Paradise

In my nascent days of free-jazz lapping, it was much easier to hear of Sonny Sharrock than to actually hear him. Sure, there were snatches, be it from his last (and convolutedly enough, most popular) work, the theme to Space Ghost, or his extra-dimensional tremors as sideman on Pharoah Sanders' Tauhid. But unless you felt like digging for some buried moments on Herbie Mann records (or his unaccredited turn on Miles' Jack Johnson), you were stuck with his 80s and 90s work. While Ask the Ages was furious (again teaming him with Sanders), and Guitar burned through Bill Laswell's slickness, most of us were stuck gleaming his six-string prophecies from the sludgy supergroup Last Exit, where he shared earspace with Laswell, Peter Brötzmann, and Ronald Shannon Jackson.

Only in the last two years has this changed, with a CD version of Black Woman finally unveiling the free-jazz fury that Sharrock concocted at the end of the 60s with wife Linda, pianist Don Pullen, and percussive octopus Milford Graves. A singular testament in the proto-forms of fire music's freedom skronk and feral rock howl, a follow-up would be daunting to any artist. And so, when he next turned up, in the BYG-Actuel series with Monkey Pocky Boo, Sharrock avoided the instrument that he reinvented for the free jazz genre, instead reaching for the, uh... slide whistle for half of side one.

Paradise was released five years later, and it headed straight for the cutout bins, rarely even filed under the "jazz" section in record stores. Looking like a disco-diva record, it came at a time when George Benson and Chuck Mangione were what "jazz" sounded like. And while the free and furious improvising of Sharrock's past two records could arguably not be called jazz, either, this time around the Sharrocks did away with their own history, as well as that of the genre, letting out something that defiantly remains unclassifiable and as outside of human time as that oft-idealized Paradise itself.

Taking their cue from modern R&B; radio and slick funk, "Apollo" commences with a dusted Diana Ross-like sighing before Linda decides to have a deep-throating contest, taking the mic far down her gullet for some gurgling. Meanwhile, the backing band starts acting like a zooted Gap Band before morphing into a prog band midway through, escalating into the upper registers of the synth. Sonny Sharrock starts off with a jubilant, almost African guitar tone, but then performs some positively dripping primordial No-Wave slobber in endlessly cascading/ascending guitar lines that slurp and go just far enough out, setting the table for the next 20 years of New York guitarists-- right up to Sonic Youth's shredding on "100%". By the time Linda's punched back into the track, with her salving vocal sighs and soft instrumental bedding, the crazy jag that just occurred is all but forgotten.

Producer (and noted tape composer in his own right) Ilhan Mimaroglu has a definite hand here in mashing the disparate strands of "Apollo" together, somewhere between his graceful massaging of the exotic jungle into the hairy back of Mingus' Cumbia & Jazz Fusion and his political acid-trip tape-splicing frenzy of Freddie Hubbard's Sing a Song of Song My, but it still makes little sense in the overall scheme of things, a belle confusion.

Continuing the schizophrenic oscillations between barbed Ono-outburst and velvety vowel abstraction is the beautiful respite of "End of the Rainbow", where Linda's wordless serenity swirls with washes of cymbals. The concord doesn't remain for long-- "Miss Doris" comes along clanking cowbells and timbales that bleed into a clavinet quiver. The sound quickly reaches g-funk frequencies as piercing as the continued caterwauls of the Missus, which go to that unholy place between Diamanda Galas and Curly of the Three Stooges. For more glottal oddities, she turns her lingua into a wah pedal on "1953 Blue Boogie Children", mixing Mellotron with Morse code as Sonny alternates channels of ping and pulverization brilliantly. The climax comes with the closer, "Gary's Step", which continually crescendos and then levitates even higher into the stratosphere for eight minutes, invoking the Ecclesiastics of classic free jazz's soulful wail, the one such piece that harkens to their past.

This is a strain of funk far from that of the Mothership, or even the tumultuous punched-in lurch of Miles' On the Corner. It's somewhat like the proto no-wave achieved on Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band, combining Yin yips with hubby's masculine string malevolence over a rock-solid rhythmic pulse. No matter how much gibberish is splattered about by the couple, the bass and drums chugs along intact, greasing the broken chunks of tongue and guitar so that it's easier to swallow down. A quarter of a century on, Paradise is coming to be delectably digestible.