Jazz Articles about Elliott Sharp

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Elliott Sharp's Terraplane: Forgery

by Eyal Hareuveni
December 20, 2007

Guitarist Elliott Sharp, one of the most influential and innovative figures on the avant-garde New York downtown scene of the last generation, claims that his blues outfit Terraplane (coined after Robert Johnson's “Terraplane Blues") is actually a pop band that lacks only popularity. He is absolutely right. Forgery—the group's fifth release—is its most direct, compact, emotional and, ultimately, most matured to date.Sharp's proficiency is so well-versed in the blues vocabulary, inside and out, that one can imagine him ...

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Elliott Sharp’s Terraplane: Forgery

by AAJ Italy Staff
October 10, 2007

Con questo nuovo lavoro, Forgery - dedicato alla “contraffatta" convinzione che New York sia il centro creativo del mondo, mentre invece è da qualche anno prevalentemente immobilizzata nei propri cliché - i Terraplane di Elliott Sharp vanno, come si suol dire, dritto al sodo. Band che da qualche anno sta lavorando a un attento rinnovamento della materia musicale blues, i Terraplane possiedono in eguale misura coesione e elasticità e tentano con questi undici nuovi brani di stringere con la tradizione ...

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Elliott Sharp - Reinhold Friedl: Feuchtify

by AAJ Italy Staff
March 22, 2007

Chi ha ancora nelle orecchie The Velocity of Hue, il bellissimo lavoro in solo per chitarra acustica di Elliott Sharp, è bene che non si lasci scappare Feuchtify. Strategie, spettri, dettagli di strumentazione tornano ad essere l’essenza di questo nuovo lavoro del musicista americano in collaborazione con il pianista Reinhold Friedl. Feuchtify contiene tredici tracce registrate al Tonic di New York (e poi mixate in uno studio di Berlino Est) in cui l’approccio improvvisativo, vero nocciolo della lirica poetica del ...

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Elliott Sharp: Secret Life

by C. Michael Bailey
February 10, 2007

Multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp expresses music through his own personal filter. He does this in the postmodern spirit: instead of assembling a collection of musical ideals, he adopts musical ideas rooted in the reaction to the restrictions and limitations of those musical ideals. In some highbrow sense that may describe what Ornette Coleman and late John Coltrane were attempting to do with not only jazz, but music in general.

Sharp takes blues, jazz and rock elements, combining them freeform to create ...

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Elliott Sharp & Reinhold Friedl: Feuchitfy

by John Eyles
January 12, 2007

Recorded in New York in March 2001 as part of Elliott Sharp's 50th birthday celebrations, this is the second release from this duo, after Anostalgia (Grob, 2002). The combination of Reinhold Friedl's piano—prepared or played inside—with Sharp's array of instruments is highly distinctive. The two players are adept at laying down repeated patterns—as close as one could ever get to riffs in freely improvised music—which are frequently complex, but also highly engaging and entertaining. Typically, Friedl lays down the pattern ...

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Elliott Sharp & Reinhold Friedl: Feuchtify

by Nic Jones
December 16, 2006

It moves stealthily, this music, and the range of its tonal palette belies the instrumentation. In his piano work Friedl utilises parts of the instrument other than the keyboard, while Sharp makes use of the time-honoured in the form of the dobro and the comparatively new in the form of a computer. And while it's often difficult to decipher the contribution of one from the other, a piece like “Pend" has the effect of throwing the distinction into sharp relief. ...

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Elliott Sharp: Sharp? Monk? Sharp! Monk!

by Elliott Simon
December 15, 2006

A guitarist with a mastery of his instrument's fretboard, Elliott Sharp goes beyond pedestrian picking and strumming for a percussive and pianistic effect that has to be seen to be believed. In fact, Sharp's approach to his instrument is in many ways more reminiscent of a pianist than a guitarist. It is no surprise, then, that the material on his unique tribute to Thelonious, Sharp? Monk? Sharp! Monk!, fits Sharp's style to perfection, allowing him to give a new look ...