An innovative vocalist lost her speech, but she’s still performing
In April, Vienna-based avant-garde jazz vocalist Linda Sharrock gave her first New York performance in over 40 years: a sold-out concert at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, as part of a seriescurated by Solange.
Appearing between poet Claudia Rankine and saxophonist Archie Shepp, Ms. Sharrock guided eight musicians through a fully improvised set while she howled powerfully over the cacophonous squall of free jazz in a declamatory style that evoked the evening’s program title, “TheCry of My People.”
It wasn’t until after she’d received multiple standing ovations that most of the audience realized the 76-year-old singer wasn’t able to speak: Ms. Sharrock became aphasic after a 2009 stroke that paralyzed her right side; she now uses a wheelchair. A few weeks later at the Boston-area home of pianist Eric Zinman, who plays in her group the Linda Sharrock Network, Ms. Sharrock was unable to verbalize much more than “yeah,” “no,” “OK” and “I don’tknow.”
Despite her limited dialogical abilities, Ms. Sharrock was cheerful, charming and quick to laughter. Much of the talking was done by her caregiver, Mario Rechtern, an 81-year-old Austrian free jazz saxophonist who has, by his account, overseen her personal affairs and daily activities for the last 20 years. He not only plays in her band, he helps her dress, feeds her if necessary and carries her down the stairs.
“This work with Linda is consuming,” Mr. Rechtern said, tugging at his woolly gray beard, “and at the same time, I cannot give in to the consuming, because when I give in, she’s lost. So it’s challenging.”
Ms. Sharrock’s return to the stage, a manifestation of her stubborn refusal to be silenced, is one of the most stirring comeback stories in recent memory. Over a career stretching six decades, Ms. Sharrock has been a resolutely singular figure; almost no peers share her uniquely unorthodox vocal delivery.
Too “out” for jazz’s incrowd, she was relegated to relative obscurity. Yet her commitment to challenging her audience has ultimately made her a role model for experimental vocalists and Black female performers.
Poet-vocalist Camae Ayewa, who performs as Moor Mother, recalled hearing Ms. Sharrock’s music for the first time and “losing my mind,” she said in an interview. “I wrote a little poem about this because it was such urgency on my part to be like, ‘What is going on here? This is where I want to go! This is what I want to sound like!’ I hadn’t heard anyone before that had inspired me this way besides Betty Carter. I just started to be obsessed about it.”
Ms. Sharrock’s vocal exclamations have become deeper and more guttural moans than the high-pitched shrieks of her early work with her then-husband, musician Sonny Sharrock. In the late 1960s, Sonny revolutionized jazz guitar through volume, distortion and feedback while playing with Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis. Linda’s approach was no less radical: On three albums of collaborations with Sonny, beginning with their remarkable 1969 debut “Black Woman,” her wordless exhortations included psychedelic sighs, orgasmic yodels and bloodchilling screams, all delivered with an intensity that made “Plastic Ono Band”era Yoko Ono sound like Anne Murray in comparison.
Ms. Sharrock moved to New York after graduating from high school in 1965 with the intention to study painting, but soon became immersed in the Lower East
Side’s jazz scene, where her inaugural professional gig was singing with Sanders. When she first began performing, she shaved off her eyebrows and kept her hair close-cropped, she told The New York Times Magazine in 1975. “It was the strangest look I could conceive of,” she said. “My life had taken such a drastic change, I wanted to present it physically.”
She met Sonny through Sanders, and they married in 1967. Earnings for most free jazz musicians were lean, but that year, Sonny got the opportunity to work with the commercially successful jazz-funk flutist Herbie Mann, and spent most of the next seven years playing in his group. Linda went on tour with them and eventually joined the band, usually performing two of the couple’s compositions each night, “Black Woman” and “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black.”
The Sharrocks lived in an apartment at 77 E. Third St. in the East Village; pianist Dave Burrell was a neighbor and hosted rehearsals for the 1969 “Black Woman” album in his tiny living room. Mr. Burrell recalled in an interview that hearing Ms. Sharrock sing for the first time, “I felt a bolt of excitement,” he said. “I thought of her as a vocalist who could throw herself into the ‘Black is beautiful’ moment and movement, and that made her one of the boys, so having her around was cool.”
After Linda and Sonny divorced, she moved to Turkey and then Vienna, where she met her second husband, Austrian saxophonist Wolfgang Puschnig, a few years later. (Sonny died in 1994 at 53.) Initially they were just musical collaborators, Mr. Puschnig said in a video call from his home in southern Austria, but a relationship blossomed and they were married in 1987 while in Mozambique for a gig.
Under their own names and in groups like the Pat Brothers, AM4 and Red Sun, Mr. Puschnig and Ms. Sharrock recorded more than 20 albums together on European and South Korean labels from 1986 to 2007, but her vocal approach had changed markedly. Mr. Puschnig said that she moved away from singing in her free style after consulting a former Ziegfeld girl turned palm reader, who told her, “I see you’re a singer, but you don’t use words, but you should because you have a talent to use words.”
Mr. Puschnig said Ms. Sharrock’s health started to deteriorate in the mid-1990s, and although their romantic relationship ended around 1996, they continued working together as late as 2007. Around 2004, Mr. Rechtern. who had first met Sharrock in 1979, began caring for her, and wasgranted power of attorney in2007.