Warren Harding "Sonny" Sharrock (August 27, 1940 – May 26, 1994) was an American jazz guitarist. He was once married to singer Linda Sharrock, with whom he sometimes recorded and performed.
One of few guitarists in the first wave of free jazz in the 1960s, Sharrock was known for his incisive, heavily chorded attack, his highly amplified bursts of wild feedback, and for 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 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.
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 fucked up axe."
Guitar is a solo studio album by American jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock. He recorded the album with producer Bill Laswell at RPM Sound Studios in New York City. As the project's sole instrumentalist, Sharrock performed and overdubbed his guitar improvisations onto other sections of a song he had recorded beforehand.
When Guitar was released in 1986 by Enemy Records, it received positive reviews from critics, who praised Sharrock's compositions, playing, and use of distortion. The album was named the eighth best record of 1986 by rock critic Robert Christgau, while jazz writer Ian Carr said it epitomized the electric guitar's range as an instrument.
Guitar was viewed by Sharrock as the culmination of a period in his career spent developing his sense of composition. After releasing his first record Black Woman in 1969, he experimented with different influences during the 1970s. When he recorded "Dance with Me Montana" in 1982, the song's chord progression changed his perspective on composing and inspired him to pursue more melodic ideas: "You listen to [it], and it's like a blind man struggling to get out of a room. Guitar was a crystallization of all of the things that I had discovered in that song." In the early 1980s, he had also worked on projects with Material, an experimental band fronted by Bill Laswell, who helped Sharrock produce the album.