Elliott Sharp’s Terraplane featuring Eric Mingus – Twenty Dollar Bill
Delmark 883-8
Digital Single
You ready to get blown away from a powerful, intense, & heavy blues recording from Delmark Records from Elliott Sharp!! – The multi-talented NYC experimental/avant jazz legend, Elliott Sharp‘s Terraplane featuring Eric Mingus on vocals! Yep, that MINGUS!! (son of Charles Mingus!)
Written by Elliott Sharp, “Twenty-Dollar Bill” is both a lament about the nature and value of folding money in today’s world as well as a satiric stab at the fact that Andrew Jackson, featured on the $20 bill, was also a slaveholder. The push to replace Jackson with Harriet Tubman, a social activist and abolitionist and escaped slave, has been mired in Congressional inactivity.
“Twenty-Dollar Bill” (Sharp, zOaR Music – BMI)
Eric Mingus, vocals
Elliott Sharp, guitars, keyboards
Dave Hofstra, bass
Don McKenzie, drums
Recorded at Studio zOaR – NYC; August 2023
Produced by Elliott Sharp,
Mixed and Mastered by Elliott Sharp
TWENTY-DOLLAR BILL – ELLIOTT SHARP
It was sitting in my pocket
Just waiting to jump on out
Filled with hope and desire
And maybe a little shout
Thought I might get some action
A little snort of something too
A loaf of bread a jug of wine
Make me happy not so blue
Make me make me make make me think of you
Where did it go? Where did it go?
That $20 bill…..that $20 bill
300 slaves of Jackson you can’t avoid the touch
On every single purchase whether little or very much
Rolled up rolled up so tight or folded thin and flat
Hidden in my jacket or underneath my hat
Ready for the moment ready for the day
Ready for the ‘pocalypse no matter what they say
Just slipped right through my fingers
On a walk around the block
Nothings cheap and nothings good
In this old town today
Nothings free for anybody
Not in any way
For neither love nor money
Folding green just ain’t the key
Something happened once or twice
Even memories have their price
Where did it go? Where did it go?
That $20 bill…..that $20 bill
I’ll never know
Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.
A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.
His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.
Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson’s Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a new documentary “Doing The Don’t” by filmmaker Bert Shapiro.
Elliott Sharp’s TERRAPLANE synthesizes the intersection of country and urban blues with Mississippi fife & drum bands, post-Mingus/Ayler jazz, the sonic innovations of Sharp’s long-running ensemble CARBON and the rhythmic force of the groove, from the shuffle to contemporary dance music. Begun in 1991, Terraplane has been through many permutations with a number of guest artists including HUBERT SUMLIN, the legendary guitar innovator and sideman to Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, as well as singer/poets ERIC MINGUS and TRACIE MORRIS.
http://www.elliottsharp.com/
“Longtime collaborators, Mingus and Sharp have worked together for decades in a dizzying variety of musical situations.” – Real Art Ways
Son of the legendary jazz icon Charles Mingus, Eric Mingus is, unsurprisingly, a musical polymath himself. A classically trained vocalist, he sings the blues like nobody’s business, improvises with the best of them, and plays a fierce bass. Mingus caught the attention of Knoxville audiences during Our Common Nature: An Appalachian Celebration with Yo-Yo Ma & Friends in the late spring of 2023.
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp has been a legend on the downtown New York scene for decades. He’s led the projects Orchestra Carbon, SysOrk, Tectonics and Terraplane.
Eric Mingus bio:
ERIC MINGUS
Vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and poet Eric Mingus has been steeped in the jazz tradition since birth. Born in New York City, son of Charles and Judy Mingus, as a child Eric played underneath the piano while his father improvised and composed, accompanied his father to innumerable rehearsals and performances, and studied cello and music theory with his father, and drums with Dannie Richmond. Like his father, Eric exchanged the cello for the double bass in his teens, and he studied voice throughout his school years, winning medals in NY State competitions for his performances.
After studying voice and bass through his teens with various luminaries of the music world and a brief semester at Berklee college of music, Eric sought the education of the road, touring as a vocalist with, among others, Carla Bley and Karen Mantler, and having the opportunity to perform with Percy Heath, Jimmy Heath, Bobby McFerrin, George Adams and Don Pullen. Later on, Eric worked included performances with Wolfgang Puschnig, Steven Bernstein and his Millennial Territory Orchestra, and David Amram, among many others. Eric has performed at numerous major Jazz Festivals, including Saalfelden (Austria), Orvieto Winter Jazz and Ah Um Festival (Italy), Jazz a la Villette and Banlieues Bleues (France), the Berlin Jazz Festival (Germany), Montreal Jazz Festival (Canada), as well as other festivals such as the Adelaide Festival of the Arts (Australia), Bonnaroo Festival TN, Wall to Wall at Symphony Space NYC, and several performances at NYC’s Summerstage and Celebrate Brooklyn.
Eric was part of a commission celebrating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s 1964 speech in Berlin Germany for the Berlin Jazz Festival, tasked to write poems that would intertwine with music written by Elliott Sharp. He has been commissioned to compose a piece for Yo Yo Ma’s new initiative, Our Common Ground, and was commissioned to contribute a recorded piece to the Centre Culture Irlandais in Paris, for a sound installation during covid lockdown. Eric was awarded a recording residency at Looking Glass Arts in summer 2022. He has recorded extensively as a leader as well as a collaborator.
Eric’s passion for poetry, and specifically the spoken word/ jazz tradition, led him to start a duo project with Howard Johnson; this work has continued through the years in duo and larger groups, with various collaborators, including a notable recording of Langston Hughes poetry, with pianist David Amram, which was released on Mode/Avant Records. Eric has worked very selectively with his father’s music, singing on the Mingus Dynasty album “Blues and Politics”, and more recently writing lyrics for his vocal performance on “Work Song (Break The Chains)” with the Mingus Big Band on their latest release, The Charles Mingus Centennial Sessions.
Eric works extensively in education; he is a judge and educator at the annual Charles Mingus High School competition, and has presented masterclasses and leadership ectures at Berklee, Harvard, UC Irvine, as well as at the Banlieues Blues Jazz festival (Paris, France) and the In Situ Arts Society (Bonn, Germany). He taught vocal improvisation classes and a Charles Mingus workshop at London’s Community Music House.
https://www.charlesmingus.com/eric-mingus
Listen to an ELLIOTT SHARP interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered”.
https://www.npr.org/2012/09/22/161539917/elliott-sharp-blues-is-a-feeling
Elliott Sharp’s TERRAPLANE synthesizes the intersection of country and urban blues with Mississippi fife & drum bands, post-Mingus/Ayler jazz, the sonic innovations of Sharp’s long-running ensemble CARBON and the rhythmic force of the groove, from the shuffle to contemporary dance music. Begun in 1991, Terraplane has been through many permutations with a number of guest artists including HUBERT SUMLIN, the legendary guitar innovator and sideman to Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, as well as singer/poets ERIC MINGUS and TRACIE MORRIS.
The song will be featured SONG OF THE DAY on April 14, 2024 on the prominent website, ALL ABOUT JAZZ!!
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/media/track-twenty-dollar-bill-by-elliott-sharp
https://airplaydirect.com/music/ElliottSharpTwentyDollarBill
Elliott Sharp is mostly known for his forays into experimental/avant garde jazz music, having released over 80 albums covering a bevy of musical styles. The multi-instrumentalist has also led his band Elliott Sharp’s Terraplane since the early ’90s, which combines country and urban blues, occasionally adding other genres to the mix as the band has progressed.
The group recently signed a deal with Delmark Records, with an album in the works for August release, recently releasing their first single, “Twenty Dollar Bill,” which features Eric Mingus (son of Charles Mingus) on vocals. The song is a rumbling, electric blues with a bit of a Mississippi Hill Country drone, as Mingus laments the value (or lack thereof) of the dollar for all of us these days. Sharp’s guitar pierces through the steamy haze and humidity of the driving rhythms generated by Dave Hofstra (bass) and Don McKenzie (drums).”
— Graham Clarke
http://www.bluenight.com/BluesBytes/wn0424.html
Elliott Sharp: ‘Blues Is A Feeling’
“Blues is a feeling, and it exists cross-culturally. It always has existed, and it always will. It’s part of being human,” says musician Elliott Sharp.
Courtesy of the artist
In the 1980s, Elliott Sharp was the height of New York City cool, a central part of that town’s experimental music scene. His creations were inspired by advanced mathematical concepts. He tuned his guitars according to the Fibonacci Sequence and wrote challenging pieces inspired by fractal geometry.
But Sharp has an alter ego: With his side band Terraplane, he transforms from New York avant-garde aesthete to down-and-dirty Chicago bluesman. Here, he speaks with NPR’s Jacki Lyden about his album Sky Road Songs and former Howlin’ Wolf guitarist Hubert Sumlin’s “pearls of blue wisdom.”
Interview Highlights
On the first time he heard the blues
“I’ve always loved the blues. The first time I heard country blues, I would go to the library and take out records, and heard some things that summer in Pittsburgh. The thing that always resonated with me was country blues, the acoustic guitar often played with a slide, often imitating the voice — the keen and powerful and passionate voice. It just hit a resonant chord.”
On blues as a feeling
“Blues has always used the materials that were at hand. It’s always been contemporary music. It’s a feeling — you can’t think of it as a style. That’s what’s happened a lot in modern music: The marketing people say, “Well, this style is defined by these parameters. Anything outside those parameters isn’t that thing.” But blues is a feeling, and it exists cross-culturally. It always has existed, and it always will. It’s part of being human.”
On Chicago blues guitarist Hubert Sumlin
“Hubert was one of the sweetest guys on the planet, as well as a brilliant and visionary guitarist. He was one of the first to really make the electric guitar speak. He would provide commentary for [Howlin’] Wolf with guttural sounds, strange kind of swoops — very modern, very timeless.
“I first met him in Chicago in a little dive in 1983. We talked for a while and then, through another singer I was working with, I began to back him up and then produce some records of his, and then he joined us with Terraplane. We went to Europe a number of times with Hubert to play concerts and tours. He was always just such a pleasure to hang out with. I’ve sat next to Hubert many, many times watching his fingers, and I’ll still never be able to figure out how this incredible economy of emotion gets these amazing sounds out of his guitar.”
On Sumlin’s “blue pearls of wisdom”
“For Hubert, I think the main thing — and something that anyone involved in the arts needs to do — is to find out who they are. And that process, of course, is different for everybody. With Hubert, he explained it as ‘getting fired by Wolf’ many times until he found his own sound.”
https://www.npr.org/2012/09/22/161539917/elliott-sharp-blues-is-a-feeling
