Sonny Sharrock - Biography
Sonny Sharrock was among the first – if not the first – to adapt the principles of free-jazz horn playing to the electric guitar. Eschewing the crisp, linear approach of such predecessors as Wes Montgomery, Tal Farlow, Joe Pass, and Jim Hall, Sharrock looked to such ‘60s freestylists as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler for inspiration. The impact of his dense, loud, skittering style can be heard in the playing of musicians as diverse as James Blood Ulmer, Elliott Sharp, Carlos Santana, and Thurston Moore. What has come to be known as “skronk” virtually originated in his work.
He was born Warren Harding Sharrock on Aug. 27, 1940, in Ossining, New York, the home of Sing Sing Prison. He began his career as a teenaged singer in the doo-wop group The Echoes. He was attracted to the saxophone as a youth after hearing Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on Miles Davis’ 1959 opus Kind of Blue, but he was asthmatic and unable to play the instrument. Instead, in 1960 he took up the guitar, and applied the freewheeling attack advanced on the sax by Coltrane and his contemporaries to his axe.
In 1965, after studying at the Berklee Music School in Boston, Sharrock moved to New York City, where he began playing with top-flight jazz musicians – only some of whom were like-minded exponents of the free jazz style. He made his studio debut on Tauhid (1966), led by Coltrane’s latter-day saxophone colleague Pharoah Sanders.
In 1967, he began a fruitful relationship with flutist Herbie Mann; through 1974, he appeared on 11 albums as a member of Mann’s commercially popular group. Though Sharrock’s style was decidedly “outside,” the guitarist later told interviewer Francis Davis that Mann “never once tried to tone my shit down.” His explosive playing also appeared on such albums as Don Cherry’s Eternal Rhythm (1968), Wayne Shorter’s Super Nova (1970) and Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1970).
Sharrock bowed as a leader on Mann’s Atlantic-distributed boutique label Vortex. Black Woman (1970) was an uncompromising date that featured the wailing free-form vocals of the guitarist’s wife Linda and scattergun playing by a band that included the top free jazz drummer Milford Graves. The Sharrocks made two more albums together before their divorce in the late ‘70s: Monkey-Pockie-Boo (1970), an even more challenging session cut for the French free jazz label Actuel, and the relatively subdued Paradise (1975).
It would be a decade before Sharrock led another date of his own, but he remained active as part of a musical posse led by bassist-producer Bill Laswell, a standard bearer for New York’s downtown experimentalists of the ‘80s. He began working with Laswell’s band Material, and played on the group’s album Memory Serves (1982). In the mid-‘80s, he became a member of Last Exit, a blow-it-out, high-volume free-jazz quartet that also included Laswell, saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, and Ornette Coleman’s onetime drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. The unit would record half a dozen independently released albums, all but one of them live; their lone studio effort Iron Path (1988) is currently out of print.
Laswell produced Sharrock’s solo effort Guitar (1986), highlighted by some high-density overdubbing. Some live recordings and the somewhat conservative Highlife (1990) followed. In 1991, he released the album that is generally considered his crowning effort: Ask the Ages, a hyper-powerful quartet session with Pharoah Sanders, drummer Elvin Jones, and bass phenom Charnett Moffett. The set received universally admiring reviews.
By 1993, Sharrock was receiving widespread (if unsung) attention for his work in an unlikely venue: as the principal soloist on the soundtrack of Cartoon Network’s satirical “talk show” Space Ghost Coast to Coast. He also signed a major label recording contract with RCA. However, on the verge of the wider recognition he had deserved for so long, he was stricken with a fatal heart attack on May 26, 1994. He was 53.
