BORN in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1951, Elliott Sharp has some 85 recordings to his name over the past four decades, from contemporary classical and orchestral music to avant-garde and from opera to experimental jazz, noise, no-wave and electronic music.

An inveterate performer, playing mainly guitar, saxophone and bass clarinet, he has led many ensembles over the years, including the blues-oriented Terraplane and Orchestra Carbon.

Sharp grew up in a musical family, with both his parents playing piano, and he started on the instrument at the age of at six, playing his first recital of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 at New York's Carnegie Hall when he a mere eight years of age.

But relentless piano practice contributed to the asthma that nearly killed him that year and, after he recovered, he switched to clarinet and took up the in guitar 1968.

In May 2007 he performed his solo Concert in Dachau in the Cafe Teufelhart in the village of Dachau near Munich. Before becoming a site of atrocity and nazi mass murder, it had been a centre for artists and musicians.

What was he thinking while playing there? “I try to think of very little when I perform,” he tells me. “Once I hit the zone, operation is pretty much automatic with fingers and ears connected through the void.

“But I do study history and the resonance of the place is part of my larger memory bank that I access while improvising or realising a score, even if subconsciously. My mother is a Holocaust survivor who spent WWII hidden by farmers.” Her farmer was interned in Drancy [in France] and other camps and survived.

“One doesn't have to go very far in this world to be near horrific places,” he replies when I ask what it was like creating the intense and harrowingly beautiful sounds on Concert in Dachau in a place of such catastrophe and hatred.

“Even if you are not in the exact geographical locus of an atrocity, you feel the diffusion of such horror. The US has perpetrated many brutal and inhumane crimes, some possibly conceived in offices in Wall Street. Once learned, we carry this weight wherever we go.”

He's performed in Hiroshima and visited the museum of the bombing. It was, he says, “absolutely excruciating in its horror and pathos yet we played a very joyous concert that night.The art may reflect all that we witness, but not all of the process of exorcism involves reliving the memory.”

In his sleeve notes to the album, Sharp dedicates his record to all those, everywhere, who are scourged by oppression, racism, tyranny and war, particularly Palestinians denied their homeland by the Israeli government.

Sharp has played to Palestinian audience and collaborated with Palestinian musicians in Europe, Palestine, Beirut, Sharjah and New York, where his opera Filiseti Mekidesi (In Search of Sanctuary) premiered in 2018.

“The featured soloist was Kamilya Jubran, an incredible Palestinian singer based in Paris,” he says.

As for Concert in Dachau, it is unique and strangely consoling, full of undeterred solo artistry that strives to overcome the past barbarism of its setting.

It shows how music simultaneously expresses the real world of savagery, compassion and human empathy, regenerating hope even in the place of the utmost inhumanity.

Concert in Dachau is released on Intakt.