Sonny Sharrock never wanted to play guitar. He disliked the instrument when he first tried it out, as a 20-year-old in 1960, and he remained stubbornly committed to that attitude even after he’d radically expanded its expressive possibilities, remade it to suit his vision, established himself as one of the greatest ever to play it. Or so he claimed, to almost anyone who ever got him on the record, until just about the day he died. In 1970: “I hate the guitar, man.” In 1989: “I don’t like guitar, I don’t like it at all.” In 1991, two months after the release of his last and greatest album: “I don’t like it.” In 1992: “I despise the sound of the guitar.” In 1993, less than a year before his death: “I didn’t like the instrument very much.”
Sharrock had asthma as a teenager, which didn’t stop him from singing doo wop, or dabbling in any street-level mischief that was available to a ’50s kid in his hometown of Ossining, New York. But it did rule out the tenor saxophone he coveted after an encounter with Kind of Blue converted him to the church of John Coltrane. An acquaintance had a guitar on hand, so he picked that up instead. The decision, he would later be sure, had saved his life from “whatever young men die of in the street.” Still, he went on resenting the guitar, which he believed was not suited to the outbursts of ecstatic humanity he heard in Coltrane or the other tenor players he came to love, like free jazz pioneers Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler, Coltrane associates who took their music even further toward an oblivion outside Western ideas about melody and rhythm. The guitar, to Sonny Sharrock, always sounded the same, no matter who was playing it. It had no feeling.
Just about every musician Sharrock admired had worked on bandstands, or at least begun seriously honing their craft, while they were still teenagers. As a young man, he felt he was arriving to jazz late in life, too late to learn the music by the usual methods: studying other players, absorbing their licks, eventually developing your own. So he decided to simply express himself as purely as he could within the bounds of his ability at the time, on an instrument he didn’t care for. Had he gone searching for guitar idols, he wouldn’t have found any, because no one before Sonny Sharrock played guitar like him.
Only Jimi Hendrix did as much as Sharrock, as early, to push the electric guitar to its limits and explore what sounds were there. Hendrix’s wildest music, like 1970’s “Machine Gun,” involved extreme volume and the ensuing feedback and distortion, spontaneous outer energy that he harnessed and redirected; if he put the guitar down in the middle of a solo, it might go on roaring without him. Sharrock, who liked to keep the volume on his amp at 4 out of 10, was more like a horn player, animating an object that would otherwise lie mute. Everything that came out—as his slide shot past the end of the fretboard, as his pick struck muted strings, as he strummed chords so quickly and ferociously that they began to resemble approaching tornadoes—came from kinetic effort. The energy was inside him.