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 February 15, 2005 Sheryl Bailey’s Search for Beauty
Jazz guitarist Sheryl Bailey’s musical lineage includes several classically trained pianists, from her great-grandmother on, but, like a lot of kids since the 1960s, Bailey was pulled toward the guitar. "When you’re 13, you want to be a rock star," she told me before a gig at the Deer Head Inn, a venerable jazz spot in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains resort area. "I begged my mother for a guitar. It was a Harmony Strat from Penney’s. It was my way of asserting my independence." After a couple of years of playing on her own, she began to take formal lessons from a jazz guitar instructor in her native Pittsburgh. "My mother told me I’d have to study. I became obsessed around the clock with trying to understand harmony." Still in her 30s, Sheryl Bailey has four impressive CDs under her belt, beginning with 1995’s Little Misunderstood. On that fusion disc, Bailey was already showing her impressive technical skills. It was with her second album, Reunion of Souls (2001), that she revealed her profound gift for melody. The disc featured her and guitarist Chris Bergson in a quartet with bassist Ashley Turner and drummer Sunny Jain playing a series of straight-ahead jazz compositions, including four by Bailey. Bailey took the reins as leader and writer with The Power of 3, her first album with her current trio, which includes Gary Versace on organ and Ian Froman on drums. She was at the Deer Head to celebrate the release of her second disc with them, Bull’s Eye, which, like its predecessor, is composed of her own tunes. Joining forces with these two brilliant musicians has brought Bailey’s talents as a leader, writer, and player into focus. "It took a while to find the right band," she told me. Her trio avoids groove clichés, preferring to function as a legitimate jazz unit. That’s not to say that she scorns the funkiness that makes organ trios so enjoyable. She and her cohorts shift gears easily, from the traditional balladry of "Song for All Souls" to the greasy soul of "Swamp Thang" and the hard bop of "Old and Young Blues." The common denominators in all of her tunes are a love of melody and a search for beauty. Yet Bailey is no lightweight, no player of "smooth jazz." Her songs are musically and emotionally complex, accessible but challenging. Her knowledge of jazz history and her commitment to renewing the form while remaining true to its roots informs all her work. In her teaching (she’s an assistant professor of guitar at the Berklee School of Music), she emphasizes the history of jazz guitar. "Older players did more chordal-based stuff," she explains. "Younger players now are more single-note." In addition, such guitarists as Wes Montgomery and Tal Farlow knew the music of the great songwriters of their time. "Back then, pop music was more harmonically lush." When I asked Bailey what had pulled her toward jazz, she said she’d heard it on a local radio station as a teenager. "I stumbled onto it. I was attracted to it -- it was so exotic. I grew up around show music and classical." While it was jazz that took hold, the music she heard at home has left its mark. Bailey’s music contains some of the structural elegance of classical music, a sense of completeness in her writing and in the way her solos develop. Her songs also have a natural melodic flow that seems to stem from her appreciation of classic songwriters. It’s in performance that Bailey’s talents come together in perfect, exhilarating balance. Her CDs are sharp and exciting, but she seems to become fully charged in front of an audience. That evening at the Deer Head included her interpretations of Dexter Gordon’s "Cheesecake" and Miles Davis’s "Solar," but she was there to highlight her own tunes, which didn’t suffer in comparison with those older, better-known compositions. Her improvisations were fresh and consistently surprising, building on the possibilities suggested in her tunes. She rarely falls back on a stock riff or phrase, and even her quickest lines remain melodically compelling. Bailey’s broad knowledge of harmony and chord structure -- on the basis of which she’s written a textbook, The Chord Rules -- gives her music tremendous complexity and variety. What struck me most forcefully as I watched Bailey onstage was how much joy she gets from playing music and how easily she is able to pull her listeners into that enjoyment with her. She closes her eyes, smiling, rocking, and swaying to the music, but she’s also intensely aware of what’s going on around her. She often seems as surprised and delighted by the other players as she is by anything she herself is playing. Surprise and delight are natural responses to Ian Froman’s playing. He’s an exceptionally musical drummer, responsive and at the same time unpredictable enough to throw Bailey rhythmic challenges that push her to her limit. Brian Cherette was the third member of the trio at the Deer Head. Gary Versace had a previous engagement, but Cherette was neither a last-minute replacement (he’s played with Bailey often) nor a compromise. He’s an alert improviser whose musical imagination shows the influence of such innovative players as Larry Young, but he also reaches back to pull in the sounds and feels of early jazz organists like Wild Bill Davis and Bill Doggett. Most impressive to me was his ability to program a Korg electronic keyboard to sound exactly like a Hammond organ. Audiophiles would have been impressed with how clean and balanced the trio’s live sound was -- with no miking and no one running sound. Bailey tours often in the US and abroad. In her online bio with Guitar Nine Records, an instrumental guitar collective, she describes music as, "the universal language . . . the greatest tool for creating peace and breaking down cultural barriers." Those words may sound naïve, but Bailey’s music is imbued with a sense of life’s joy and possibilities. It avoids postmodern irony, but it’s also free of sentimentality. Plenty of current musicians like to remind us that life can be dark and difficult. In these hard times, Sheryl Bailey reminds us that beauty is truth and that pursuing it is laudable. You can read about some of Sheryl Bailey’s other projects at www.sherylbailey.com, where you can also buy her discs. …Joseph Taylor
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