Sonny Sharrock - Ask the Ages

someone buy my cd for 50$

no way is this alb better than 'black woman'

i've been trying to find a copy of this for a long time too but thanks to this thread i just went fuck it and got it 'elsewhere'. first listen and it's certainly a different beast than "black woman" but a beast nonetheless

o hey, "someone's" selling this on discogs for ONLY 20$!

man, i love this album so much. got mine for $6 in 2005 when i found one in the record store where i worked, and begged my boss to sell it to me for mad cheap. thanks sandy!

btw if anyone wants to help me start a campaign to press this shit on vinyl, im in.

*enlists*

all we need is a screenprinter and a kickstarter

i got screenprinting gear, but v low tech like speedball yo. would proably want someone who knows what they're doing. dunno nothing about having vinyl printed or rights acquisition. or are we talking about an "import"? webs of mystery. you know anyone who's pressed vinyl?

we should recommend this one to ilxor

ha, cool -- don't recall if it's been brought up in that thread or not. i know sharrock in general's come up. i can't find a damn thing by him in the local shops but i'll def keep an eye out!

this is my fav. jazz record too fwiw

I got deeply into this album about 6 mo. before he died. At the time, I was in music school and lived with a bunch of jazz majors -- most of whom were suspect of free practitioners like Sharrock and Sanders tho probably only outright hostile to the latter due to his propensity to revert to pig-squealing noise in lieu of chord substitutions or modality even.

My memory of Ask the Ages was strong tunes and arrangements, great Pharaoh solos, but that Charnette seemed maybe a little out of his league. Listening again for the first time in, er, ages, I'm not hearing any problems with Charnette and loving the tunes. Whoever called the title track from Here Come the Warm Jets on "Once Upon a Time" is spot on.

Also dug out Last Exit for the first time in eons. Despite the ridiculous press releases touting them as drunken marauders pillaging towns across Europe, I've always loved most of these records. Not sure the ever topped "Line of Fire" from Cassette Recordings -- 20 minutes that captures the best of each member: Brotzmann in full ale-swilling blare, Shannon Jackson rolling and grooving, Sharrock doing his thing supported by Laswell, whose playing on these records is better than anything he did. He just fit in perfectly between Sharrock's chordal stabs and Shannon Jackson's grooves.

still sounds like one of the flat-out best america albums of the 90s, with little competition

^ add n to x

Spotify has Ask The Ages, also Pharoah's much earlier Tauhid, where Mr. SS is the beep-beep roadrunner, goading the leader's sunrise-on-the-Nile song into a water buffalo bellow (if the Nile didn't have such critters before, it does now). He's also the team provocateur on the first two tracks of Pharoah's Ipzopho Zam, then, on the 28 minute-and change title track, comes up with what I think of an African-Caribbean riff--rippling, tensile, succinct--which turns out to be his iteration, or maybe invention, of the group theme (gliding and boiling through sunburst saxes, lattices of percussion, bass, keys, Leon Thomas yodeling in tongues, but also in tune, and not too much, honest!). Spotify doesn't have that one, but they have a bunch of others Sharrock played on, incl ones they list, and others here (with a few more in Allmusic, like a couple more Herbie Mann albums)
http://www.sonnysharrock.com/info.asp?pgs=discography

He's also the team provocateur on the first two tracks--emphasis on "team" here: mostly discreet, sometimes sneaky--listen on headphones.

Last Exit's stuff really holds up, especially the live albums—Iron Path, their only studio record, is a little tame. When I interviewed Laswell a year or two ago, I briefly brought up the idea of assembling a Last Exit box, and he said it could definitely be done, and that there were plenty of other unreleased recordings, but that it would be very labor intensive to find and organize the tapes. I think if I ever launched a Kickstarter project, that would be it—a massive Last Exit box with as much unreleased stuff as could be unearthed.

Yeah man--still a lot of incredible Sharrock here and there in the Interweb universes---recently heard Pharoah with Sonny and the dual-drummer combo in Japan: robust vocal intro (not Leon-style yodeling)maybe Sonny, who was a singer way before starting over as a guitarist. It's wordless at first then, "My mother's son/My father's son", and onto the guitar (sounds like another guitar behind his solo; Nicky S., perhaps?), sax, bass drums--9 minutes rolling like 3.

http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=469038
this was upped to Dime a couple of weeks ago. I couldn't work out how to find this thread and post to it at the time,Has search engine actually started working again, just did this today with google.

Lovely set with 3 of the 4 players from the lp but Pheroaan AkLaff on drums instead of Elvin Jones.
Very good set, a bit less droney than the lp, more upbeat not so old -timey. Extended versions of several of the lp tracks plus a 17 minute plus upper and Lower Egypt

Whoa would love to hear that! I'm not on DAD unfortunately.

http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=3370

I was hoping the tread-revive was due to an impending vinyl reissue.

I've been listening to ATA in the car this week. It's beautiful. I really didn't dig it when I got it in the late 90's during my first furtive forays into free jazz because it sounded tame to me compared to Tauhid or Izipho Zam or whatever shreddin' Sonny I'd heard at that point. It sounded like a Santana record to me back then, which was a bad thing (I've since come around on Santana, too) and I traded it away. I picked it up again on the cheap a year or so back and now it sounds perfect to my old ass. Dude left us too soon!

have also been listening to this a lot the last 2-3 weeks, coincidentally. Great record, tho I think of it less as "free jazz", than an extension of mid 60s Impulse/Coltrane quartet sound. Will have to check out that live set.

an extension of mid 60s Impulse/Coltrane quartet sound

I'm seeing that Hive Mind Records is doing a vinyl reissue - double LP, 45rpm, edition of 500. I feel like I'll look forward to this and then look forward to paying exorbitant prices to a flipper. Still, sounds pretty cool.

Kinda surprised I never once popped into this thread over the years just to say 'masterpiece.'

i have it on cassette, sounds great. will happily dub it for you if you’d like xp

and yeah. masterpiece.

is there a link to some info about this new vinyl release? if it's that limited i don't have much of a chance but a guy can dream.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BtwQ-YDAv6e/

hivemindrecords
Coming soon
2 x 12” 45rpm
First time on vinyl for Sonny Sharrock’s final album, which features Pharoah Sanders on sax, Elvin Jones on drums and a young Charnett Moffett on bass. The whole lovely package was produced by Bill Laswell and originally released in 1991. We feel the 45rpm pressing was the only way to give the album the sound quality it deserves.
Limited to 500 copies
Available soon.
#newvinyl #newrelease #vinyl #vinylcommunity #vinylcommunitypost #jazz #jazzvinyl #sonnysharrock #pharoahsanders #elvinjones #elvinjonesjazzmachine #charnettmoffett #billlasswell

thank u

I never know where they come up with a number like 500 - is that all these labels feel like they can be sure they'll sell? Is 1000 too big a run?

having run a small reissue label
i do have an answer
sitting on 80 units at $7 each
after you sell the bulk of it
and are still not in the black
it’s hard
the margins are so slight
double your order (500 vs 1000)
and your cost goes way down
but who wants to buy those 580 rex

so. i’m drunk, maybe have a better answer in the morning

labels that manufacture mystique and purposely run short are garbage

the point is get music to people

Or a licensing thing. Hopefully there will be digital on bandcamp as well but there's also a good chance they don't have the digital rights.

I highly doubt that a Sonny Sharrock reissue is going to crash the Hive Mind Records website the minute the presale goes up. Those 500 copies will be around for a while.

I'm guessing Laswell still maintains the digital rights- he did a CD reissue a couple of years ago. Neither reissue looks like they're going with the low-budget but very beloved (by me) original artwork, for reasons unknown.

also can I just say that A) I adore Sonny Sharrock and B) the more I think about it this is one of my favorite albums ever

yeah you can definitely say that

b) mee too :)

The new artwork is so boring. Also, double 45's is my least favorite way to listen to an album that was never conceived as a double album. I came to listen to the jams, not get up every 12 minutes.

What I'm saying is that I'll be sticking with my old cd of this all-time great.

Agreed on the artwork. Just because this record is something else, it doesn't need to look like Something Else.

I kind of like the new artwork, anyway I'm way into this, esp double 45s, I wonder what the source is? Original tapes, hopefully.

I love this record so much. A friend of mine owns this on cassette!

i just assumed the image was only for the ig announcement tbh

I hope that's not the real cover. Laswell's M.O.D. Technologies label reissued it on CD in 2015, with this cover:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Fjl3hcK7L.jpg

That's not bad. (The CD is already out of print - I wonder if they only had the rights for a little while, or a limited print run, too?)

I'm guessing Laswell still maintains the digital rights

Possibly not as he has a lot of stuff on Bandcamp (including Sharrock's 'Guitar') but not ATA.

that reissue cover is bad too

og cover is totally cool don't fix a thing that isn't broke

it's available to order now

thanks, got it. even with shipping to the u.s. the price wasn't outrageous which is cool.

Oh? I’m not seeing anything on hive mind’s website.

go to their bandcamp

Bull Moose Music still has a few copies of the 2015 M.O.D. CD in stock. all of M.O.D.'s releases from 2016 onward have been digital-only, and it looks like they're allowing their other CD releases to go out of print as well