Sheryl Bailey 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 Sheryl Bailey:
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 Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Sheryl Bailey
- City: New York City
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
My Life & Work
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Bio:
There's no description more apt for Sheryl Bailey than "A sizzling guitar goddess", coined by Elliot Simon of All About Jazz. He's not alone with his superlatives-Adam Levy of Guitar Player Magazine calls Sheryl "One of the most compelling tones of her generation", and Frank Forte of Just Jazz Guitar ranks her "among the best bop guitar players with a fresh approach and something new."
Sheryl's playing is unquestionably "sizzling". She has groomed incredible chops and impeccable taste with which she applies them. It's said (by Lee Metcalf, The Villager) that she can "go from zero to blazing in two beats", but she is continually praised for never sacrificing melody and lyricism for technique. "She balances superior technical skills with a strong lyrical sense and swinging touch..." continues Metcalf, and Joe Taylor of Soundstage says "Bailey combines an astonishing command of the fingerboard with a seemingly endless flow of melodic invention."
As for the guitar, she's hardly had it out of her hands since the age of 13. That was when her mother finally relented to Sheryl's begging for a Harmony Strat from the J.C. Penney catalogue. Though Sheryl was a rock-star wannabe, the influence of her pianist mother got her obsessed with learning harmony, and her first teacher in Pittsburgh, John Maione, introduced her to the guitar tradition-Wes, Jimmy Raney, George Van Eps, Joe Pass and others. She eventually attended Berklee College of Music. Her years of dedication and focus won her 3rd place in the Thelonius Monk International Jazz Guitar competition in 1995, and she was chosen as a Jazz Ambassador for the U.S. State Department in 2000 for a South American tour. She is now said to be "One of the top players in an emerging generation of jazz guitarists" (John Heidt, Vintage Guitar).
Her own trio, The Sheryl Bailey 3, is a modernized version of the organ trio-"the ultimate organ trio" according to JazzInside Magazine. In addition to their 15-year plus residency at NYC's 55 Bar, they have toured China, Canada, Europe and the US. She also tours the world as a member of David Krakauer's "Ancestral Groove". A partial list of others with whom she has performed and recorded with includes Richard Bona, George Garzone, Lincoln Goines, Kim Plainfield, Bill O'Connell, Mike LeDonne, Irene Cara, Lea Delaria, Jack Wilkins, Howard Alden, Shingo Okudaira, Ingrid Jensen, Dwayne Burno, Tommy Campbell, Simon Woolf, Alex Garnett and Ken Peplowski.
To date, Sheryl has 9 CDs out under her name, and a live DVD, The Sheryl Bailey 3 Live in NYC (Mel Bay). Each successive release has drawn more accolades. Of Live at the Fat Cat, Joe Taylor says, "...this disc proves again that Sheryl Bailey is one of the most gifted and exciting jazz guitarists on the scene", and that she is a "jazz composer of the first order". In 2010 MCG Jazz released A New Promise, her tribute to Emily Remler, produced by Grammy-award winner, Marty Ashby, featuring Sheryl as the solo artist with Three Rivers Jazz Orchestra. In Downbeat Magazine Phillip Booth commented, "She is one of the new greats of her chosen instrument". Her 2014 release on the Cellar Live label, A Meeting Of Minds features The Sheryl Bailey 3. A feature on the disc in Guitar Player Magazine states: "They are so in sync they seem to finish each other's ideas". In 2015, she and bassist Harvie S debuted their acoustic duo, Plucky Strum on Whaling City Sound. JazzTimes Magazine remarked of Bailey’s approach: "her fluidity of style is impressive, her agility uncommon".
Sheryl is a Professor at Berklee College of Music, and at the Collective in New York. In keeping with Sheryl's philosophy of "giving back", her 2011 quartet release, "For All Those Living" donates 20% of sales to the Ronald McDonald House of NYC. She has been an Artist in Residence at countless other programs, including NYU, Bates College, the Stanford Jazz Workshop, Towson University, the LA Music Academy and GIT. In 2009, Mel Bay published her book Moveable Shapes: Concepts for Re-Harmonizing II-V-I's. She has also developed a complete curriculum in jazz improvisation for interactive cyber study via Truefire's Guitar Sherpa program, The Bebop Dojo. In addition she has top selling courses available from Mike's Masterclasses, Jazz Guitar Society, JamPlay, and Truefire.
So, Sheryl lives up to Elliot Simon's description, in all facets of her work. Earning "Rising Star" status on Downbeat's Critic's Poll 2013, 2014, and 2015. At a recent duo performance in New York-Sheryl and Jack Wilkins-I sat next to Jimmy Wyble. After a couple of tunes, Jimmy leaned over and whispered, "She's one of the top five" ...as in, one of the top five guitarists in the country. And Vintage Guitar terms her "one of jazz guitars current front runners."
— Evelyn Palmer
Contact Information
- Email: sheryl@sherylbailey.com
- Telephone: +1 917-476-4336
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://myiesstore.com/sherylbailey/
- ▶ Buy My Merch: http://myiesstore.com/sherylbailey/
- ▶ Book Purchases: http://www.amazon.com/MBGU-Jazz-Moveable-Shapes-II-V-ebook/dp/B01I25FGV2
- ▶ Twitter: SherylBailey
- ▶ Instagram: gtrnerd
- ▶ Website: http://www.sherylbailey.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm6BuzHxr9RXryCNsQVblqA
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCm6BuzHxr9RXryCNsQVblqA
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/1oevVi72hJTXKMvtt3IW8s
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/0FoKXe2mL3O6PHF46FsnPL
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/1ahvRKGdLgX6D4q4UZDCBd
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/2tqeE1l3auysSDpfEfQFsa
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/6yaiMdhT4juM6TUYI1EDo2
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/7dcBeieQ0vDuB52qP2bK7K
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
"I came from a family of professional musicians and we all had to study the piano. Maybe it was because I was rebellious, but I wanted to play the guitar instead of the piano. I think it was because you could play rock music on the guitar. So I had studied piano and trumpet as a kid, but when I got the guitar, that's when I got really serious about music."
"[The guitar] is loud. It's a contemporary instrument. The electric guitar, which is mostly what I play, to me it's a contemporary sound. It's a voice, and it seemed like the voice that expressed me the best. There are so many things you can do with the guitar, whether you want to play straight jazz, or you want to be a singer songwriter, or a composer, or a film scorer. You can get a good background in harmony, melody, and rhythm from studying guitar. It's in many ways a complete instrument."
"I try to make my teaching as practical and as based in the real world as possible. Because I do perform and I tour a lot, and record, I try to bring that experience to my students, to tell them this is what you really need to know to go out there and do it, and be successful."
"The ideals of being professional-being prepared, being on time, having a good attitude, being someone who's friendly and easy to work with-sometimes is as important about getting the gig as anything. Because there are so many great players, the more that you're prepared and the more that you're a good person to work with, you're going to move to the top of the list of people to call."
"For me, what's important is that the material that we're dealing with in class is practical to what a real musician has to deal with. It's about developing the skills that you're really going to need to make you successful. Those are the skills that I learned at Berklee, too. I think that's what's awesome about Berklee: You get to study with people who are really out there doing it, and to learn from that experience."
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry 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.
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 through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
