Sheryl Bailey

And The OCC Jazz Orchestra with Special Guest Jay Ashby
(Presented by MCG)

Sheryl Bailey was 18 when she first saw Emily Remler perform, at the University of Pittsburgh Jazz Festival as part of an all-star combo that included Sonny Rollins and Ron Carter. Inspired by Remler’s originality and amazing command of the guitar and by the fact that she was a woman – one of only a handful of female guitarists to have achieved prominence during the entire history of jazz – Bailey was profoundly affected by the experience.

Bailey’s promise to herself and her desire to keep alive the memory of Remler, who died tragically in 1990 at age 32, was the impetus for A New Promise, Bailey’s sixth CD as a leader and first for the Pittsburgh-based MCG Jazz label. The disc teams the guitarist with Pittsburgh’s extraordinary 16-piece Three Rivers Jazz Orchestra for eight selections, including three composed by Remler and three by Bailey. Although many guitar players have taken solos with big bands over the years, A New Promise stands with such milestones as Charlie Christian’s 1941 recording of “Solo Flight” with the Benny Goodman Orchestra and Kenny Burrell’s 1965 album Guitar Forms with Gil Evans as a rare instance of the instrument being featured as the primary solo voice in such a large ensemble.

The CD’s producer, MCG Jazz executive director Marty Ashby, first heard Bailey play in 2006 at the 55 Bar in Greenwich Village. Impressed with “her musicianship, sense of groove, and the unabashed clarity in which she improvised lines,” he invited her to return to her native Pittsburgh to perform in concert with the Three Rivers Jazz Orchestra. One of the numbers he asked her to do was Remler’s “Carenia,” a samba that saxophonist and orchestra co-director Mike Tomaro had arranged for the band. When Bailey went to Ashby’s office the next day to discuss making a CD, she noticed a large painting of Remler behind his desk. “I just looked up and it seemed apparent that we should do something for Emily,” Bailey says. “It was right there in front of us.”

Sheryl Bailey was born on May 20, 1966, in Pittsburgh. “I come from a family of classical musicians who all play the piano,” she says. “I had to take piano too when I was a kid, but I was very rebellious and actually wanted to be a rock star when I was, like, 13. I loved Peter Frampton and Ritchie Blackmore. I was really into heavy metal.” She took up guitar at 13 and within two years as playing in bar bands. “I was giving my mother many gray hairs over it,” she recalls.

lthough long associated with jazz, Bailey never entirely abandoned rock. “It’s still part of me,” she states. In recent years, she has been appearing in New York City with fellow guitarists in a band called Jazz Guitars Play Jimi Hendrix. Since 2002, she has recorded and toured (particularly in France) with clarinetist David Krakauer’s wildly eclectic Klezmer Madness in which her electric guitar takes the place of traditional klezmer violin. “I’m sort of like the other lead voice sparring with David,” she explains. “It’s totally like a Jimi Hendrix freak-out in a lot of ways.”

Bailey performs monthly at the 55 Bar with her organ trio, with which she has released five CDs on her own Pure Music Records and also tours internationally, and she often does two-guitar engagements with her friends Jack Wilkins and Howard Alden. “I don’t really separate them all,” she says of the various musical forms with which she is involved.

For the past nine years, Bailey has been an Assistant Professor of Guitar at the Berklee College of Music, from which she had graduated earlier. She teaches there two days per week, commuting to Boston from her home in the Bronx. And for the past three years, she has also been teaching at the Collective School of Music in New York City. She is much in demand for guitar clinics around the world and has written two instruction books, the latest, Moveable Shapes: Concepts for Reharmonizing ii-V-I’s, published in 2009 by Mel-Bay Guitar University.

A New Promise not only represents a new creative plateau in Bailey’s prolific, distinguished career but also calls attention to the often-overlooked legacy of the woman who so inspired her. “She paved the way for me,” Bailey says of Emily Remler. “I really felt her pain and her struggle with where she was at that time being a woman player. I really wanted to hear Emily’s person in me when I played. It meant a lot to me to do this tribute and pay homage to her and to say thank you.”