Hailing from the neighboring towns of South Portland and Cape Elizabeth, Maine, Neil Pearlman (piano) and Dylan Sherry (saxophones) have been carrying on a musical conversation for more than a decade. Each established musicians in the jazz and folk music scenes of New England, their friendship began years ago as teenagers at the Maine Jazz Camp and has culminated now in their new duo project Pearlman / Sherry. The duo will be hitting the road in April 2018 to support the release of their debut album, recorded in the fall of 2017. Their latest project draws on traditional folk melodies from around the world as a foundation for an eclectic set of structured improvisations and arrangements.
A stalwart of the greater Boston music scene, Dylan Sherry can be heard with a wide variety of projects around the city as a bandleader and sideman. His background playing saxophone in the surprisingly vibrant Maine jazz scene and subsequent studies in jazz and classical performance have resulted in an expressive and versatile musical voice. He is in high demand around the region and has been involved with a wide variety of projects including his groups Sudden Duo and Spontaneous Trio, afro-celtic funk band Soulsha, experimental contemporary trio Transpiler and the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, to name just a few.
Neil Pearlman (“a tremendous pianist” --BBC Radio Scotland) has been carving his own path on the piano since he first started blending the traditional Scottish music he grew up with and the jazz piano concepts that fascinated him in high school. He headed to New York for college to further explore jazz, latin and improvisatory music and has been discovering new musical territory ever since, from his 2015 album “Run to Fly” with the quartet Alba's Edge (“sophisticated, mellow, contemporary folk-jazz” --fRoots Magazine) to this latest duo with Dylan Sherry, perhaps his most unabashedly modern and improvisatory project yet.