News & Updates — Sonny Sharrock

Sonny Sharrock came around 'bout the same time as Jimi Hendrix and brought a fast & heavy string-shaking style into free jazz, with massive chords and rock energy. His sound & style contained elements of hard rock, doo-wop, funk, bop and soul, and he claims to model his playing after jazz saxophonists and John Coltrane in particular. (He claimed that asthma prevented him from playing a horn and that he thought himself "a horn player with a really fucked up axe".) Warren Sharrock hailed from Westchester County NY and sang doo-wop as a teenager. He got into jazz and made...

When I was a teenager I was into all this crazy free jazz stuff (which I am still REALLY into, FYI) and someone like Herbie Mann seemed like a joke to me. His awful hairy-chested nudie album cover on Push Push was disgusting to me and when a girl I knew (who was into the Grateful Dead...another band I hated in those years) expressed her fondness for both Herbie's "physique" and his music I gave her the album to take it off my hands. (I had bought it in a collection of jazz & blues albums). But the problem with...