Elliott Sharp's Terraplane - Forgery

DIRECT—MASSIVE—UNFUSSY—AGGRESSIVE

The title Forgery refers to the current condition in New York, a city that pretends to be on the pulse of the world but has in fact long since become a museum of itself. With Forgery Elliott Sharp is turning to a new audience. Terraplane is, as Sharp himself says, a pop band that lacks only popularity. That will surely change now with its most mature and yet most provocative album yet. Terraplane — the blues of the future, which gets by without the romance of the cotton field.

Few musicians have presented as many different stylistic facets over the course of their careers as the New York guitarist, bassist, clarinetist, and composer Elliott Sharp. He was one of the protagonists of the legendary New York downtown avant-garde scene that produced such other original artists as John Lurie, Fred Frith, and John Zorn. With Mofungo, already in the 1980s, he was producing a type of folk that today’s antifolk heroes would be proud to espouse. With his long-standing formation Carbon he tried out all imaginable intertwinings of jazz and hardcore. With the Semantics he played a style of experimental jazz that was informed as much by blues as by serial music. With Tectonics he was one of the pioneers of freely improvised techno. And in the guitar trio Oblique, with David Torn and Vernon Reid, he devoted himself to gigantomaniac guitar madness. In addition he wrote pieces for orchestra and string quartet, invented a series of exotic big city instruments, and provided a regular series of scene updates on the current creativity of the New York sound in his State of the Union compilations. It scarcely seems to fit with the image of this bustling constant innovator that he should have a blues band as well. But Terraplane is anything but an abashed night-job project by these New York musician; rather, it turns out to have been Sharp’s most stable band over decades, with which he tours constantly and has produced a wealth of albums.

When Terraplane’s new album is placed in the context of the blues band Hazmat Modine, the bluegrass rebels O’ Death, and the Gypsy punk guerrillas of Gogol Bordello, it is clear that Sharp is once again out in front of a new movement. New York fell into a kind of creative lethargy after 9/11, but now the first voices are emerging from hibernation. It is not the avant-garde that is re-forming but rather a scene that is formulating a new relationship to tradition from a wide variety of perspectives. It is not tradition in the sense of neoconservatism but rather a new rebelliousness that does not want to permit the cultural legacy of the diverse ethnic groups of the United States to be exploited by a one-sided abuse of power. It also has a special relationship to the tradition of the blues. “Whenever we have an especially repressive government, the blues experiences its most powerful phases,” says Sharp. “In that sense the blues is just the right form of expression for our time. We are not interested in making didactic speeches, but the music itself has such a strong subversive potential that he speaks directly to people’s emotions at such times.”

So it should come as no surprise that Forgery is unusually hard, direct, massive, and unfussy in comparison to its most recent albums. The grooves are more direct than ever; the singing blunt, the solos driving and aggressive. A punk album among blues disks but nevertheless, or precisely for that reason, an entirely authentic expression of urban blues. “The songs themselves are much more the focus of this record than in the past,” admits Sharp. The band is more compactly deployed than ever. An old wise saying of R&B says that the most effective music is based on a funky rhythm section and a jazzy horn section. We put that precept to work fully.”

Once again Sharp has assembled a handful of masters in their respective fields, including the vocal secret weapon Eric Mingus, son of the legendary jazz magician Charles Mingus; the poet Tracy Morris, who turns “Katrina Blues” into a highlight here; trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, whose lush sound has previously rounded off albums by the Lounge Lizards, the Jazz Passengers, and Bill Frisell; and Dave Hofstra, one of the most senior and experienced bassists from the Big Apple, who was a founding member of Terraplane. Newcomer drummer Tony Lewis frees the band of jazzy ballast. The album is dedicated to Terraplane’s former drummer Lance Carter, who died recently.

The title Forgery refers to the current condition in New York, a city that pretends to be on the pulse of the world but has in fact long since become a museum of itself: the biggest yuppie community in the Western hemisphere, where the last traces of its former life are being eradicated. Sharp was always a sensitive chronicler of the New York state of mine. “Back then, all you had to do was leave your apartment and you would meet people you knew. Life took place on the street. Today everybody takes refuge behind a computer, and everyday life in New York has become very lonely. Even the lowest common denominator of social life — shopping — has been banished to the Internet for good. Nothing is left of the New York I once loved.”

With Forgery Elliott Sharp is turning to a new audience. Terraplane is, as Sharp himself says, a pop band that lacks only popularity. That will surely change now with its most mature and yet most provocative album yet. Terraplane — the blues of the future, which gets by without the romance of the cotton field and sticks its fingers in the gaping wounds of the twenty-first century.