Happy Tuesday : any music lover should have listened to this theme, which stretches across the first side of Sounds of Liberation, album released in very small circulation in 1972 on Dogtown and has since become cult. On the back of the cover, we see this collective of musicians from Philadelphia leaning against a graffiti wall, where a woman of just 20 years old appears. Here is Monnette Sudler, whose guitar with saturated free funk accents already says a lot about the qualities. Born June 5, 1952 in Philadelphia, she was then one of the few instrumentalists in a music where women were often forced to the microphone. Her mother, moreover, sang, but it was on the piano that she put her daughter when she was 8 years old. Until Monnette Sudler picks up a guitar: it’s a revelation for the teenager, who then plugs into the folk current and the psyche, Jimi Hendrix in influence, before taking Wes Montgomery as a model.
Self-taught composer
She will keep a virtuoso touch, a clear fingering and a precise phrasing which recall the importance of bebop, as evidenced by a number of records, in particular on the Danish label Steeplechase. However, it was in a completely different vein that Monnette Sudler began to shine in the early 1970s, when she crossed paths with other young musicians from the Philadelphia melting pot: saxophonist Byard Lancaster and vibraphonist Khan Jamal, who take him on an adventure typical of this period when jazz becomes more soulful and radical. These few years spent in the Sounds of Liberation – then her passage alongside Sunny Murray and Sam Rivers – will raise her to the rank of legend of the free, thirty-five years after the publication in 1976 of her first album as a leader, the swift but somewhat wiser Time for a Change, while a French label brings it back to light with the album Meeting of the Spirits, even allowing him to return to play in France.
This is a real resurrection for this composer (and singer with bluesy folk tints), self-taught then by the Berklee College of Music who, after having seen better days, to paraphrase the title of her second disc on Steeplechase in a falsely classic aesthetic, truly original, will go through a dark period. During the 1980s, the wave of fusion gradually caused it to fall into relative oblivion, even if it accompanied the South African Hugh Masekela for a time. Life isn’t so easy, to contradict one of his lovely themes titled Easy Living, a sublime calypso which also speaks of his fascination for the subtle strings of Latin music. An abusive husband pushes her towards alcohol, keeping her away from the light. Until the fatal accident, in 1993, where, driving while inebriated, she drove in the wrong direction and killed a woman. She will spend several years in prison, working on her instrument and writing a new repertoire.
Political battles
Upon his release, Monnette Sudler became involved in educational programs, becoming a reference for the young generation of Philadelphia, as evidenced at the time of his death by the many tributes on social networks (bassist Anthony Tidd like guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel ), later founding and even leading the Philadelphia Guitar Summit, while continuing to lay down records despite a serious lung condition. recent sound Stay Strong, engraved in the midst of a pandemic, recalls that she had forgotten nothing of the political fights for the rights of her community and that she was still an exceptional guitarist, which is echoed in the ballad Back to Living Again. Alas, this first-class return will not have a sequel for the one whose death we have just learned from cancer at her home in Germantown, a historic district of Philly.