Bruce Gallanter interviews Elliott Sharp, Joe Fonda at Downtown Music Gallery event

2026, January 22

United States

On January 12, Downtown Music Gallery in New York City hosted a public reading and discussion featuring Elliott Sharp and Joe Fonda, followed by their first-ever live performance together as a duo. The event also included extended, in-person interviews conducted by Bruce Gallanter focused on the artists’ recently published books.

Sharp read first from his new book, Feedback: Translations from the IrRational, and was then interviewed by Gallanter. Fonda then discussed passages from his new book, My Life in the World of Music. After these talks, Sharp and Fonda, who have known each other since 1978, performed together using a variety of extended techniques. Sharp played his electroacoustic guitar through an amplifier, while Fonda played acoustic contrabass with no amplification.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity.

Bruce Gallanter: Elliott, I have a few questions for you.

Elliott Sharp: Okay, if we have time.

Gallanter Yeah. When did you pick up the guitar?

Sharp 1968.

Gallanter And you would listen to mostly rock music at that point?

Sharp Yeah, and classical music. I played classical piano as a kid and classical clarinet after that when I was eight, when the piano gave me asthma (in my interpretation) that nearly killed me. So I played clarinet, then I got an electric guitar, and that was it. The clarinet went by the wayside. Also, I got kicked out of wind ensemble and marching band because I came back from a summer residency after my junior year with long hair and a beard, and Al Renino, the band director, would have none of that.

Gallanter When you first started playing, were you playing kind of blues rock stuff at the beginning?

Sharp Well, making psychedelic noise, I was very inspired by readings I was doing in Cage, I was an electronics geek, so I was building my own circuits and experimenting with tape delays and building ring modulators and fuzz, so I was making a lot of noise... and trying to learn Jeff Beck's guitar playing from the Yardbirds records and then Jimi Hendrix. I mean, Jeff Beck's playing, at least I could find the notes. With Hendrix, it was beyond me at first, it was just so sonic, you know, but yeah, and a lot of blues, country blues, playing a lot of slide.

Gallanter So you played in blues rock bands?

Sharp Yeah. I was playing, the first blues band I was in was called the MFBB, the MotherFucking Blues Band, and I was playing bass in that.

Gallanter And that was '68, '69?

Sharp That was '68, '69 when I was still in high school. I started playing guitar and pedal steel in bands in Ithaca in 1970 when I was at Cornell.

Gallanter OK. That's where you went to school first?

Sharp Yeah.

Gallanter So you've had I mean, I know that most people think of you more as avant-garde kind of noisemaker, even with the guitar and the other instruments that you play, but it seems that you've always had that blues thing.

Sharp Yeah, blues. And I went for a long period of playing bebop and studying with Roswell Rudd. But I'll still do gigs occasionally, playing like for a party, playing some blues or jazz or funk tunes, and people come and say, well, I didn't know you actually knew how to play guitar.

Gallanter Somebody said the same thing today when we had on that Terraplane CD. They said, this is Elliott Sharp? He plays the blues? I said, he plays the blues really well, and he's obviously studied it, because you've been doing records of that, starting with that Hoosegow record.

Sharp Right. Well, even going back for that playing in bands that never recorded, but the first Terraplane record was in 1994. And also, I mean, Just living with that music and going to hear as much of it live as I could. And then working with Hubert Sumlin from 1994 until he passed away.

Gallanter Hubert Summon played guitar for...

Sharp Howlin' Wolf and a little bit with Muddy Waters, but without Hubert; Hubert's DNA is throughout American electric blues playing. Without Hubert, there would have been no Jimi Hendrix, no Eric Clapton, no Robbie Robertson, and Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page. And his playing is throughout. Hubert was what's called by his former manager, the Picasso of the blues, because he took a very Cubist approach. Hubert was very spontaneous. And I mean, his playing was very unpredictable and very vocal. And he'd just interject weird little noises and pops and slides and bangs and screams and laughs. I mean, really, he could do anything. And as I said, I worked with Hubert for many years and standing this far away from him. We took Hubert on tour to Europe a number of times and to England. Watching his right hand, and I still have no idea how he played what he played. He had an incredibly relaxed right hand usage - no pick - so it was mostly the left-handed. Yet he would have this amazing articulation there, and Hubert was a master. Supernatural.

Gallanter Tell me about meeting Jimi Hendrix.

Sharp Sure. Well, I was in Manny's Music in July of 1969.

Gallanter This is a famous music store where you buy equipment, and there was like a whole row of these stores.

Sharp And there was, yeah, music row on 48th. And there was a wall of pictures of famous musicians who bought their stuff there. So I'm sitting there trying out the cheapest Gibson guitar they had. And I'm just, you know, as I said, I was doing a lot of noise, but I really didn't have a lot of regular chops on guitar. So I was playing the three chords to Gloria, and I see standing in front of me gold boots and turquoise pants, and I look up, and it's Jimi Hendrix smiling down at me. So I put the guitar down, and I went, oh, hi. And he was very kind, very sweet guy, you could tell. And he went, oh, hi. And then he was trying out fuzzboxes. So I had like a private concert of Jimi Hendrix trying out fuzzboxes for 40 minutes. Mind-blowing. And he played it on, was it Dick Cavett? Yeah, Dick Cavett that night playing. And he was playing with the two guys from the house band backing him up.

Gallanter Ed Shaughnessy...?

Sharp Ed Shaughnessy on drums. This kind of chubby session guy wearing an Apache scarf, you know. But they played okay. They played great. I think he played Hear My Train A Comin', and a very funny interview with, with Cavett. I mean, you could see he was a very humble guy. Cavett said, well, people say you're one of the world's greatest guitar players. He said 'No, no, no man...'

Gallanter He was much more humble than people thought. Over the past, I don't know, maybe 10 years, a large number of musicians that I know have been putting up books.

Sharp Yeah. It's just an old saying. Young people do things. Old people write books. I don't know who said that. I've tried to find who said that first.

Gallanter There's some truth in that. And I get these books, I read them all. And I learned a lot. A lot of them have good interviews with other people. And Elliott put out a book in 2018, which was more autobiographical. He just sold out of copies. And he put out a book this year called Feedback. And that book is kind of him digging into the different ideas that he had in the other book and on those ideas. And I find this book fascinating because he talks about all the different types of music that he's been involved with and concepts of music and the way music affects people. And I just read a couple of pages at a time and think about what he says and think about how his concept applies to my understanding of music. So we have some copies on the counter. Elliott will sign them if you'd like. We don't have any copies of the first one, but he's going to get more made.

Sharp It's out of print, actually. It went through two printings, which I'm really happy about. And what the publisher, which is Terranova Press, run by David Rothenberg, who you may know as a composer and clarinetist and author, he's going to start doing print-on-demand. So that will be available again.

Gallanter So Joe Fonda also wrote a book about his life that came out recently. And I just want to say that I met Elliott in 1980 in New York. That was kind of, for me, the beginning of the downtown scene, because within about three years between 79 and 81, I met John Zorn, Eugene Chadborn, Pauli Bradfield, Wayne Horvitz, Robin Holcomb, Tom Cora,. All those people I didn't know, and we all became friends, and I watched them all develop and evolve in all kinds of ways. First time I saw Elliott play, he was playing tenor sax in a trio, at The Performing Garage, maybe?

Sharp Yeah. The Trio In Transit with Steve Piccolo, the original bass player in The Lounge Lizards, is an old and dear friend of mine from the university days, and the great Denis Charles on drums, who was really one of my favorite drummers, favorite people. I couldn't believe it when I moved to where I was living, I was introduced to Denis, who lived across the street, so we got to hang all the time, and Denis of course, played with my former teacher, Roswell Rudd. There's a great record called School Days of Roswell and Steve Lacey, and, who's the bass player on that?

Gallanter Henry Grimes.

Gallanter So I know this guy almost as long. I've seen him in a lot of different bands, Joe Fonda. I like his book because it's really about his life. And a lot of these books, I get to learn people's stories. And everybody has a different story. And we kind of learn about how they came up and what kind of molded them. You played electric bass in the early days?

Joe Fonda: Yeah.

Gallanter When you started out?

Fonda Yeah, sure. I didn't even know there was such a thing as an upright bass as a teenager.

Gallanter You're about the same age as me.

Fonda I'm 71 now. How old are you?

Gallanter 71. All right, so we're the same age. So we grew up during the same period of time. And your father was a trumpet player?

Fonda My father was a trumpet player, yep.

Gallanter And you played with him?

Fonda I did, yeah. Let's see, I graduated in '73. So I played with him in '72 when he started to play again near the end of his life. Yeah. It's in the book, but it's amazing that my father showed up at a rock gig. I had a rock band like every kid my age, and he said, man, you sounded good, I want you to come and play with us. He was running a jam session at this bowling alley in this small upstate town where we lived, and he said, you come and play with us. So I said, I don't know this music dad. He said, you just come. So I would get up on the stage with him, and I'd ask, what keys is it in? And the piano player would say - maybe they'd play A Train, he'd say it's in C? And all I could do was play a C major scale. Quarter notes - "doo doo doo doo". And that's all I did. I can't believe they tolerated it, but they did. You know, what a beautiful thing, because I knew nothing about the music, but my father wanted his son there -- and eventually - the story's in the book, I figured it out. But I started by playing a major scale no the matter. Whatever key it was, I walked up and down a major scale through the whole song until it was over.

Gallanter What did you pick up acoustic bass?

Fonda Let's see, '74, around 1974. So just because I started listening to other music, I came out of R&B. The same thing Elliott is talking about, you know, Hendrix and Uriah Heep, Jethro Tull, you know, Mott the Hoople. So, but then fusion} came, so I go through a fusion thing with Weather Report and, you know, Freddie Hubbard Sky Dive and stuff. Then I start, I find Monk, I find Charlie Parker, I find some Miles stuff. All this was music I never knew. And that's when I said, you know, I got to put this electric bass away and learn to play upright, so I put the electric bass away for many, many years before I picked it up again, and just focused on playing acoustic bass.

Yeah. I just thought of a story. You know, when you play electric bass, you can play a fifth. You know, you don't use your fourth finger [points to his pinky finger]. You use these three. So I used to go to bed at night with a tape of book between my fingers trying to stretch them out so I could play a fifth on the upright bass. My friend said, you're fucking crazy. You're going to ruin your hands. Eventually I was on a gig where there was a real bass player. The guy that played with Mahavishnu.

Gallanter Michael Henderson?

Fonda No, the later one. Who's the French violin player? He was in Jean-Luc Ponty's band. Yes, Ralphe Armstrong. Ralphe said, he saw what I was doing. He said, man, you're going to hurt yourself. And he pulled me aside, said, go get him a book for acoustic bass. And he said, you got to start using your fourth finger. And that was the beginning of changing this thing of putting a book between my fingers and starting to learn some real techniques. Thank you, Ralph. I could be crippled by now if you hadn't spoke to this young man.

Gallanter Every chapter in Joe's book is about a different band or musician that he played with and how he evolved with that person or that group. And there's about maybe a half dozen different groups. A lot of them have lasted over a long period of time. Personnel changes as people pass away. But it shows that there's a very personal thing going on that develops. You know, when you get to play with a band for a long time, there's a lot of camaraderie, both musical and mental camaraderie that goes on. He talks a lot about working with Anthony Braxton and with Wadada Leo Smith. And he had a band with Michael Jefry Stevens, the piano player. For many years they had about a dozen records out. A band called The New Band.

Fonda The Fonda-Stevens group.

Gallanter Yes, that's a great band.

Fonda Yeah, it was a good band. And Michael was my partner when we decided, hey, let's try to go to Europe. So the story's in there. It was quite a trip trying to figure out how to get to Europe.

Gallanter Well, you managed yourself.

Fonda We did it ourselves. I guess, you know, like everybody in New York, we found some folks that had been doing it, and they gave us some lists, and we started. That was during the fax, the days of faxes. So we had a fax machine, and we would fax all day long. As a matter of fact, Andy Laster came back from Europe, and he came over to see us. He said, Joe and Michael, the promoters were saying, stop sending so many fax. They got your message. You're killing them. So I remember. We didn't know. All day long, fax, fax. We were faxing everybody.

Gallanter Talk about that tap dancer that you worked with for a long time. The woman tap dancer?

Fonda Brenda Buffalino. So Brenda Buffalino was one of the geniuses of American tap dance. And the truth is there would not have ever been a tap dance revival, which there has been, if it wasn't for Brenda. Brenda brought these older African-American men out of retirement and started to, they were called the Copacetics. If I can remember all the guys. Jimmy Slyde. Honi Coles. There was four of them. I think there's somebody named Brown. So anyways, Brenda brought them out and set up concerts. and teaching and this whole renaissance began. She's never gotten the credit she deserves, you know, that's life, that's American history, but the truth is, and she's an amazing dancer herself, one of the best.

Gallanter She's on the record with you and Braxton.

Fonda Yeah, that's right. We did do - I used to run a recording called From the Source, Anthony, the great Herb Robertson, Grisha Alexiev, and myself, and Brenda and Vickie Dodd, who's kind of a vocalist who sings in tongues and stuff. So yeah, there was no tap dancer anywhere in the world who could have done this recording other than Brenda. So, because the music was quite contemporary, it wasn't "Tea for Two", and she read the charts, she figured it out, and I was quite proud of this recording, still am, for doing it, and Braxton and Brenda connected, because they're two artists on the same level, so it was interesting. It was like these two people and the rest of us, and I was like a connecting factor, but I knew where the real music was coming from. It was coming from Braxton and Brenda. So remember her name, Brenda Buffalino.

Gallanter You also talk about being in a blues band, and practicing with the drummer for long periods of time.

Fonda Okay, here's my blues story. So I put my electric bass away and I play upright for 15, 20 years. And then one day I'm in a record store in Connecticut and I hear Robert Cray and I said, wow man, I gotta get back to this music, cause it's some of my roots. So I found a gig through a friend of mine in Northampton. I would drive up from here every Monday night. And first I went up and sat in. And they said, oh man, you can have the gig if you want. Kenny Johnson was the drummer who was leading the band, who was with James Cotton. He was from Chicago. Kenny Johnson was the Beethoven of the blues. So I had the gig every Monday night. So I would go up every Monday night. I tried to study the repertoire. I would tape every gig and go home and listen. And I'll tell you, I could hear that I was not what we call in the pocket. I did not know where the pocket really was in that music, even though I've been a great jazz musician for what, 25 years. Where Kenny, who was the real thing, played the time, where the pocket was, I couldn't find it. I kept going up every Monday night, and I tape it. come home, same thing, like, man, what am I missing? But I didn't give up. I kept going back. One year later, I finally came home with the tape and put it on and I said, man, I got it.

Gallanter What does that mean? Being in the pocket?

Fonda It's a magical thing. It's hard to explain what it is. How do you, technically, can I break it down? It's where you lay down the rhythmical feel. There are so many places in a beat where you can lay it down and where you accent, I guess. So I could not really put the shuffle "dom, da dom, da dom, da dom, da dom". I couldn't find, because he had it so deep in his body it wasn't deep enough in my body. Yeah, I came out of Howlin' Wolf records and stuff like that. But I didn't really have it because I didn't live the music. So for that whole year, I taped it until I got it. Now I got it. I got it. You want to play a shuffle with me? I'll shuffle you right out the door. Because I know where the pocket is. So that's my blue story. That's how deep that music is, just in terms of where the groove is. You know, I'm sure Elliott can verify it, because he hung out with Mr. Sumlin. These cats knew where what we call the pocket is.

Gallanter Okay, one more little story.

Fonda Mm-hmm, then we play

Gallanter In '69, I went to the Fillmore, actually 1970, for about the second or third time, and I saw three bands play. The first band was called Dreams, and that was the Brecker Brothers, and John Abercrombie, and Billy Cobham. They were great. Then a band called The Allman Brothers played, and then a terrible version of Canned Heat closed the gig. I had front-row tickets. It's the only time I had front-row tickets to Fillmore. The tickets were $3, $4, and $5. And feet on the stage. Allman Brothers were a blues rock band from Georgia. They played their own sort of this blues rock thing that was open-ended and they improvised. That's something that rock bands except for like the Dead and some other bands didn't do a lot of. But they really kind of nailed that thing. They had two drummers, two lead guitar players, organ and bass. They had a lot of tragedy in the band. The bass player died within one year. And Duane Allman, the co-leader, died within two years. But the two drummers in the band were Butch Trucks, who I think ended up killing himself, and Jai Johanny Johanson. You ended up playing with him. How did that come about?

Fonda I met Jaimoe [Jai Johanny Johanson], because he was living in Connecticut. I was also there for a few years when I was raising my children. He was a friend of this gentleman named Kunle Mwanga, who's a very important person in his music. Kunle was from Chicago. He managed everybody. Braxton, Ornette, Cecil. Kunle also played clarinet, and we had a gig. And somehow - Kunle knew everybody - he invited Jaimoe to come to this gig in Hartford, Connecticut. So that's where I first met him. And from there, I don't know, I just continued to contact him and we started to play together. I called him for some gigs, blues gigs, and we became good friends.

Gallanter They eventually started a band.

Fonda Yeah, we did. The story goes, first of all, this live record at the Fillmore was one of my favorite records as a child. I wore it out. Live at the Fillmore.

Gallanter Recorded 1970.

Fonda Incredible. At that time it was really something. I loved that music. So, Steve, this is connected to Steve Swell because there was a record date. These Italian fellows came over. I think it might have been, it was either you or Herb Robertson got me on this recording date with these fellows from Milan.

Gallanter is that Tononi?

Fonda Tononi was the drummer. Steve was on the date, Herb Robertson, and they called me. Probably Steve and Herb got together, but talk to him later, he'll tell you who got me on the date.

Steve Swell (who is in the audience): I don't remember.

Fonda You don't remember? Okay, so actually, thank you for that. You know, and hooking me up on that gig for First on First, with [Makanda] Ken [McIntyre]. Yeah, man, I never forgot that. Thank you. All right, so, recording sessions over. We're having lunch, some little restaurant. For some reason I asked to promoter, the guy that produced it. Hey man, what's your favorite record? He said, man, Allman Brothers, Live at the Fillmore. I said, oh man, that's my favorite, one of my favorites too. I said, man, Jaimoe's a good friend of mine. He said, oh yeah, sure.

Gallanter Jaimoe's the last surviving member of that band.

Fonda Right. You know, you know Jaimoe, fuck you. I said, man, I'll call him up. So I grabbed my phone, I dialed Jaimoe's number, he answers the phone. I said, hey Jaimoe. There's this Italian guy here is one of the biggest fans, Allman Brothers fans I've ever met. Would you say hello? I'd give him the phone. He knew Jaimoe's voice, so that's where this thing started. He said, Matt, let's start a band with Jaimoe! I said, my hero, my hero, let's do it! I said, okay. And then we started this whole thing. We recorded five records. We brought Jaimoe to Italy twice. We did two things here. And the third one, Jaimoe will miss the record day, but he came in and overdubbed. So we have these five records called the J and F band.

audience member Killer record!

Gallanter Some of them are tributes to the Allmans.

Fonda They're all connected to all my brothers in some way.

Gallanter They do all kinds of good blues stuff in that band. Do you play electric?

Fonda I do. I play both electric and upright based on it. So there's arrangements of some of Allman Brothers tunes, some originals, but it's rooted in in trying to capture that spirit. So don't doubt Joe Fonda when he tells you he knows somebody! That's the lesson! I won't tell you I know somebody if I don't! All right, we play now!

Gallanter Yes, Elliott and Joe are old friends that they haven't played together before. So this is going to be the first time.

Sharp We know each other since 1978.

((music plays))

((audience applause))

Sharp I think we still have a few things left unsaid.

Fonda Always! So thank you all for coming down and participating in this.