Guitar (Sonny Sharrock album)

Composition and recording

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", Sharrock recalled. "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.

Sharrock recorded Guitar at RPM Sound Studios in New York City. As the sole instrumentalist for the project, he first recorded his performance of a song's introductory passage and chord statement before overdubbing his improvisations onto the finished recording. His compositions on the album included a blues piece called "Black Bottom", the berceuse "Broken Toys", "Devils Doll Baby"—which featured Sharrock's frenzied slide guitar playing—and "Princess Sonata", a suite showcasing his range of techniques. Sharrock cited Guitar as the first time he was able to play both powerfully and melodically in the same way saxophonists John Coltrane and Albert Ayler had late in their careers.

Release and reception

Guitar was released in 1986 by Enemy Records. In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau found Sharrock's avant-garde jazz playing "funky and beautiful" but also daring sonically. He said his songs feature expressive melodies, relaxed tempos, and definite song structures, which are sometimes "either counterpointed or strung together in a suite". Ken Hyder from Hi-Fi News & Record Review appreciated how Sharrock had abandoned the rhythmic strumming style of his past work in favor of "a post-Hendrix feedback electric guitar sound" in an elaborate overdubbing process that sustained his well–defined guitar lines. Hyder recommended the album to listeners of all genres and said Sharrock's playing recalled blues, R&B, and folk melodies. "Throughout all the distortion he avoids the one-dimensional emotion trap and comes up with something intensely warm and human." At the end of 1986, Christgau named it the year's eighth best record in his list for the Pazz & Jop critics poll, and later wrote that both Guitar and Sharrock's next album—Seize the Rainbow (1987)—could restore any listener's interest in jazz fusion.

In a retrospective review for the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot believed that as a showcase for a solo guitarist, Guitar was "bloodied and beautiful", while AllMusic's Sean Westergaard called it "a beautiful statement by one of jazz music's most unique voices" in Sharrock, whose unadulterated timbre sounded both "powerful and beautiful". Jazz critic John Fordham said the album was a "sensational, terrifying exercise in abstract sounds, fragmented blues, feedback and slide-guitar splinterings," but also "one of the most effective antidotes to the prim and studiedly dramatic conventional jazz-guitar performances on the circuit" at the time. In the Spin Alternative Record Guide (1995), Guitar was ranked 86th on a list of the "Top 100 Alternative Albums". According to The Absolute Sound, Laswell helped produce Sharrock's playing within a glossy, expansive sound that offered both an intimate jazz feel and an intense rock quality, which in the process helped "shine a light into Sharrock's spiritual depths". In The Rough Guide to Jazz (2004), Ian Carr felt Guitar epitomized the breadth of the electric instrument, "ranging from impressionistic sound poetry to abstract-expressionist blitzkrieg".

Track listing

All music composed by Sonny Sharrock.

Personnel

Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.