Born in Cleveland in 1951, Elliot Sharp is one of the crucial figures of New York’s avant-garde musical scene due to his multifaceted and extraordinarily creative body of work developed throughout the last four decades. A musician trained in classical piano and with a solid academic curriculum that included studies in music composition, jazz, anthropology and electronics at prestigious educational institutions of the United States, Sharp soon deviated from the normative musical trajectories in order to venture through the more unstable, although more artistically stimulating, territories of experimentalism beyond stylistic or aesthetical borders, as proven by his precocious explorations, inspired by the musical and theoretical works of Karlheinz Stockausen, Iannis Xenakis or Harry Partch, of the electronic sounds generated by modulators and oscillators. In the late 1970s, under the influence of both the aforementioned avant-garde composers as well as by Jimi Hendrix’s guitar style and Bob Dylan’s lyrical flow of conscience, Elliot Sharp began his multidimensional creative trajectory, fundamentally based on the intersection of numerous contemporary artistic fields and languages, from orchestral composition to free improvisation, from jazz to electronic music, of which he is considered one of the pioneers due to his experimentations with computers and algorithms during the 1980s in the context of the project Virtual Stance. A multi-instrumentalist focused mainly on his approach to guitar, although he is also fluent in saxophone and clarinet, Sharp has collaborated throughout his career with crucial names of global music such as, among many others, Jack DeJohnette, Sonny Sharrock, Debbie Harry, Eric Mingus, Zeena Parkins or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and his compositions, performed by prestigious ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet or the hr-Sonfonierchester were presented at music and art festivals all around the world. His artistic activity, however, goes far beyond the strict borders of musical creation, since it is also expanded by the sporadic curatorship of exhibitions, his writings, his teaching activity and the production of albums of other musicians. Evidently, the summary of such prolific career such as that of Elliot Sharp would not be complete without the reference to the several formations that he led, among which we may highlight the hardcore/jazz/blues band Terraplane, with whom he just recently recorded the album “Century” (2021) and which is considered one of his most accessible musical projects.

The Guimarães Jazz 2023 edition will thus have the honor the present, in a solo performance, one of the greatest artists in activity in the field of avant-garde and exploratory music of the twenty-first century. This concert represents the return to the Portuguese stages of an adventurous musician and a faithful representative of the creative impetus that, through the confluence of European tradition with the modern musical languages of jazz, blues, electronics and pop, allowed the flourishing of the freest and more fertile expressions in Western contemporary art.