Joe Morris & Elliott Sharp - Realism

Producer's notes:
Pairing my two favorite guitarists, Joe Morris and Elliott Sharp, succeeded—pardon the cliché—beyond my wildest dreams. Their contrasts and their commonalities came together in the studio in ways I’d never even imagined. The old ESP slogan “You never heard such sounds in your life” seemed as apt as it had ever been. Engineer Jim Clouse and I could barely believe what we were hearing, or even seeing—there were wave forms on the monitor we’d never witnessed before: instead of the usual spiky soundwaves of peaks and valleys, there were squiggles that looked like alien scripts imagined for a science-fiction movie!

Each track on Realism is kind of like three tracks: acoustic, effects, and the combination. Thus, in a way, the players are dueting not only with each other but also with themselves. (Morris is on the left, Sharp is on the right.) There is intentionality but also openness to the unplanned. Sometimes this kind of music is called “abstract” because it’s not made up of just simple melodies, harmonies, and rhythmic beats (and this session reminded me that the guitar is inherently a percussive instrument, though of course great players have ways of sometimes making us forget that). Everything is “abstract” on some level, but that doesn’t mean its impact on listeners is solely abstract. As Albert Ayler demonstrated vividly, the sound of the notes is an integral part of how music is received by listeners, timbres mattering as much or even more than the pitches chosen in the heat of improvisation— the gestural shapes of the players’ lines and the way they intertwine create complex textures that reach our brains on both emotional and abstract levels that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Ever since this session, I’ve been telling people it’ll be the most far-out album in ESP’s storied history—and that’s saying something when the label brought you Albert Ayler, The Godz, Sun Ra, and MIJ. And now, here it is.