Phil Sheridan

Canadian musician (trumpet, valve trombone, vibes), composer, arranger, engineer, producer and record company executive born in Woodstock, Ontario. A jazz musician by the age of 14, he attended Westlake Music College in L.A. and graduated in the late 1950s. After playing and touring extensively with an L.A.based show-group, he returned to Toronto in the early 1960s where he wrote and arranged for CBC and started his engineering career. Started out first at Hallmark Studios, Toronto and moved to RCA Studios, Toronto in early 1969. When Thunder Sound opened in 1971 he was chief engineer and later General Manager. He left Toronto in 1978 to start a jazz record store in Coconut Grove, Florida but would return to Toronto occasionally to engineer a recording. He learned of RCA Limited's plan to sell their Mutual Street studios in 1979 and joined with the studio's maintenance engineer Bob Richards (6) to purchase it, renaming it McClear Place and founded Innovation Records (3) in 1980 with Richards. In February 1984 Richards bought out Sheridan's stake in McClear and he left McClear in 1985. Sheridan focused on producing for his label Innovation and then relocated to California to launch and head The Jazz Alliance label in 1991. He returned to McClear Pathé as an engineer on August 1, 1994. However, this was short-lived and in 1996 Sheridan became in-house engineer and producer for The Studio At Puck's Farm in rural Ontario.