[Dixielandjazz] Shearing LA Times Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Sadly

Steve Barbone
Jazz pianist George Shearing dies at 91
George Shearing, blind from birth, played in an all-blind band before  
becoming Britain's leading boogie-woogie artist. In the U.S., he hit  
on a jazz formula that established him in the jazz world and made him  
one of its leading artists for half a century.

George Shearing, the elegant pianist who expanded the boundaries of  
jazz by adding an orchestral sensibility and a mellow aesthetic to the  
music, has died. He was 91.

Shearing died Monday of congestive heart failure at Lenox Hill  
Hospital in New York, said his manager, Dale Sheets. Shearing had been  
inactive since taking a fall at his New York City apartment in 2004,  
according to Sheets.

A prolific songwriter, he once introduced "Lullaby of Birdland,"  
written in 1952 in celebration of the fabled New York nightspot and  
its radio show, by saying: "I have been credited with writing 300  
songs. Two-hundred-ninety-nine enjoyed a bumpy ride from relative  
obscurity to total oblivion. Here is the other one."

Born in 1919 in the Battersea district of London to working-class  
Cockney parents, Shearing was one of nine children and was blind from  
birth. He started playing piano and accordion at age 5 but didn't  
receive formal musical education until he spent four of his teenage  
years at the Linden Lodge, a school for the blind.

It was there that he learned Bach, Liszt and music theory. It was also  
during that time that he became interested in jazz by listening to  
recordings by American pianists Meade Lux Lewis, Earl Hines, Art Tatum  
and Fats Waller.

At Linden Lodge, Shearing showed enough potential to earn a number of  
scholarship offers from universities. But after graduating, he went to  
work in a local pub where he earned about $5 a week and tips for his  
playing.

Within a year, he had joined Claude Bampton's big band, a 15-piece  
unit made up of blind musicians who played compositions by Jimmie  
Lunceford and Duke Ellington.

In 1937, Leonard Feather, the jazz critic, composer and producer,  
discovered Shearing playing as a swing accordionist in a London jam  
session. He quickly arranged for Shearing to record for English Decca  
and, although that recording date was not Shearing's first, it was the  
one that set his career in motion.

With Feather's help, Shearing got a regular radio program on the BBC.  
He had his own Dixieland band and was also his country's leading  
boogie-woogie pianist. Soon he was being called Britain's answer to  
the great American pianist Teddy Wilson, and for seven consecutive  
years he was chosen his country's most popular jazz pianist by Melody  
Maker magazine.

During World War II, Shearing toured military bases in Britain,  
playing for the troops, and worked frequently in groups led by French  
violinist Stephane Grappelli, who spent the war years in London.

Shearing met his first wife, Beatrice Bayes, known to friends as  
Trixie, while playing in an air-raid shelter. They married in 1941 and  
had one daughter, Wendy Ann, before divorcing in the early 1970s. He  
later married Eleanor Geffert, who survives him as well as his daughter.

Encouraged to go to America after the war, Shearing first visited New  
York City in 1946 and moved there permanently the next year. He became  
a naturalized American citizen in 1956.

Shearing's career in the United States, where he was unknown, started  
slowly. His first job was intermission pianist at a New York club  
during a Sarah Vaughan engagement. He filled the same role at another  
club during an Ella Fitzgerald engagement and sometimes filled in for  
her pianist, Hank Jones.

He continued as a struggling, scale-earning unknown until early 1949,  
when — again with Feather's help — he hit on a jazz formula that would  
establish his musical identity and make him one of the leading jazz  
artists over the next half a century.

Feather suggested that Shearing add a guitarist and a vibraphonist to  
the standard rhythm section to make up a quintet. The personnel in  
that first group was diverse both in race and gender and included John  
Levy on bass, Denzil Best on drums, Marjorie Hyams on vibraphone and  
Chuck Wayne on guitar.

The group went into the recording studio and came out with "September  
in the Rain," which sold nearly a million records. Their first New  
York engagement came in April 1949 at the Café Society Downtown. They  
then went out on a national tour, and by the end of the year,  
Shearing's group was voted the No. 1 combo in Down Beat magazine's  
reader poll.

With this group, Shearing developed what came to be known as "the  
Shearing Sound," which involved not only the makeup of the band —  
vibes and guitar generally were not both found in quintets — but also  
the style in which he played the piano. He used the "block-chords"  
technique to create a big, lush, orchestral sound. In his book "The  
Jazz Years: Earwitness to an Era," Feather wrote that Shearing  
"developed a new and unprecedented blend for his instrumentation."

In that technique, a New York Times writer noted some years ago, "both  
hands play melodies in parallel octaves with a shifting cloud of  
chords in between."

Shearing worked primarily with his quintet for much of the next three  
decades. The personnel shifted but over the years included some of the  
finest names in jazz including Cal Tjader and Gary Burton on vibes and  
Joe Pass and Toots Thielemans on guitar (though Thielemans was better  
known as a harmonica player).

 From the early 1950s on, Shearing had steady work in the recording  
studios, first with MGM, where he was under contract from 1950 to  
1955, and then Capitol Records for 14 years. With Capitol, he recorded  
albums with some of the best singers of the day, including Peggy Lee,  
Nancy Wilson and Nat King Cole, and achieved substantial chart success  
in the late 1950s and early '60s.

Though his bread and butter was with the commercially successful  
quintet, Shearing in time began to feel limited by it and grew tired  
of life on the road. At one point, he told New Yorker jazz critic  
Whitney Balliett, his quintet did 56 concerts in 63 days.

"George drives himself harder than you notice," bassist Al McKibbon  
once told Feather. "One night in Oklahoma City, I saw him literally  
fall asleep in the middle of a chorus of 'Tenderly.' He woke up with a  
start and carried right on."

Shearing disbanded the group in 1978. For most of the rest of his  
career, Shearing appeared mainly in solo, duo or trio settings.

His work in duos and recording contracts with Concord Records and then  
Telarc in the 1980s seemed to revitalize him. He recorded five albums  
with singer Mel Torme that were critically and commercially  
successful. He and Torme won Grammy Awards in 1982 and 1983.

His autobiography, "Lullaby of Birdland," was released in 2004.

Over the years, he played for three U.S. presidents — Gerald Ford,  
Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan— and Queen Elizabeth II. An anecdote he  
related to Feather about his brush with royalty said much about his  
sharp wit.

"When we were preparing to be received [by the queen], I was told that  
the directive is: Do not extend your hand until the queen extends  
hers. I said, well, either somebody's going to have to cue me or  
she'll have to wear a bell. But somebody did cue me," Shearing said.