Another “Black Woman” musician, trumpeter Ted Daniel, was a childhood friend of Sonny from Ossining, New York. “She was one of a kind,” Daniel said in an interview. “I haven’t heard anyone sing with the pure passion and that kind of freedom that she had when she sang with Sonny in that band.”
Released on Atlantic Records’ Vortex subsidiary, the pioneering “Black Woman” failed to find a wider audience. A few years later, the pair formed The Savages, a working band that could play regularly. The group featured steel drums and Latin percussion and played downtown venues like the Tin Palace and lofts like Studio Rivbea, said Abe Speller, the band’s drummer. The Savages recorded a soundtrack for Sedat Pakay’s 1973 short documentary “James Baldwin: From Another Place” and performed a live performance in 1974 on WKCR, which are the only surviving memories of their existence. Speller recalled that the band went into hiding to rehearse before entering a studio in December 1977 to record a four-song demo tape, but the group failed to secure a record label deal and ultimately flopped.
After Linda and Sonny divorced, she moved to Turkey and then Vienna, where a few years later she met her second husband, Austrian saxophonist Wolfgang Puschnig. (Sonny died in 1994 at age 53.) Initially they were just musical collaborators, Puschnig said in a video call from his home in southern Austria, but the relationship blossomed and they married in 1987 while in Mozambique for a concert.
Under their own names and in groups such as Pat Brothers, AM4 and Red Sun, Puschnig and Sharrock recorded more than 20 albums together on European and South Korean labels between 1986 and 2007, but their vocal approach had changed noticeably. Puschnig said she stopped singing in her freestyle after consulting a former Ziegfeld girl turned palmist, who told her, “I see you’re a singer, but you don’t use words, but you should because you have a talent for using words.” .
“That’s how he started writing lyrics,” he said.
Jazz fusion bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma performed with them for years and produced “On Holiday,” Sharrock’s 1990 album of Billie Holiday covers, complete with new jack swing beats and a rapper. “She was pushing the ball,” Tacuma said in an interview, “thinking outside the box, in terms of music, creativity and improvisation, and trying to achieve musically with her voice something that she hadn’t done before.”
Puschnig said that Sharrock’s health began to deteriorate in the mid-1990s and, although their romantic relationship ended around 1996, they continued to work together until 2007. Around 2004, Rechtern, who had first met Sharrock in 1979, , began caring for her and received power of attorney in 2007. “She was really falling into nowhere,” Rechtern said. “If she hadn’t taken her, she would be in a nursing home.”
