George Shearing born 13 August 1919

Sir George Albert Shearing, OBE (13 August 1919 – 14 February 2011) was a British jazz pianist who for many years led a popular jazz group that recorded for Discovery Records, MGM Records and Capitol Records. The composer of over 300 titles, including the jazz standard "Lullaby of Birdland", had multiple albums on the Billboard charts during the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and 1990s.

The youngest of nine children, Shearing was born in Battersea, south-west London, into a poor, working-class family. His father delivered coal and his mother cleaned trains by night, having cared for her children during the day. Blind from birth, George showed musical aptitude, memorising tunes he had heard on the radio and picking them out on the family's piano, taking lessons from a local teacher and then continuing his studies for four years at the Linden Lodge School for blind children in Wandsworth.

Offered university musical scholarships, he turned them down in favour of paid work as a solo pianist in local pubs, starting when 16 at the Mason's Arms, Battersea, and concentrating first on popular songs and then branching out into jazz. He achieved a degree of prominence with Claude Bampton's newly formed, all-blind stage orchestra in 1937, joining as second pianist: press coverage of the time describing this as "a phenomenal venture".

A fellow band member, the partially sighted drummer Carlo Krahmer, encouraged Shearing's jazz interests. Spurred on by access to Krahmer's record collection, Shearing formulated an approach heavily influenced by Teddy Wilson and Fats Waller, 

plunging into the London after-hours club scene and sometimes playing alongside visiting American stars such as the tenor-saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, while observing Waller at first hand. He made his first solo radio broadcast in 1938 and began to record regularly, either as a soloist or with groups led by Vic Lewis and the top players of the day. In 1941 he met and married Trixie Bayes.

With what now appears to be dazzling speed, he moved through bands and small groups fronted by prominent leaders including the clarinettist Harry Parry, Bert Ambrose, Harry Hayes and the French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, with whom he recorded frequently, Grappelli being at that point resident in London as a refugee from German-occupied Paris.

So complete was Shearing's mastery of jazz piano that the Melody Maker poll voted him the top British pianist for seven years in a row. Aware of being the proverbial big fish in a rather small local pond, Shearing accepted an invitation from the British writer Leonard Feather, a friend from London who had already emigrated, to visit New York in late 1946. He stayed for three months and recorded a trio date for the Savoy label. Encouraged by this experience and enthralled by what he had heard, Shearing moved for good in December 1947.

By now heavily into bebop, he began to attract attention as the intermission pianist at the Hickory House on 52nd Street, sometimes acting as Ella Fitzgerald's accompanist on her pianist's night off before finally landing a quartet engagement at the Clique Club with the fine clarinetist Buddy De Franco. 

Set to record, De Franco had to drop out for contractual reasons and Feather came to the rescue, suggesting that Shearing might try a quintet instead, adding guitar and vibraphone to the usual piano, bass and drums trio.

Voiced in block chords with Shearing using the "locked-hands" style pioneered by the pianist Milt Buckner, where the melody is harmonized in the right hand and echoed in the left, the quintet's new approach caught on immediately, their recording of September in the Rain, made for MGM in February 1949, selling 900,000 copies. Where bebop had seemed over-complex to many listeners, here was a musical style that sounded modern and new, but was easy to enjoy. By now one of the hottest tickets in jazz, Shearing's quintet toured endlessly, recorded incessantly and played residencies at the best clubs in every major American city.

Gradually, Shearing began to introduce a classical element to his concerts, sometimes performing as a soloist with orchestras, and with the quintet featured for the rest of the concert. He also formed a big band and recorded with Latin ensembles, adding a conga player to the quintet. Beauty and the Beat (also 1959), his album with the singer Peggy Lee, was another runaway success. Credited with some 300 compositions of his own, Shearing gained his greatest success with Lullaby of Birdland (1952), commissioned as the theme music for a radio programme based around the famous Birdland club in New York.

                                 

By 1968, Shearing's nimble, witty jazz style was showcased in smaller line-ups, with trios giving way to duos, this pared-down format allowing him a free rein to move from Bach to bebop in a single number. He also formed a vital partnership with the singer Mel Tormé, their collaboration resulting in Grammies in 1983 and 1984, and he briefly reformed his quintet in 1994 for recordings.

Shearing remained fit and active well into his later years and continued to perform, even after being honoured with an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993. He never forgot his native country and, in his last years, would split his year between living in New York and Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, where he bought a house with his second wife, singer Ellie Geffert. This gave him the opportunity to tour the UK, giving concerts, often with Tormé, backed by the BBC Big Band. He was appointed OBE in 1996. In 2007, he was knighted. "So", he noted later, "the poor, blind kid from Battersea became Sir George Shearing. Now that's a fairy tale come true."

In 2004, he released his memoirs, Lullaby of Birdland, which was accompanied by a double-album "musical autobiography", Lullabies of Birdland. Shortly afterwards, however, he suffered a fall at his home and retired from regular performing. He died of heart failure in New York City, 14 February 2011 at the age of 91.

(Compiled and edited from Wikipedia & The Guardian)

Here’s George at a live recording from the Munich Philharmonie during 1992