[Archive 2026-01-22] Bruce Gallanter interviews Elliott Sharp, Joe Fonda at Downtown Music Gallery event

Historical archive — originally published 2026-01-22. This report records what was known on that date. It is not current news; subsequent events may have changed the situation. Wikinews closed in May 2026.

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.

((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.

((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.

((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)) 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.

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