Biography

Listen to Delmark Blues & Jazz Artists:

20 Dollar Bill - Elliott Sharp's Terraplane featuring Eric Mingus
Delmark 883-8 Digital Single

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
Photography by Aaron Sarles

Graphic design by Janene Higgins

ELLIOTT SHARP: bio

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.

https://bigearsfestival.org/event/eric-mingus-elliott-sharp/

https://www.oakridger.com/story/lifestyle/2023/12/28/eric-mingus-and-elliott-sharp-at-2024-big-ears-festival/72038318007/

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 a recent interview on NPR's "All Things Considered".
https://www.npr.org/2012/09/22/161539917/elliott-sharp-blues-is-a-feeling