Sonny & Linda Sharrock’s 1969 debut album, Black Woman, forced masculinity’s dominance over the avant-garde sound into obeisance at the power and control of Linda’s vocal instrument. Screaming, humming, moaning and whispering — sometimes in unison, sometimes in call-and-response duet — with the deconstructed cadences of guitar string scrubbing, sax timbres and piano chords, Linda’s soprano shrills are the centerpiece and soul of the album. It’s (always been) Linda Sharrock’s improvisational freedom that impresses. She uses syllabic vocal swelling/inflections with abstractions of the Blues’ achey sensuality, Gospel’s hymns and testimony, and African Folk’s ritualistic vibrations to create massive Jazz collages that draw on our multidimensional heritage — not just sonically, but sentiently, too. The result, frenetic whimpers and wails that expand language’s absence into a rapturous new form of expression; her voice, a stethoscope on the pulse of an identity’s righteous rage.

For Linda, the sound is, both, about AND not about aesthetic viability; the notes and rhythms are platforms for the angst, anger, pain, desire and persistence of a people. And the very fact that she couldn’t be typified is what shifted avant-garde into a musical realm of its own. Sonny’s sustained rise to fame would heavily rely on the siren songs of Linda’s gifted voicebox, both before and after their 1978 divorce. The couple released two additional joint projects, Monkey-Pockie-Boo in 1970 and Paradise in 1975. The latter, their first label-backed record, was produced by Turkish avant-garde Electronic composer Ilhan Mimaroglu. The label’s intention was to garner more commercial success, though the project’s electric pianos and unpredictable fusion of R&B and Funk grooves received harsh criticisms from the mainstream world. So, shortly after her divorce from Sonny, Linda relocated to Vienna where she began working with musician and composer Wolfgang Puschnig, who later became her second husband. Her time was spent touring — mostly away from America, though frequently performing the Jazz festival circuit with Sonny — and simultaneously working on her own experimental suites with new collaborators. To name a few: 1975’s Jazz For Thinkers recorded with a group of Austrian improvisers, 1989’s …And She Answered  recorded with Puschnig and pianist Uli Scherer, 1995’s …And Then Comes The White Tiger recorded with South Korean percussion ensemble Samul Nori, a tribute to Billie Holiday titled On Holiday (1990), Like A River (1994) featuring Freak Power trombonist Ashley Slater, and Confessions (2004) featuring Stephan Oliva on piano and Chad Tchamitchian on bass.

Throughout the ‘80s, ‘90s and early 2000s, Linda Sharrock toured, worked, and lived in Istanbul, Korea, Bangkok and London, and was featured as a guest vocalist on works with The Roots, Austrian poet Ernst Jandl, and Japanese artist Aki Onda, among many others. Sharrock’s creative output, ever-driven by inarticulable emotions, continuously challenged expectations as her later works found her dabbling in R&B and Pop-influenced sounds. She even wrote lyrics, with the encouragement of a poetry teacher, for select recordings/performances; namely, an original composition, “A Long Way From Home,” which appeared on Puschnig’s Pieces Of The Dream album. But she suffered a debilitating stroke in 2009 that left her partially paralyzed and unable to speak. Still, she remained determined to work, tour and reclaim her artist self. And that’s precisely what she’s done with the support of her musical partners and longtime collaborators, Mario Rechtern and Margaret Unknown (Max Bogner).

Linda’s 2014 return to music was a part-live, part-studio recording titled, No Is No: Don’t Fuck Around With Your Women. In 2016, under the name Linda Sharrock/The Abyssity Of The Grounds (Linda’s multiplying orbit of musicians from France, Italy, Japan, the UK and Switzerland), the Gods and They Begin to Speak albums were released. Collectively, they returned to touring and Linda — who now performs seated in a wheelchair — ululates in deeper registers; without the range she once possessed, but with the same unruly-yet-compelling ability to sonically wade through the totality of Black feminine emotion. She tarries on with pure musicality to the breakthrough; to that peak of catharsis on the other side of distress. And for the first time since the ‘70s, Linda Sharrock will perform in NYC to vault collective reckoning into a massive, sonic electricity at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for Saint Heron’s Solange Knowles-curated “Eldorado Ballroom” music and performance series.

"The most important thing is to express what you're feeling inside - and accept the consequences. That kind of liberation has slipped away from many people; it hasn't slipped away from me.”

—Linda Sharrock (1994)