Sheryl Bailey

here’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.”

In 1995 Sheryl was awarded third place in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Guitar Competition, and has toured South America on behalf of the US State Department as a Jazz Ambassador, honoring the music of Duke Ellington. She currently leads her own trio, The Sheryl Bailey Three (Gary Versace on Hammond B3 and Ian Froman on drums). Her 2002 release, The Power of Three was critically acclaimed and charted in the top 20 of the Jazz Week radio charts. To date, Sheryl has 8 CDs out under her name, and a live DVD, The Sheryl Bailey 3 Live in NYC available from Mel Bay records.

Sheryl is an Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music, and at the Collective in New York. She has been an Artist in Residence and a Clinician at countless other programs and institutions, including NYU, Bates College, the Stanford Jazz Workshop, Towson University, the LA Music Academy and the GIT.

In 2009, Mel Bay published her book Moveable Shapes: Concepts for Reharmonizing ii-V-I’s. She also contributed to Volume 4 of Mel Bay’s Master Anthology of Jazz Guitar Solos and she writes a column called “New York Scene” for the Mel Bay Guitar Session, and for Berklee College of Music’s “Open Position” webzine. She has also developed a complete curriculum in jazz improvisation for cyber study through Truefire’s Guitar Sherpa program, “The Bebop Dojo.”