A major figure in New York City's avant-garde music community since the '70s, Elliott Sharp is a composer and instrumentalist whose body of work runs the gamut from experimental and contemporary classical pieces to blues, noise rock, and electronic music. Sharp was born in Cleveland, Ohio on March 1, 1951, and displayed a talent for music at an early age. He insists he began learning the piano when he was six years old, and started performing in public when he was eight. Sharp then took up the clarinet, and later the guitar. Sharp was also passionately interested in science an...