Sonny Sharrock
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Warren Harding Sharrock (August 27, 1940 – May 25, 1994) was an American jazz guitarist. He was married to singer Linda Sharrock, with who he sometimes recorded or performed.
Sharrock began his musical career singing doo wop in his teen years. He collaborated with Pharoah Sanders in the late 1960s, appearing first on Sanders' 1966 effort, Tauhid. He made several apperances with flautist Herbie Mann and also made an uncredited guest appearance on Miles Davis' A Tribute to Jack Johnson, perhaps his most famous cameo. Sharrock was known for his incisive, heavily chorded attack, his bursts of wild feedback, and for his use of saxophone-like lines played loudly on guitar; he had in fact wanted to play tenor saxophone from his youth after hearing Davis' Kind of Blue on the radio at age 19, but his asthma prevented this from happening, although Sharrock said repeatedly that he still considered himself "a horn player with a really fucked up axe." [1] (http://www.martinos.org/~reese/joetest/articles/articles_v01_j.html)
Sharrock was semi-retired for much of the 1970s, undergoing a divorce from wife/occasional collaborator Linda in 1978. In the intermitting years until producer/bassist Bill Laswell coaxed Sharrock out of retirement, he worked as both a chauffeur and a caretaker for mentally challenged children. With Laswell's urging, Sharrock appeared on Material's (one of Laswell's many projects) 1981 effort, Memory Serves. In addition, Sharrock was a member of the punk/jazz band Last Exit, another Laswell-backed outfit. During the late 1980s, he also 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." [2] (http://www.joemcphee.com/jny/sharrock/schaefer.html)
Laswell would often perform with the guitarist on his albums, and produced many of Sharrock's recordings, as well, including the entirely solo Guitar, the metal-influenced Seize The Rainbow, and the well-received Ask The Ages, which featured John Coltrane's bandmates Pharoah Sanders and Elvin Jones. One writer described Ask The Ages as "hands down, Sharrock's finest hour, and the ideal album to play for those who claim to hate jazz guitar." [3] (http://www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=sonny_sharrock)
In 1994, Sharrock died unexpectedly of a heart attack in his hometown of Ossining, New York. He was 53. Sharrock is perhaps best known today for the soundtrack to the Cartoon Network program Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, one of the last projects he completed in the studio before his death.
Discography
- 1969 Black Woman
- 1970 Monkey-Pockie-Boo
- 1975 Paradise
- 1986 Guitar
- 1987 Seize the Rainbow
- 1987 Dance With Me, Montana
- 1989 Live in New York
- 1989 Faith Moves (duo with Nicky Skopelitis)
- 1990 Highlife
- 1991 Ask the Ages
- 1996 Space Ghost Coast to Coast
- 1996 Into Another Light