Sonny Sharrock

Warren Harding Sharrock (August 27, 1940–May 25, 1994) was an American jazz guitarist. He was once married to singer Linda Sharrock, with whom he sometimes recorded and performed.

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 effort, Tauhid. He made several appearances with flautist Herbie Mann and also made an uncredited guest appearance on Miles Davis's 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 John Coltrane play on Davis's album 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 f***ed up axe."

Three albums under Sharrock's name were released in the late '60s through the mid-'70s: 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 Sonny and his wife, Paradise (an album of which Sharrock was embarrassed by and stated several times that it was not good and shouldn't be reissued). After the release of Paradise, Sharrock was semi-retired for much of the 1970s (excepting some works such as the bootleg-only recording The Junk Sessions with sludge-blues guitarist Denny Lethargy), undergoing a divorce from wife/occasional collaborator Linda in 1978. In the intermitting years until producer/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 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 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."

Laswell would often perform with the guitarist on his albums, and produced many of Sharrock's recordings, 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."

In 1994, Sharrock died unexpectedly of a heart attack in his hometown of Ossining, New York, just as he was on the verge of signing the first major label deal in his entire career. He was 53. Today, Sharrock is perhaps best known 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.