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.
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.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).