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
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.