The Cathartic Skronkings of Iconic Free Jazz Guitarist Sonny Sharrock
- Bill Milkowski
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
The Ossining-born six-string renegade would’ve turned 86 on Aug. 27
A ferocious player whose unrelenting, distortion-laced six-string attack liberated a generation of avant garde guitarists, Warren Harding “Sonny” Sharrock first gained inside notoriety for playing on Pharoah Sanders’ 1967 Impulse! album Tauhid. His contributions on that latter-day Trane-inspired free jazz opus were particulary felt on his ‘skronk’-fueled, string-scraping solo on “Aum/Venus/Capricorn Rising.”
Sharrock later gained access to a much wider audience by playing alongside guitarist Larry Coryell and vibraphonist Roy Ayers on Herbie Mann’s hit instrumental version of “Hold On, I’m Coming” from 1969’s Memphis Underground. His solo on that tune, regarded as absolutely insane by conventional guitarists, inspired a smaller contingent of proto-punk players and adventurous avant garde listeners.
That same year, Sharrock recorded his first as a leader, Black Woman, for Mann’s Vortex label. Accompanied on that auspicious debut by his wife Linda on vocals. Sharrock also premiered the droning, Delta-fied “Blind Willie,” a tune he would subsequently revisit in more electrifying fashion on his 1986 Bill Laswell-produced album, Guitar.
Sharrock appeared on Miles Davis’ groundbreaking Jack Johnson sessions from 1970 (uncredited on the original 1971 release, though his slide guitar and Echoplex-laden contributions on the track “Willie Nelson” were later well documented on the Sony Music 5CD set from 2003, The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions).
In 1980, Sharrock began working with bassist-producer Bill Laswell, later appearing on Material’s 1981 debut on Celluloid Records, Memory Serves (reissued in 1982 on the Elektra Musician label) which also featured alto saxophonist Henry Threadgill, cornetist Olu Dara, trombonist George Lewis, violinist Billy Bang, guitarist Fred Frith and drummer Fred Maher.
Sharrock and Laswell would later form the high-powered improvising superband Last Exit with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and saxophonist Peter Brötzman. ) Their output from the mid ‘90s to the early ‘90s mostly came from live recordings on tour and marked some of the most intense music of that period.
I remember once at the old Knitting Factory (the original one on Houston Street back in the ‘80s) approaching Sharrock after a set there by Last Exit, and I had the temerity to ask him, “Hey Sonny, how come you don’t ever play chords.” His answer snapped back at me like he was swatting a fly. “Fuck chords!”
Not too long after that, drummer the summer of 1987, I saw Sonny leading his own band with bassist Melvin Gibbs and drummer Abe Speller. I was sitting in the front row of that event and at some point in the act of him brutally thrashing his black Les Paul guitar I noticed two (or was it three) broken strings flailing in the air. Sonny, unpreturbed, with eyes closed, kept bashing away on his instrument with hurricane force. It was an exercise in brutal bliss. As I wrote in the July 1987 issue of Guitar World:
“To witness the powerful man in concert is like standing near a volcano. Sonny closes his eyes and reacts to the bombast, thrashing violently at crescendos or savoring a single sustained note as if in ecstasy. He totally abandons himself to the flow, at times running wildly across the stage while cranking out impassioned licks. At a recent performance in New York, Sonny snapped not one, not two, but three strings during the course of one particularly sick solo. And he kept going like a psychedelic juggernaut. This man is not for the faint of hear. But for those who might be intrigued by a marriage of Hendrix and Coltrane, dig Sonny.”
In 1988, Sharrock lent his “shards of splintered glass” guitar sound to Machine Gun’s self-titled debut on guitarist Robert Musso’s Mu Records label. That band, led by Musso, also featured saxophonist-flutist Thomas (Rage) Chapin, electric bassist Jair-Rohm Parker Wells and drummer Bil Bryant.
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n 1991, Sharrock released the brilliant Laswell-produced Ask the Ages, an incredible 5-star album (IMO) featuring Charnett Moffett on bass, Elvin Jones on drums and Pharaoh Sanders on tenor sax. It remains a favorite of mine, not for the kind of cathartic onslaughts that Sharrock unleashed with Last Exit, but for the beautifully melodic material and consummate accompaniment provided by the regal rhythm tandem of Moffett and Jones with Sanders in tow on saxophones. I’m still thrilled listening to the mysterious and beguiling “Who Does She Hope to Be?” and the triumphant anthem, “As We Used to Sing,” powered by Elvin’s signature over the barline swing factor. As he told an interviewer at the time: “I've been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song. I know it’s possible.”
My next encounter with Sonny was a sitdown interview for the July 1993 issue Downbeat. It took place in the afternoon at the Time Cafe on Lafayette Street, above The Fez, where the Mingus Big Band held forth every Monday night. Sonny was joined by fellow guitar slinger Vernon Reid for an animated talk about the formation of the Black Rock Coalition, Sonny’s encounters with Miles Davis, the towering influence of John Coltrane and attain that exalted level where “the song plays you.”
To my surprise, Sharrock would later gain a certain amount of mainstream notoriety through his skronking slide guitar theme song for the animated Space Ghost Coast to Coast mock interview show on Comedy Central.
He recorded that cathartic theme on Nov. 19, 1993 and six months later he was gone. Sharrock’s sudden death from a heart attack on May 26, 1994, at age 53, came as a profound shock to that twisted segment of the guitar community that acccept ‘skronk’ as a valid part of the instrument’s vocabulary. Here is that Downbeat conversation with Sonny and Vernon:
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