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Elliott Sharp: Secret Life
by C. Michael Bailey
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 ...
Continue ReadingElliott Sharp & Reinhold Friedl: Feuchitfy
by John Eyles
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 ...
Continue ReadingElliott Sharp & Reinhold Friedl: Feuchtify
by Nic Jones
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. ...
Continue ReadingElliott Sharp: Sharp? Monk? Sharp! Monk!
by Elliott Simon
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 ...
Continue ReadingElliott Sharp: Sharp? Monk? Sharp! Monk!
by Mark Corroto
Elliott Sharp might have once been described as a skinny kid from Cleveland, Ohio who has come to steal your women and drink your beer. But that, my friends, was a long time ago. A graduate of the New York Downtown scene of the 1980s and 1990s, Sharp has branched out into string quartets, hard-core blues, electronics, orchestral music and soundtracks. His interests and imagination are never exceeded by his grasp. That's why his take on five classic ...
Continue ReadingElliott Sharp: String Quartets: 1986-1996
by Farrell Lowe
One of the epigrams from composer Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies notes that “repetition is a form of change" and that sort of idea is at the core of E#'s concepts in relation to this recording of string quartets--but it is a form of repetition that mutates like an old Delta blues. Consider the guitar work of Mance Lipscomb. Even though he's using a somewhat rigid form of "the blues," his guitar and vocal work cascades around the signposts of that ...
Continue ReadingElliott Sharp's "Terraplane": Blues For Next
by Glenn Astarita
Blues For Next is the newly released two CD set by New York City downtown scene guitar god Elliott Sharp, as this recording bespeaks a bit of a diversion from the guitarist’s usual blend consisting of hard-core prog-rock/modern jazz and EFX based stylizations. On disc one, subtitled “Plus”, the guitarist utilizes the vocal talents of Eric Mingus and Dean Bowman while disc two signifies the “Quartet” and vocal-less part of the presentation.
Unfortunately, the bluesy proceedings on the first disc ...
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