Sharrard shreds at Still Partners

“We’re kind of on an endless tour right now,” said Scott Sharrard, a longtime collaborator of Greg Allman, of Allman Brothers Band fame, who died last May of liver cancer.

Thanks to a tangled web of local ties to the Allman Brothers, one of the recent stops on Sharrard’s “endless tour” was Still Partners, a gastropub and live music venue on Sea Cliff Avenue, last Friday night.

Dan Roth, the club’s owner, is a drummer who occasionally plays with longtime Sea Cliff resident Andy Aledort, an associate editor of Guitar World magazine and a former bandmate of Allman Brothers founding member Dickey Betts.

Aledort brought Betts’s son Duane to Still Partners last summer to perform a tribute to Greg Allman. Duane was set to do a tribute in New York City, according to Aledort. “I said, ‘Why don’t you come a day early,’” he recalled suggesting to Betts, “‘and we’ll do a tribute at Still Partners?’” And that’s how the venue, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary in June, became a North Shore enclave for legends of American rock music.

Sharrard was Greg Allman’s writing partner, and his death last year hit Sharrard hard. “There’s just been a lot of loss around me right now,” he said. Butch Trucks, the Allman Brothers’ drummer, died last January, and Floyd Miles, a guitarist who had toured with Allman and Sharrard as part of Greg Allman and Friends, died this January. Sharrard’s 16-year-old dog died last year, too. The past year 14 months were “an absolute decimation of the soul for me,” he said.

Amid the loss, Sharrard’s second son, Lewan, was born. “My second son being born,” he said, “it was, like, this amazing, life-affirming love to have him with me throughout that year.” He called his son “Buddha-like,” adding, “I don’t know where this cat came from, man.

“It’s a very specific period to go through,” Sharrard said of his year of loss and love. “It makes me want to tell their stories.”

Roth said of Sharrard, “He’s one of the bigger names we’ve had come through Still Partners. I think he’s the full package. He writes, he sings and he can play like nothing else. You don’t usually get all three of those in one place.”

Listening to his set, this reporter heard Sharrard shred his solos with the playful finesse of a jazz guitarist and the soulful intensity of a blues artist, with the undeniable influence of Americana — funk and Southern rock in particular — underlying it all.

Watching Sharrard’s finger work — which seamlessly transitioned between complex and elegantly simple — it was easy to see how he would have had chemistry with Greg Allman. But he places more value on his songwriting than his solo technique.

“For me,” he said, “the song is the most important reason to show up to the gig.” Songs, he added, should be “accessible” — that is, played easily, with “just a single instrument and a voice.”

This less-is-more approach applies not only to Sharrard’s songwriting, but also to how he arranges his band, which includes a bassist and a drummer. “We call it the tripod,” he said. “Guitar, bass and drums. That’s why I stripped my band down to three, because that’s the heart of the groove and the song and the ideas.”