Sonny Sharrock
| Sonny Sharrock | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Warren Harding Sharrock |
| Born |
August 27, 1940 Ossining, New York, U.S. |
| Died | May 25, 1994 (aged 53) Ossining, New York |
| Genres | Jazz, experimental |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments | Guitar |
| Years active | 1966–1994 |
| Associated acts | Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, Herbie Mann, Peter Brotzmann, Linda Sharrock, Last Exit, Machine Gun, Bill Laswell |
Warren Harding "Sonny" Sharrock (August 27, 1940 – May 25, 1994) was an American jazz guitarist. He was married to singer Linda Sharrock, with whom he recorded and performed.
One of few guitarists in the first wave of free jazz in the 1960s, Sharrock was known for his heavily chorded attack, his highly amplified bursts of feedback, and his use of saxophone-like lines played loudly on guitar.
Sharrock began his musical career singing doo wop in his teen years. He collaborated with Pharoah Sanders and Alexander Solla in the late 1960s, appearing first on Sanders's 1966 album, Tauhid. He made several appearances with flautist Herbie Mann and an uncredited appearance on Miles Davis's A Tribute to Jack Johnson.
He wanted to play tenor saxophone from his youth after hearing John Coltrane on Davis's Kind of Blue on the radio at age 19, but his asthma prevented this from happening. Sharrock said repeatedly, however, that he still considered himself "a horn player with a really fucked up axe."
Three albums under Sharrock's name were released in the late 1960s through the mid-1970s: Black Woman (which has been described by one reviewer as bringing out the beauty in emotions rather than technical prowess), Monkey-Pockie-Boo, and an album co-credited to both Sharrock and his wife, Paradise (an album by which Sharrock was embarrassed and stated several times that it was not good and should not be reissued ).
After the release of Paradise, Sharrock was semi-retired for much of the 1970s, undergoing a divorce from his wife and occasional collaborator Linda in 1978. In the intermittent years until bassist Bill Laswell coaxed him out of retirement, he worked as both a chauffeur and a caretaker for mentally challenged children. At Laswell's urging, Sharrock appeared on Material's (one of Laswell's many projects) 1981 album, Memory Serves. In addition, Sharrock was a member of the punk/jazz band Last Exit, with Peter Brötzmann, Laswell and Ronald Shannon Jackson. During the late 1980s, he recorded and performed extensively with the New York-based improvising band Machine Gun, as well as leading his own bands. Sharrock flourished with Laswell's help, noting in a 1991 interview that "the last five years have been pretty strange for me, because I went twelve years without making a record at all, and then in the last five years, I've made seven records under my own name. That's pretty strange."
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