The Jazz Messenger: Bassist Avery Sharpe Pens a Poignant Song Cycle for Troubled Times

By Greg Cahill | From the July-August 2024 issue of Strings Magazine

Ask Avery Sharpe about his relationship to the double bass and the celebrated 69-year-old jazz composer and player doesn’t mince words: “I have become one with the bass,” he says. “If I don’t have that energy and physicality running through my body and my mind and my psychology, it sort of destroys my equilibrium. My mother once said to me, ‘You cannot go in a room that has a bass and not touch it and do something with it.’ She said, ‘You have to play it—you can’t be in the same room without doing that.’ Yes, I must have those frequencies going through my body all the time for me to feel normal.”

The Georgia-born Sharpe, who now lives in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, took time out from travel preparations to attend the inaugural international jazz festival sponsored by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to discuss his love of the double bass and his latest long-form composition and recording of I Am My Neighbors Keeper, an eclectic mix of jazz, gospel, African, blues, and pop music that builds a song cycle that deftly blends social-justice issues and politics with the personal and the spiritual. He is supported on the album by a double quartet. “I love all kinds of music, so my taste is very diverse,” he says. “Of course, my first love is jazz. I started playing gospel music from day one because of my upbringing in the Pentecostal church, the Church of God in Christ, where I begin playing electric bass, but I’ve always had a love of all kinds of music. I love the challenges that each genre brings. I guess part of my personality is that I love challenges and different kinds of music. And different approaches and different projects that involve ensembles, symphonies, gospel choir, plays, and theater are challenging to me.”

Sharpe’s music training began as a child. His mother, a piano teacher and church choir director, introduced Sharpe to piano at age eight. He also played accordion and electric bass. His introduction to double bass came while attending the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where Sharpe received a degree in economics with a minor in music in 1976, before completing a year of graduate school in 1980 in music performance. That’s where he met his first double-bass instructor, Reggie Workman, a National Endowment for the Arts jazz master and veteran of the John Coltrane Quartet and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. “I didn’t start double bass until I was 19 years old, which is probably considered relatively late by today’s standards,” he says. “I started electric bass at the age of 16 and never had a lesson. It was all self-taught. A friend of mine, who also played bass, came over and showed me a couple things, and I got a book, and the rest of it is autodidactic.” 

Sharpe “didn’t know anything” about double bass when he first met Workman. “He taught me how to tune it, and I studied with him for about a year at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst,” he says. “But the things he taught me really didn’t sink in until about two to three years later. I had heard double bass by Ron Carter on the CTI label recordings of the late 1960s and early 1970s. His sound is what drew me into the bass, but Reggie Workman was the first bass player of his caliber that I saw live, and it had a tremendous effect on me. I wanted to get that sound, and I wanted to get to the bass. 

“Reggie Workman saw me play—I was playing electric bass—and he told me if I were going to study double bass, I would need to spend most of my time on that bass. He said do not stop playing electric bass because you play that so well and you have it under your hands, but spend the majority of your time studying the double bass. One thing that he did tell me that kept me from quitting—he said, ‘You are going to want to quit.’ I didn’t really understand what he was saying at the time until I started practicing and trying to play live gigs, when the pain of my right-hand fingers started to get excruciating and my fingers were bleeding and the flesh was peeling off. Then I understood what he was talking about, and I wanted to quit, thinking that no one was going to hire me to play this thing anyway, so I might as well stay with electric. But I always remembered his words and didn’t quit.”

Indeed, Sharpe went on to record and/or tour with such jazz greats as Wynton Marsalis, Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, and Freddie Hubbard, to name a few. He has also composed everything from solo pieces to large orchestral works. “The reason why I wrote I Am My Neighbors Keeper was that I’ve always been political. Even though some artists say that they are not political,” he says, “we all are, whether we realize it or not. If you say nothing when you see something wrong, when you say nothing, that is being political. You’re letting other people make the decisions for you. Most times they will make decisions that are not going to benefit you or others like you.

“In America, which is supposed to be one of the richest countries in the history of mankind, we do not always treat those who are less fortunate than us in a humane way, especially in the last eight years. It has almost become fashionable to beat up on those less fortunate than yourself. [Attitudes] have been, really in the last 40 years, that if a person is poor, it is their fault, and God doesn’t like them because of their lifestyle, race, gender—anything that makes you different. I felt that I needed to do I Am My Neighbors Keeper just to remind us of our humanity and that we are our Neighbors keeper, and we should help one another.”

Why was it important to focus on social justice issues and Black heroes in particular? “I grew up in the 1960s, which was the epitome of the civil rights movement, women’s rights, and gay rights, and that had a big effect on me,” he says. “My heroes were people like Dick Gregory, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Artists in the 1960s in all genres of music were trying to change the world with their art. I feel that I have a duty, and I am standing on the shoulders of my heroes and sheroes.” 

On “World Love (Dounouyha Hanunteya),” Sharpe explores both rhythmic and melodic elements of West Africa, using the double bass as a vehicle for melody. “On the tune ‘World Love,’ when we did the recording, we had an African dancer actually in the studio to give us inspiration, so I was really more playing to what the dancer was doing,” he says. “Just thinking of sort of a dance with the dancer. I see the double bass as a vehicle for melody because that is where I am coming from. I hear melodies in their particular octave, but I also hear it in the octave of the bass. Sometimes I will double the bass with a different instrument to give it a different timbre and to help bring the bass out. Sometimes on recordings, on stereos, the bass cannot be heard as well due to timbre, like say [compared to] a saxophone or trumpet. Melody on the bass is extremely important, but I also love playing the bass as a rhythmic instrument. I was in Senegal one time, and the Senegalese drummers commented that I played bass like a drum.” 

While I Am My Neighbors Keeper addresses big social issues, Sharpe has a rare gift for connecting the political and social to the personal and spiritual. That can be heard on “A Little Prayer for Mom,” in which one of his sisters sings about the relationship between music and their mother. This poignant blues tune speaks to the importance of music in our everyday lives. “Music for me is life,” Sharpe says. “I am always comparing my challenges in life to music. What are we doing in life? We are solving problems every day, sometimes small and sometimes extremely large. To me, life is analogous to music, especially jazz, because in jazz we are just problem solving. What I mean by that is if I have chord changes that I have to improvise on, then that is a problem that I have to solve: How do I negotiate that? How do I make the chord changes or the song sound like something when I’m improvising?” 

Sharpe actually slow cooked that song for decades, writing the music some 30 years ago while wanting to express that all his music comes from his mother. “She played piano in the church, directed choir, and she was my first music teacher when I was eight years old when she gave me piano lessons,” he says. “As a matter of fact, she taught all eight of her children piano, but it really didn’t stick until it got to me. So whenever I would be on the road, I would think of my mother, and she would always say, ‘I’ll be praying for you, son.’ I thought, she’s always praying for everybody else. Who prays for her? 

“I was on the road in Chicago, and I thought about how she’s always praying for everybody, and so I thought about this tune. Because I was raised in the Pentecostal church, a sanctified church, playing gospel music because of my mother, I actually called her and went through the chord progression with her. So I decided to call the tune ‘A Little Prayer for Mom.’ I didn’t write lyrics for it until I decided to record the tune again, and my daughter, Maya, actually wrote the lyrics for the tune and my sister Wanda, who’s closest to me in age, is the singer on the tune. I think ‘A Little Prayer for Mom’ fits very well into my previous work because, while it is not such a cerebral essay as some of my other tunes, I feel it is the essence of where I’m coming from. Anyone who listens to my music, no matter how complicated or simple it is, will always hear some sort of spirit coming through the music, which is my intent.” 

The song also reflects his deeper, personal philosophy of life. “I’m always trying to have a spirit, in particular a positive spirit, permeate through my compositions, and frankly whenever I play,” he says. “My thought is from the old spiritual lyrics ‘This Little Light of Mine, I’m Going to Let It Shine.’ That is what I’m trying to do when I live my life and when I play music.” 

Sharpe would like musicians to move beyond mere entertainment and make a positive impact on the world through their music. “Music has a healing property,” he says. “It can also have a destructive property or negative connotations, if you put that kind of vibe out there, be it through lyrics or just bad music. If there’s a choice, as there should be, choose to do more music on the positive spectrum. I love communicating with the audience on a level that means when they leave the concert, they will be inspired in their everyday life to try to be better at what it is they do. Because they’ve seen me perform at a high level, and I want them to be inspired to do all things at a high level. I want them to be entertained, but most importantly, I want them to be inspired.” 

Writing long compositional forms, like the I Am My Neighbors Keeper song cycle, presents trials and rewards, Sharpe says. “One of the major challenges is trying to find the time to do the project,” he explains. “I am in the middle right now of orchestrating my CD 400: An African American Musical Portrait for choir and orchestra. It is also a challenge to make it sound as great as I possibly can. I often tell people that when I’m writing for orchestra, it’s like being a traffic cop—I’m trying to keep everyone out of each other’s way so that the traffic can flow smoothly. But the one thing I really love about writing and orchestrating is that most of my compositions are for orchestra. I am performing with them, so it is unbelievable to hear and feel the music you have written going past you as you are playing—the sound gets into your body, and the only way that I can describe it is that it’s very spiritual, and it’s like you’re getting high. I always tell people I’ve never done drugs. This is not a judgment thing, but my drug of choice has always been music.”

As for the message inherent in his latest jazz work, Sharpe hopes I Am My Neighbors Keeper will remind listeners “to always pursue the positive road and remember, we are only here for a short time, and we should help and love while we are here and pass that on.”