutely can. With a ready-made instrument - he uses an acoustic modified with a Dobro bridge to give him more range for using extended techniques - Sharp sets about confounding expectations in the most wondrous fashion.
Sharp has always been a player of impressive - at times devastating - technique. And the opening tracks of this disc display this in a no-holds-barred display of frenetic, finger-picking which - like some mutant hybrid of John Fahey and Olaf Rupp - almost spins out of control with its velocity. The crisp steel strings ring out, each note darting forth with a crystalline clarity. Sharp sometimes constructs cascading double-helix lines that snake around you, and elsewhere he cranks out quicksilver arpeggios. And, in one of the record's most impressive performances, one piece features him using his finger-picking abilities to riff on the Wes Montgomery tradition: Sharp plucks out chords at warp speed (sometimes with a ringing choral effect that suggests a 12-string guitar), using these to fram more delicate, reeling spirals of notes. What impresses is not simply the technique (which is impressive), nor the clarity of thought (ditto), but the cumulative structure of the pieces (often built around an evident lyricism). In some sense, this structured lyricism is a bit more evident when Sharp resorts to another of his favored devices, which finds him using an ebow and Shakti-like tapping on the bridge to create hypnotic one-man ragas. As lush, resonant tones float, Sharp sometimes transforms the drone itself into the line, and sometimes creates counterlines of sharp metallic clarity (with pitch-bending and overtones achieved by precise finger hammering). This achieves an effect very similar to that on Hans Reichel's Bonobo Beach.
And every so often, not surprisingly for those who know Sharp's history, an earthy blues lick creeps in or there is a deft use of a slide (or some other glissando device). Only rarely does it sound like some preparation has been used on the instrumentation - with lots of flatted or muted tapping which suggest something within, between, or atop the strings - and on these rare occasions Sharp gets a nice blend of ringing harmonics/overtones and damped blocky sounds. Unlike a lot of solo improve albums, the nearly 70 minute running time doesn't drag on; it's captivating from start to finish. And while it won't get me trading in my copy of The Death of the Rare Bird Ymir, this is a rich, enjoyable recording.
By Jason Bivins
Squid's Ear
Elliott Sharp (Issue Project Room) - June 27, 2003
Elliott Sharp is best known for his complex, hard-edged compositions and his equally intense guitar playing. But Sharp wavers between mathematical expressionism and a Hubert Sumlin-inspired blues, and both sides were presented on a night at the new East Village gallery Issue Project Room. He introduced the evening by saying that he would perform one acoustic set and one "invoking the gods of silicon."
His fractals and electronics are well documented and generally satisfying. A more recent surprise has been his emergence as a serious blues player. Not referential blues, not ironic or post-modern or flashy or British blues, but the real deal, the lowdown, dirty, who's-your-daddy kind of blues. He is, of course, a virtuoso, so he's not just doing the I-IV-V, but hammering and finger picking and taking apart and reassembling the real folk blues.
Rather than merely reviving the past, Sharp plays his own, nonlinear blues. He knows the old vocabulary, but tells new stories. He is among a very few pushing the blues formula forward (or away) and along with Haino Keiji and Loren Connors, is one of the great blues players of the turn of the century, this century. (I'd further offer as a footnote and a footbridge John Lee Hooker's out-of-print double disc "Alone" as a link from the so-called blues to the so-called experimental improv). Of the three, Sharp is certainly the most entrenched in tradition (which is to say people might call me a fool, but only about the other two).
Here's what E# does: he sidesteps the AAAABBAACBAA. He does a reverse pirouette over the 12-bar, bypasses the thistle and gets down to the bone. He not only tears it up, he deals with the pieces. He sweeps the floor and paints the wall besides.
Personally, I hold Muddy Waters responsible for putting the blues on life support. Muddy's Big Beat was so compelling that 20 dozen Robert Crays and a few King brothers all grasped on to the pounding sound. But the blues gots to breathe, it gots to stretch and live. (Or, put more kindly, in a paraphrase borrowed from Muhal Richard Abrams, if you don't have any ideas to push the music forward, then by all means keep the past alive.)
And here's a short list of people who believed the blues should move forward, and not just sit on its ass (to keep the peace, Mr. Morganfield can share the top spot with the venerables Hooker and Sumlin): Lightnin' Hopkins, Charley Patton, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and the Mississippis Fred McDowell and John Hurt. Add Sharp to the list. It's a shame only the avant improv crowd is listening.
-Kurt Hostetter
Cost: $6-10