Gord Sheard via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Gord Sheard:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Artist
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Gord Sheard
- City: Toronto
- Country: Canada
Current News
- What's Up? I'm a musician (pianist, keyboardist, composer, arranger, producer) and music educator (full-time professor at Humber College in Toronto) with a PhD in ethnomusicology. In addition to leading my own bands -- including Gordon Sheard & SInal Aberto, and the Gordon Sheard Trio -- I play with several bands and do various freelance gigs in the Toronto area.
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Professor Sheard...a jazzman truly blessed and bewitched with Jelly Roll Morton's "Spanish Tinge".
Gordon got to be a Ph.D. by interviewing Brazilian musicians, by analyzing, synthesizing and writing. But he got to be a musican (keyboards both horizonally -- piano -- and vertically -- accordion) by swinging...deep into the hot gumbo that boiled up into the North American continent through New Orleans...and stepping through to the far side of the Gulf of Mexico and the Amazon the man's brought back a lot that never did make it as far north as the cradle of jazz.
Gordon has had the pleasure of performing with Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker, Steve Gadd, David Garibaldi, Steve Ferrone, Lew Soloff, Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, and Slim Gaillard. He toured extensively with fluegelhornist/composer Chuck Mangione in the United States, Canada, South America, and the Caribbean.
His CD "All Saints' Bay" (named of course for the Baía de Todos os Santos) was recorded in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil with Bahian musicians (among other colleagues of his), utilizing and incorporating the rhythms of candomblé and samba, and others native to the region.
When Gordon is not treading the backroads of Bahia in search of the lost rhythm he is Head of Composition at Humber College.
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Website: http://www.gordonsheard.ca
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCflLr5yYVEer6gaczremCqg
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/0LNUlOysuepmCRGroy1krq
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/10ygUYIhJxiYCjMmPWhSoZ
My Recordings
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Discography:
Gordon Sheard, "Crucible," 2006 [CD]
Gordon Sheard, "All Saints' Bay," 2013 [CD]
Gordon Sheard & Sinal Aberto, "A New Day," 2019 [CD]
Matrix Music Player
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Tail of the Tiger - Gordon Sheard12 tracks43,133 plays | 430 views
The world's artists via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius. In order to work for the children of the canecutters though, the mechanism must work for everybody.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from the quilombos of Bahia to the favelas of Rio to the poorer quarters of New Orleans to the south side of Chicago to Harlem to Appalachia to Irish villages and Russian shtetls and even Mozart...put it like this:
"Where there's misery, there's music!"
So it's not just Brazil. And it's not just music.
