Histories of electric guitar innovators often are a recounting of the most obvious names: Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Albert King, Duane Allman.
But there’s also a more obscure but equally significant guitar pantheon, populated by six-string revolutionaries who didn’t sell as many records as Hendrix or Clapton but who changed the way we hear music just as profoundly. Their history begins with innovators such as Ike Turner, Guitar Slim and Link Wray, and proceeds into the 1960s with Buddy Guy and Sonny Sharrock, whose story may be the most intriguing of all.
Sharrock, who makes a rare Chicago appearance Sunday at Lounge Ax, always considered himself a jazz player, yet his influence on rock history has been undeniable. Everyone from the MC5 to Sonic Youth is in his debt.
Sharrock, now 53, didn’t even begin to study guitar until he was 20, after an adolescence spent singing doo-wop and dabbling in other art forms. He hung around Manhattan’s Lower East Side and drank in the sounds of Miles Davis and John Coltrane at the height of their powers, befriending the likes of Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. He longed to play saxophone, but asthma turned him in the direction of the guitar.
The sounds he heard in his head-the unearthly wail of Albert Ayler’s saxophone, the polyrhythmic barrages of Elvin Jones-had no equivalent on guitar, but this somehow did not discourage him.
“There was a point of no turning back just before I turned 20, and I remember the night,” he says. “I was lying in my bed thinking, `Do I really want to do this?’ I knew there would be a lot of suffering in this for me. I knew I wasn’t going to make any dollars right away, or maybe never. But I realized there was nothing else I could do. I’m not a religious person, but it was as close as I’ve come to having a religious experience.”
Similar words have been used to describe Sharrock’s guitar playing, but not initially. The history of jazz guitar, from Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian to Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery, was defined by virtuosity, restraint, tastefulness. Sharrock was after catharsis.
If there were any parallels to Sharrock’s slash-and-scream style, they were developing in rock, but Sharrock says, “I didn’t know anything about that until recently, because the music I was into was holding me so fast. I remember one night seeing the Jazz Messengers with Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter, then going to see Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, and then Coltrane with Eric Dolphy.
“You see that and you lie down for two or three months just trying to assimilate it all.”
Even on the free-jazz scene, “People like Pharoah, Don and Ornette were into what I was doing, but most of them couldn’t use it,” he says. “I just couldn’t get discouraged. I did a lot of day jobs but I never quit playing. I’m the kind of guy that goes in the supermarket and heads for the line that I think is going fastest, and then the cash register will break down or the checkout girl will faint, but I still won’t change lines. It’s like, `This is what I’m gonna do.’ It gets me in trouble sometimes.”
He was recruited by Miles Davis to play on his epochal “Jack Johnson” album of 1970, but claims he bungled the chance. “I’m still angry about it, in that I didn’t play very well,” he says. “I wasn’t playing what I wanted to play for him, and I always wanted to make it up to Miles.”
Yet when Davis soon after asked Sharrock to audition for a tour, the guitarist turned him down.
“Miles likes to (expletive) with people,” Sharrock says with a laugh. “He told me I had to audition even though he already knew how I played, which I thought was stupid and told him so. And that was the reason we always got along, because I didn’t take that crap from him. If you stood up to him, he loved you.”
That kind of willfullness kept Sharrock going through the ’70s, through a long period of inactivity after three solo albums recorded with his then-wife Linda. In 1986, downtown avant-garde luminary Bill Laswell put together a band called Last Exit with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and saxist Peter Brotzmann and invited Sharrock to play guitar.
“Our first gig was in Holland and I realized when the plane landed that I was on the same flight as Jackson,” Sharrock recalls. “We went to the gig and didn’t really talk about anything. We just walked out on stage and no one said a word about what was to be done. In the tradition of jazz, that’s done a lot actually. We looked at each other, the first beat came down and we figured if we didn’t kill the audience, we’d kill each other.”
Sharrock’s hyperbole isn’t that far from the truth. Words like “incendiary” seem hopelessly inadequate in the face of Last Exit’s onslaught. Sharrock and Brotzmann exploded melodies into shrapnel, Jackson swung the music violently this way and that, while Laswell’s bass fought to hold its ground. A handful of albums followed and laid the groundwork for Sharrock’s long-overdue emergence.
“Last Exit was a milestone for me because it set up a lot of things, but would I ever return to it? Hell, no,” Sharrock laughs. “Back in the ’60s when I first came to New York, the concept of playing free was to use all of your energy all of the time and just play the music. And we did that night after night at places like Slug’s. Then the music had to start taking form, and guys branched off to do different things. So to do it with Last Exit was fun, but it wasn’t the first time for me. Sometimes near the end it started to feel like old hat.”
Sharrock had other ideas, including an album that would finally pair him with one of his earliest inspirations, drummer Elvin Jones. Sharrock’s 1991 release, “Ask the Ages” (Axiom), with Jones, Sanders and bassist Charnett Moffett, is a masterpiece that combines the fury of Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced” with the tumultuous spirituality of Coltrane’s post-“A Love Supreme” albums.
“I was apprehensive that I wouldn’t be able to stand up to Elvin, that I wouldn’t be able to hold on while Elvin did what he did,” Sharrock says. “One time I did lose it. I lost the time totally because he’s so incredible with all of those different rhythms going on at the same time. I was in the main room facing Elvin, and Pharoah and Charnett were in glass booths… And I’m watching him play on `Many Mansions,’ and I flashed back to Birdland when I used to see him with Coltrane. And I lost it. For a second you can hear this bump (on the disc) because I was gone.”
Sharrock says he never communicated his awe to Jones. “He’s not the kind of guy to stand around listening to people say how much they love him. But after we finished one track he goes, `That sounds like the old days.’ That was it. I’m happy after that.”
On “Highlife” (Enemy), released that same year with his touring band, Sharrock pushes in the opposite direction, creating a pop-oriented instrumental album that includes such tracks as “Kate,” based on the music of Kate Bush.
“That was me finding my way and going all the way in that direction,” he says. “I’ve never been able to put the brakes on anything I do.”
Typically, Sharrock is pursuing a bolder, bigger sound with the band he will bring to Lounge Ax. A major-label deal with Chrysalis also is in the offing. “Everyone’s surprised, me most of all,” he says.
Though he’s held in high esteem in the rock community, Sharrock insists, “I’m a jazz player, I approach the music as a jazz player, though I’m not always sure the music I’m playing is jazz.”
But he feels little kinship with the conservative bent of the current jazz revival and young lions such as Wynton Marsalis.
“Those guys, I call them the new old men,” Sharrock says. “They’re very much into their technique and that’s too bad, because they’ve forgotten the things that make jazz or any music real: originality and having that desire to find new ways, new voices. They’ve given up on that. They say, `I can play it like everybody else who has ever played this horn. I’ll show them all.’ But I don’t think that 20 years from now anyone will be listening to their music, which is what you should be working toward. That’s what I’ve always worked toward.”
