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Blind Willy

by Elliott Sharp

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about

Blind Willy was composed by Sonny Sharrock and first appeared on his 1969 album Black Woman and is his tribute to the legendary Blind Willie Johnson. 1969 was also when I first heard Sonny in performance with the Herbie Mann band. I was familiar with Sonny's playing from his album Monkie Pockie Boo and Pharoah Sanders' record Tauhid but to hear him live was earth-shattering. Not long after I moved to NYC in 1979, I met Sonny and we became friends, and later, labelmates on Enemy Records. We performed together a few times in Europe, an unforgettable experience. This track was recorded in 1994 a few months after Sonny's tragic and untimely death, a small tribute to his visionary genius on guitar.

The first guitar track was played on a Fender D'Aquisto Standard archtop in an open-B tuning both mic'd acoustically and through a digital delay into a Fender Princeton amp. The melody and solo were played on my 1973 Gibson Les Paul Custom through a Rat distortion pedal into a Fender 75 amplifier. The Les Paul Custom was Sonny's instrument of choice and he plugged it into a Rat and then into a Marshall amp.

This track had been essentially lost since its recording. Finding a trove of DAT tapes in storage just now in September 2020, I was able to restore and master it for release.

credits

released September 14, 2020
E# - guitars.

Recorded and mixed at Studio zOaR - NYC.

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Elliott Sharp New York, New York

Elliott Sharp: composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, author, leads Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics and Terraplane with compositional strategies including fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors as well as new techniques for graphic notation to yield work that catalyzes a synesthetic approach to musicmaking as well as functioning as retinal art. ... more

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