#mod technologies

But none of this mattered to Sonny Sharrock, because the guitarist had already done his time in the wilderness. In the 1960s and early 1970s Sharrock was a marvelously disruptive presence on records by Herbie Mann, Wayne Shorter, Pharoah Sanders, Marzette Watts, and (uncredited) Miles Davis. With his wife Linda, he also made a couple mind-boggling records of primal blurt and another of unsuccessful disco compromise. Then in the late 1970s they split, and he retreated into day job anonymity. He never quit playing, but his appearances were rare until Bill Laswell lured him back into the ring. First came sessions with Laswell’s Material project, then some middling, pop-oriented solo records and a stint with free jazz supergroup Last Exit. The quality control in those years was sufficiently lax that no one saw Ask The Ages coming, and no one was really ready for it to be as great as it was. 

The brief was to revisit the free jazz of yore, but that’s not really what went down. Laswell rounded up former John Coltrane compadres Pharoah Sanders, a former wild man saxophonist who at the time was mostly playing languid treatments of jazz standards, and drummer Elvin Jones, plus generation-younger bassist Charnett Moffett. Sharrock brought two things; a half-dozen themes that sharpened the melodicism of his recent work to a fine point, and a determination to reconcile that that tunefulness with a sustained blast of the fire that had only flared intermittently in recent years. The quartet rose to the challenge. Jones summoned the surging, polyrhythmic force of his work in the Coltrane quartet; Sanders blew with a force and acuity that no one thought he had in him anymore; and Moffett locked in with Jones to provided an ancient, woody tone and stark, swinging bass lines. Sharrock ranged with consummate ease between bold, clean single-note leads and brute, uncouth explosions of grime.   

When the record came out in 1991, people noticed. It argued in a way that nothing else around did that the glory of free jazz wasn’t a footnote and didn’t have to hide away in tiny corners. It spoke to a new generation of jazz fans, people like Charles Waters and Andrew Barker of the Gold Sparkle Band too young to have been around the first time but who were inspired by the record’s example to aim in directions that it pointed. And it sure made you want to hear what Sharrock was going to do next. Sadly that didn’t work out; while his performance of the Space Ghost theme made him an ongoing presence on cable TV, he never made another record. Instead he angled for a sweet deal, nearly got it, and then died of a heart attack in 1994. He was gone, and then so was Ask The Ages.  The record disappeared along with much of the Axiom Records catalogue into a quagmire of uncertain ownership instigated by the break-up of parent label Island Records. Apparently Laswell has sorted that stuff out, because it was one of the first releases slated for his newest imprint, M.O.D. Industries. The new CD edition of Ask The Ages comes packaged in a digipak that fails to improve upon the striving-for-iconicity ugliness of the original, but the remastered sound does no harm and gives Moffett a slight, welcome boost. Perhaps most important for today’s discerning consumers is the news that the record, which came out at the height of the CD age, will eventually get a vinyl release. But really, the important thing is that it is back, undiminished and glorious.