RIP, George Shearing.

[timwat]

NEW YORK (AP) Sir George Shearing, the ebullient jazz pianist who wrote the standard "Lullaby of Birdland" and had a string of hits both with and without his quintet, has died. He was 91.

 

Shearing, blind since birth, died early Monday morning in Manhattan of congestive heart failure, his longtime manager Dale Sheets said.

"He was a totally one-of-a-kind performer," said Sheets. "It was something wonderful to see, to watch him work."

 

Shearing had been a superstar of the jazz world since a couple of years after he arrived in the United States in 1947 from his native England, where he was already hugely popular. The George Shearing Quintet's first big hit came in 1949 with a version of songwriter Harry Warren's "September in the Rain."

 

He remained active well into his 80s, releasing a CD called "Lullabies of Birdland" as well as a memoir, "Lullaby of Birdland," in early 2004. In March of that year, though, he was hospitalized after suffering a fall at his home. It took him months to recover, and he largely retired from public appearances after that.

 

Sheets said that while Shearing ceased working, he never stop playing piano.

"He was getting better periodically and doing quite well up into about a month ago," said Sheets.

 

In a 1987 Associated Press interview, Shearing said the ingredients for a great performance were "a good audience, a good piano, and a good physical feeling, which is not available to every soul, every day of everyone's life.

"Your intent, then, is to speak to your audience in a language you know, to try to communicate in a way that will bring to them as good a feeling as you have yourself," he said.

 

In 2007, Shearing was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his contribution to music. When the honor was announced, he said it was "amazing to receive an honor for something I absolutely love doing."

 

Shearing's bebop-influenced sound became identified with a quintet piano, vibes, guitar, bass and drums which he put together in 1949. More recently, he played mostly solo or with only a bassist. He excelled in the "locked hands" technique, in which the pianist plays parallel melodies with the two hands, creating a distinctly full sound.

 

Among the luminaries with whom Shearing worked over the years: Tito Puente, Nancy Wilson, Nat "King" Cole, Mel Torme, Marian McPartland, the Boston Pops, Peggy Lee, Billy Taylor, Don Thompson, Stephane Grappelli and Sarah Vaughan, whom Shearing called "the best contralto in pop."

[bhodaway10]

Thanks for the share - sad day.

[marino]

The amount of Old Masters who have left us in these few years is dreadful. One wonders whether the newer generations have generated a similar amount of talent.

 

 

[ProfD]

The amount of Old Masters who have left us in these few years is dreadful. One wonders whether the newer generations have generated a similar amount of talent.

Every generation wonders the same thing. IMO, there is no shortage of talented musicians walking around. Just a matter of how they want to apply it.

 

Thankfully, old masters like Shearing have left behind a body of work on which musicians can dig and expand. RIP Mr. Shearing.

[Mizu]

Sad news . The NYT has a good obit: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/arts/music/15shearing.html?hp

[yannis D]

Quite a loss. RIP

[David Loving]

This is a sad passing. What a player! R.I.P.

[steadyb]

R.I.P. George.

[Mark Schmieder]

Man, they're dropping like flies. Sorry to hear the sad news, but he definitely lived to a good age.

 

He was my mom's favourite jazz pianist.

[MonksDream]

Thank you, George. RIP.

[longfuse]

Although sad news, he reached a ripe old age...better than a lot of that generation of jazz musicians.

[marino]

The amount of Old Masters who have left us in these few years is dreadful. One wonders whether the newer generations have generated a similar amount of talent.

Every generation wonders the same thing. IMO, there is no shortage of talented musicians walking around. Just a matter of how they want to apply it.

 

Well, I'm all for 'modern' music in jazz and elsewhere... what I meant is, every art has one (or more) 'golden' period in which it seems that an epidemic of creative genius is going on. Italian Reinassance is a good example.

 

Shearing, like many players of his generation, stayed firmly attached to the big trunk of the fast-evolving language of jazz, while managing to develop a very solid and definite personality at the same time - all in a 'popular' and accessible style. No easy task.

 

RIP George Shearing.

 

 

[JeffLearman]

One of my heroes. I remember with crystalline clarity poring over his written transcription for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". Play the chords and melody one syllable at a time and each one is dissonant to the point of cacophany. Play them in time and you hear a lovely lilting sequence of multiple motions evoking the emotions of the lyrics.

 

I didn't understand it then, and I have only a faint inkling of it now. But the genius was unmistakeable.

 

RIP, old master!

[Adan]

91 . . . we should all be so lucky. I'm not sure it makes sense to call it a "loss," when he hasn't performed in years. But certainly, his passing is another moment to reflect on his immense contribution. Jack Kerouac, in On the Road, referred to him simply as "God." Those are some of the best passages in a great book.

[Jazz+]

February 14, 2011

George Shearing, Lullaby of Birdland Jazz Virtuoso, Dies at 91

By PETER KEEPNEWS

 

George Shearing, the British piano virtuoso who overcame blindness to become a worldwide jazz star, and whose composition Lullaby of Birdland became an enduring jazz standard, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 91.

 

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his manager, Dale Sheets. Mr. Shearing had homes in Manhattan and Lee, Mass.

 

In 1949, just two years after Mr. Shearing immigrated to the United States, his recording of September in the Rain became an international hit. Its success established him as a hot property on the jazz nightclub and concert circuit. It established something else as well: the signature sound of the George Shearing Quintet, which was not quite like anything listeners had heard before or have heard since.

 

When the quintet came out on 1949, it was a very placid and peaceful sound, coming on the end of a very frantic and frenetic era known as bebop, Mr. Shearing said in a 1995 interview on the Web site newyorkcritic.org. What he was aiming for, he said, was a full block sound, which, if it was scored for saxophones, would sound like the Glenn Miller sound. And coming at the end of the frenetic bebop era, the timing seemed to be right.

 

The Shearing sound which had the harmonic complexity of bebop but eschewed bebops ferocious energy was built on the unusual instrumentation of vibraphone, guitar, piano, bass and drums. To get the full block sound he wanted, he had the vibraphone double what his right hand played and the guitar double the left. That sound came to represent the essence of sophisticated hip for countless listeners worldwide who preferred their jazz on the gentle side.

 

The personnel of the Shearing quintet changed many times over the years, but except for the addition of a percussionist in 1953 the band continued to be called a quintet even after it became a sextet the instrumentation and the sound remained the same for almost three decades.

 

When Mr. Shearing disbanded the group in 1978, it was less because listeners had grown tired of that instrumentation and sound (although the groups popularity, like that of mainstream jazz in general, had declined considerably) than because Mr. Shearing himself had.

 

I had an identity. I held on to it for 29 years. Eventually I held on like grim death, he told John S. Wilson of The New York Times in 1986. The last five years I played on automatic pilot. I could do the whole show in my sleep.

 

Shortly after breaking up the group, Mr. Shearing said, There wont be another quintet unless Standard Oil or Frank Sinatra want it. Standard Oil never asked, but in 1981 Mr. Shearing reassembled the quintet for a Boston engagement and a series of Carnegie Hall concerts as Mr. Sinatras opening act. He returned to the quintet format on occasion after that, but it was never again his primary focus.

 

His preferred format became the piano-bass duo, originally with Brian Torff and later with Don Thompson and Neil Swainson. He also performed with bass and drums and, on occasion, unaccompanied. In the 1980s and 90s he had great success in concert and on record with the singer Mel Tormé.

 

By his own estimate Mr. Shearing wrote about 300 tunes, of which he liked to joke that roughly 295 were completely unknown.

 

He nevertheless contributed at least one bona fide standard to the jazz repertory: Lullaby of Birdland, written in 1952 and adopted as the theme song of the world-famous New York nightclub where he frequently performed. Both as an instrumental and with words by George David Weiss, it has been recorded by everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Bill Haley and His Comets, who improbably cut a version called Lullaby of Birdland Twist in 1962.

 

George Albert Shearing was born on Aug. 13, 1919, in the Battersea area of London, the youngest of nine children. His father, James Phillip Shearing, was a coal worker; his mother, the former Ellen Amelia Brightner, took care of the family during the day and cleaned trains at night.

 

In his autobiography, Lullaby of Birdland (2004), written with Alyn Shipton, Mr. Shearing recalled that his first attempts at making music involved throwing bottles from an upstairs window: milk bottles for a classical sound, beer for jazz. More conventionally, he began picking out tunes on the family piano at 3, even though it had some broken keys.

 

Blind from birth, Mr. Shearing attended the Shillington School for the Blind and the Linden Lodge School for the Blind, both in London. It was at Linden Lodge that Mr. Shearing, captivated by the recordings of American jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Fats Waller, began to study piano.

 

He was discouraged from pursuing his interest in the classics, he later recalled, by a teacher who recognized his gifts as an improviser and felt that studying classical music would be a waste of time. He nonetheless came to see the value of classical training; he later returned to the classics and eventually performed Bach and Mozart on several occasions with symphony orchestras.

 

Mr. Shearing began his career at 16, when another blind pianist gave up his job playing in a London pub and recommended Mr. Shearing as his replacement. He eventually had his own 15-minute show on the BBC and was voted Britains best jazz pianist seven consecutive years in the poll conducted by the magazine Melody Maker. He was indisputably a star at home; the next stop, clearly, was the United States.

 

Glenn Miller and Fats Waller, among others, encouraged Mr. Shearing to try his luck in the United States after World War II ended. But the booking agents were not especially impressed. At home he had sometimes been billed as Englands Art Tatum or Englands Teddy Wilson. But, he told The Times in 1986, when he performed for one American agent he received a curt response: What else can you do? It was not enough, he realized, to sound like other pianists. He needed to develop a sound of his own.

 

Mr. Shearing found it with the help of a fellow Englishman, the jazz critic and pianist Leonard Feather, who like him had moved to the United States, and who suggested what became his signature instrumentation. With Margie Hyams on vibraphone, Chuck Wayne on guitar, John Levy on bass and Denzil Best on drums, Mr. Shearing recorded September in the Rain in 1949. The distinctive sound of both the quintet and Mr. Shearing himself he used a so-called locked-hands style in which his hands played melody and harmony in close quarters, with the melody line harmonized by the right hand and doubled by the left hand an octave below caught listeners fancy, and stardom soon followed.

 

In the early years of Mr. Shearings renown he recorded for the MGM label, but his longest professional relationship was with Capitol, where he was a mainstay of the roster from 1955 to 1969. In addition to recording him with his quintet, Capitol teamed him with a number of singers, including Peggy Lee, Nancy Wilson and even Nat (King) Cole, an accomplished jazz pianist in his own right, who relinquished the piano chair to Mr. Shearing on a memorable 1961 album.

 

With the market for jazz shrinking in the late 1960s, Capitol chose not to re-sign Mr. Shearing. He then formed his own small record company, Sheba, but that enterprise was short-lived. In 1979, a year after disbanding his quintet, he signed with Concord, a jazz label, and his career soon underwent a resurgence.

 

It was under Concords aegis that he first recorded with Mel Tormé. Their albums An Evening With George Shearing and Mel Tormé and Top Drawer won Grammys for Mr. Tormé but not for Mr. Shearing, who despite his many other accomplishments never won one.

 

In his later years, Mr. Shearing also recorded unaccompanied; in duet with his fellow pianists Marian McPartland and Hank Jones; and in settings as uncharacteristic as a Dixieland band. He continued performing into his 80s and stopped only after a fall in 2004, which led to a long hospital stay.

 

Mr. Shearings marriage to Beatrice Bayes ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Ellie Geffert, and a daughter, Wendy.

 

Mr. Shearing was invited to perform at the White House by three presidents: Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He performed for the British royal family as well. The British Academy of Composers and Songwriters gave him the Ivor Novello Award for lifetime achievement in 1993. In 1996 he was invested as an officer in the Order of the British Empire, and 11 years later he was knighted.

 

I dont know why Im getting this honor, he said shortly after learning of his knighthood. Ive just been doing what I love to do.

 

Richard Severo contributed reporting.

 

[Joe Muscara]

One of my heroes. I remember with crystalline clarity poring over his written transcription for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". Play the chords and melody one syllable at a time and each one is dissonant to the point of cacophany. Play them in time and you hear a lovely lilting sequence of multiple motions evoking the emotions of the lyrics.

 

I didn't understand it then, and I have only a faint inkling of it now. But the genius was unmistakeable.

Any idea where this is available today?

[MAJUSCULE]

Jack Kerouac, in On the Road, referred to him simply as "God." Those are some of the best passages in a great book.

 

I was just thinking the same thing. RIP.

[16251]

The amount of Old Masters who have left us in these few years is dreadful. One wonders whether the newer generations have generated a similar amount of talent.

Every generation wonders the same thing. IMO, there is no shortage of talented musicians walking around. Just a matter of how they want to apply it.

 

Thankfully, old masters like Shearing have left behind a body of work on which musicians can dig and expand. RIP Mr. Shearing.

 

Young people today are growing up with a type of music that is watered down. Song writing today is more poetry than it is music. Trying to get those people to open their eyes to jazz, I think, is more difficult then back in the George's time. It takes the world as a whole to find the great masters of today. After about 20 minutes of checking out hip-hop, rap stations, I hear the creativity; but for the most part it sounds all the same.

[moj]

RIP George Shearing

 

[retrokeys]

A hero of mine for lots of reasons not least of which was the interview where he supposedly responded to the question "Have you played the piano your whole life?" His answer "Not yet." From what I've read here, I guess he did play piano for his whole life and we are better for it. R.I.P.

[Dreamer]

Nothing to add to what has already been said.

R.I.P. George.

[gangsu]

One of my heroes. I remember with crystalline clarity poring over his written transcription for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". Play the chords and melody one syllable at a time and each one is dissonant to the point of cacophany. Play them in time and you hear a lovely lilting sequence of multiple motions evoking the emotions of the lyrics.

 

I didn't understand it then, and I have only a faint inkling of it now. But the genius was unmistakeable.

Any idea where this is available today?

 

That pretty much sums up how I felt reading through Over the Rainbow, too. Well said, learjeff.

 

Joe, it's from The Genius of George Shearing: Piano Solos but I only see a UK link. It's also in the current RCM 9 repertoire book.

 

RIP

[Joe Muscara]

Thanks, Sue!

[B3bluesman59]

I loved George's work with Peggy Lee. Two incomparable artists sounding really great together.