Balliett on Shearing

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

One of the reasons I created this blog was to celebrate my Jazz Heroes both literally, in the form of original pieces about Jazz musicians and their music, and descriptively, through postings of the work of those who write about the music and its makers coherently and cogently.

Which brings me to the following brilliant essay by Whitney Balliett on George Shearing from the former’s American Singers: 27 Portraits in Writings [Oxford: 1988] which fits nicely into the second category.

There is one overwhelmingly poignant moment in this interview as it contains the only candid reference I’ve found about the cause of George’s blindness - which makes this part of his story a very sad one, indeed.

Bob’s Your Uncle - George Shearing by Whitney Balliett

“The brilliant blind pianist and singer George Shearing doesn't like his listeners to get too close. During the first part of his career — in England, where he was born, in 1919 — he hid behind the styles of other pianists. 

He was considered England's Meade Lux Lewis, England's Art Tatum, England's Teddy Wilson. In the second part of his career, which began in the late forties, just after he settled in this country, he disappeared inside his smooth, famous quintet (vibraphone, guitar, piano, bass, and drums), emerging occasionally for a solo chorus but in general restricting himself to sixteen or twenty-four bars. The disguises he has used in the third part of his career, which started in the late seventies, when he gave up his quintet, are his most refined. 

He now works in a duo with a bassist, but he is no more accessible than he ever was. He has long been thought of as a jazz pianist, but he is apt these days to play Kurt Weill's "Mack the Knife" at a very slow tempo, clothing it with thick Bartok chords. Or he will play the "Moonlight" Sonata straight for sixteen or twenty bars (he is an excellent classical pianist), and then, in the same tempo and using Beethoven harmonies, slip seamlessly into Cole Porter's "Night and Day," staying with it a la Beethoven for a chorus or so before easing back into the sonata. He will play Porter's "Do I Love You" in Mozart fashion, and his own indestructible "Lullaby of Birdland" as a Bach fugue. Or he will do a sorrowing, almost chanting rendition of Jobim's "How Insensitive," and give Alec Wilder's "While We're Young" a full-scale ballad treatment, filling it with substitute chords and Art Tatum decorations. What is always present, though impishly concealed, is a superlative pianist, who can play Mozart with a feathery correctness, then improvise with swinging abandon. Shearing has a beautiful touch, which falls somewhere between the sparkle of Nat Cole and the buoyancy of Art Tatum. His jazzlike playing is colored by Teddy Wilson and Hank Jones and Erroll Garner and Bud Powell, but he does not have a style in the conventional sense. He has perfected a unique sound, a kind of handsome aural presence, made up of his airborne tone and his pleasant, slightly foggy tenor voice; his extraordinary harmonic sense; and his refusal to use pianistic cliches. Shearing talked about his playing:

"When I sit down at the piano, I make sure my stool is in front of middle C," he said. "Then I know I have three Cs on my left and four on my right. I have my seven octaves, and I know just where I am and where I can go. I've heard too many players slog the piano. I feel sorry for an instrument that is brutally treated. I love tone production — connecting my notes so that they sing, instead of coming out clump-clump-clump. When you improvise, in addition to your tone production you must have a musical atmosphere in your head — a musical climate. You must have compounds of scales and arpeggios to fit the chords you improvise on. Sometimes as I improvise I hear a horn in my head, or an alto or a tenor saxophone, or a flugelhorn. On a slow ballad, I hear Hank Jones, who is so good he should be deported. The gift of improvisation is being able to weave from one chord to another. It's a question of immediately getting what's in your mind into your fingers. If you could explain it, which I can't, all the surprise and spontaneity and unexpectedness would disappear.”

"I don't know when I first exposed an audience to my singing, but I started singing some twenty years ago. I can't help the instrument I don't have, but I love to sing, and I hope that my love for it will reach the audience. There is a happiness that goes through my mind when I sing, a joy in being able to put words and music together. I suppose my favorite lyricists are Porter and Mercer and Lorenz Hart—and certainly Charles de Forest, whom nobody seems to have heard of and who is very much alive. I have a hellbent attitude to elocute—if there is such a word—the lyrics to the best of my ability. I always hold Sinatra and Torme and Nat Cole in my head when I sing.

"I no longer wish to work all the time. My ears get tired. I want to play bridge with my wife, Ellie. I want to work on my VersaBraille computer. I want to build up my compact-disk library. I want to do more disk-jockeying. I want to ride my tandem bike. Eventually, I probably won't play in public anymore, but I'll certainly play here."

During the past eight or nine years, Shearing and his bassist have frequently joined forces with the singer-composer-instrumentalist Mel Torme and his drummer, Donny Osborne, and they have developed an effortless and engaging act. Shearing accompanies Torme's singing, Torme plays piano with Shearing, Shearing sings by himself and with Torme, Torme plays drums with Shearing. Torme has said this about Shearing:

"I call George the Master. He is a blissful, constant surprise musically. When we do two performances in an evening of songs like 'Star Dust' and 'Dream Dancing,’ each version George plays is a spontaneous and exquisite work of art. He's got a marvellous facility for inventing substitute chords in great songs. A lot of pianists use substitute chords simply to call attention to themselves, but George does it to enhance and embellish the song. Add to that the incredible warehouse in his brain of classical music and of popular songs that no one else has ever heard of. He's a lovely man, and the only time I have seen him irascible is when people around him don't do their job right. The last time we worked together, he played a solo number in which he got softer and softer, creating a hypnotic delicacy and quietude. When he was almost beneath hearing, the sound man suddenly turned up the volume, wrecking everything. George made his feelings plain after the show."

And Shearing has said this about Torme: "We practically breathe together. We're two bodies with a single musical mind. We have a mutual love for the tone-poem writer, Frederick Delius. I throw Delius quotes at Mel all the time when I accompany him, and he recognizes them straight off. If I change a note in a chord he will answer with an altered note — his ears are that finely tuned. So is his voice, which is invariable in tune. In fact, it is in as good shape at sixty as it has ever been in his life. Mel is literarily oriented, and his reading of lyrics when he sings is marvellous. I know just where a phrase is going to stop, where he's going to take a breath. We're a marriage, Mel and I."

Shearing has also worked often with Marian McPartland, his old friend and compatriot. She said the other day, "I first heard George in 1948 or 1949, at a club called the Silhouette, in Evanston, Illinois. He had his original quintet, with Denzil Best on drums and Marjorie Hyams on vibes and Chuck Wayne on guitar and John Levy on bass. It was, of course, a mixed group, and whenever George was asked about it he'd say, 'I don't know what color they are, I'm blind.' Without question, he's a genius. Every time I hear him or play with him, I rediscover how much music of all kinds he's absorbed. And he writes wonderful music — tunes like 'Lullaby of Birdland' and 'Conception,' which has a bebop melodic line as good as any Charlie Parker wrote. And there's 'Changin' with the Times,’ and 'Bop's Your Uncle,’ which is a play on old English expression 'Bob's your uncle,’ which means everything is O.K. He loves to joke around and laugh. I've played with him, and he'll put you on the spot by suddenly changing keys or going into a different style. 

And his puns are famous. It's hard to think of him as blind, because he constantly challenges himself. Sometimes I'm embarrassed to be around him and hear him talk about all the things he's doing outside of music. We've confided in each other at different times. George knows things about me that no one else does, and I probably know secrets about him."

Shearing lives with his wife Ellie in a comfortable, modern apartment in the East Eighties. It has a sunken living room with yellow walls, an oatmeal wall-to-wall carpet, a fireplace, a Bosendorfer grand piano, an Eames chair, a wall of Braille books, and a marble head of Shearing by Ben Deane. Shearing's workroom, just off the foyer, contains two side-by-side upright pianos, his Braille word processor, all kinds of sound equipment, and a reclining chair that vibrates, massages your back, and plays tapes of birds singing in a ruined English abbey. Ellie Shearing is an excellent cook, and her sit-in kitchen has a six-burner electric stove and a plate warmer built into a wall. Shearing has a portable floor-to-ceiling temperature-controlled wine cellar in one corner, and in it are Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, Acacia Chardonnay, Fetzer Zinfandel, and Beaulieu Vineyard's Georges de Latour Private Reserve. (Shearing still marvels at the time he invited the jazz producer and oenophile George Wein to dinner and gave him, as a test, a decanted bottle of the Georges de Latour, vintage 1970. Wein took two sips and named the vineyard, the wine, and the year.) The apartment also has a stately dining room and a bedroom. Shearing moves around a lot, and when Ellie Shearing rings the lunch bell he travels the fifty feet or so from the living room to the kitchen in about three seconds. He also likes to lie flat in his Eames chair and talk, his hands crossed on his stomach. This is what he said one afternoon:

"Blindness is more of a nuisance than a handicap. People say they forget I'm blind, and that's the best compliment they can pay me. I have no desire to live a single day in an undignified way. I was born blind, and when I was a kid in London I used to go everywhere by myself. I went on the road with my quintet for ten years with guide dogs. It was one of the most enlightening experiences of my life. Maybe I'm a devout coward on the road, but I like my hotel rooms if possible to have a bathroom to the left, two chairs with a table between them, and a closet and bureau on the right. I can distinguish light and dark, and I like the window to be in front of me when I enter. An empty room is full of acoustics. In a full room, like this, sound dies. I have to snap my fingers in a full room that I don't know to find out when I'm approaching a wall or a bookcase. This is called facial vision. The movement of air is important. I can tell where people are around me simply by the way they displace the air. I think of sound as the vibration of air, and I think of color — I really don't know what color looks like — as the vibration of light. I used to travel by myself in New York taxis, but I don't much anymore, because you never know where you will end up. In general, getting around New York is wonderful, because of the grid pattern and the sharp corners. It's harder to lose your sight during your life than to be born blind. If you nurse the impairment, though, you'll be a pathetic blind man rather than a productive one. A sense of humor never hurts. Once, Ellie and I were waiting for a table in a local restaurant. It was very crowded, and a waitress carrying a huge tray of empty dishes tried to squeeze between Ellie and me. I didn't know what was happening, and I had my arm through Ellie's. The waitress said, 'Hey, what's the matter with you? Are you blind? I said, 'As a matter of fact, I am,’ Ellie said she will never forget the expression on the woman's face."

Shearing laughs a lot, and it loosens his imposing looks. He has a beaky nose, a high forehead, and grayish hair. He tilts his head up slightly when he is listening. Shearing stopped talking, sat up, stood, and, turning, went quickly up the living-room steps, across the foyer, and into his workroom. He talked as he went. "I've started writing some memoirs," he said, "and I'd like to read aloud what I've done. I've finished the first chapter and begun the second." He sat down at his VersaBraille machine and began to read, his fingers moving over a Braille tape. Here is some of what he read:

"It appears that at the age of three I made gallant but improper attempts at producing music. I used to hit the piano with a hammer. The Shillington Street School, where I went, was in Battersea, in southwest London. The area was known as the Latchmere, so called because of a well-known pub, which benefited from the same handle. This was just one of many pubs dotted around the neighborhood in case the inhabitants got thirsty. And, regrettably, they did. On numerous occasions, children would be heard crying outside pubs while adults inside were doing their level best to get to be the way I was born. It is with sadness that I relate the fact that my mother was a serious contestant. My mother, however, did her very best to keep these miseries at a minimum after I was born. Almost everything was purchased by the Y.P. method (Yours Perhaps). The installment collector was known as the tally-man. He would appear every week to collect his money. More often than not, he would be greeted with a friendly 'I'll see you next week.’ This rather unpleasant task was often foisted upon one of us kids. In which case, it would be 'Mum will see you next week.’ Purchases would be made far in excess of what would seem necessary, so that we could have collateral to borrow money to buy more, to have collateral to borrow, and so on.

"Dad was a coal man. This meant that his job was to carry as heavy a load as possible from his horse and cart to a private home or a place of business. He would leave home at about 6 a.m. and return about the same hour p.m. He worked for the same firm for three months short of fifty years and received the equivalent of twelve dollars a week. He got to retire on a handsome pension of a dollar a week. Like all working-class Englishmen, he was very proud. In my teens, when I thought of changing jobs, my dad would say, 'Why do you want to do that, son? The boss has been good to you.' I could never understand why paying me my hard-earned salary was being good to me. But through all this seeming consideration of management Dad was a strong Labour man. He used to take me to the park on Sunday afternoons to hear some guy speaking in favor of Labour and, at times, for or against Communism. When no such oratory was to be found, we would witness part of a cricket match. Of course, we were never late home for afternoon tea, which would consist of watercress sandwiches and wonderful cake made by my mother.

"Were I more adept at putting things in their proper order, I would have saved some of the sweetness of the foregoing lines to lessen the depression of some of those to come. I remember the sound of rats scampering across the linoleum floor and the sound of my dad's boot trying to hit and kill them. I remember women begging their husbands not to get in a fight outside a pub when they had had too much to drink.

"Let's take a brief glimpse at my mother's life. Dad was earning a poverty-line salary. Mother had nine kids to raise, so she took care of the family during the day and cleaned railway trains at night. It's no wonder she tried to abort me — the youngest of the family. And no wonder I became blind in the process. Although she tried drowning her sorrows in drink, I feel that she really had a guilty conscience about my position and did her very best to repent.

"To this day, I am grateful that blind children were required to spend four years in residential school between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Linden Lodge was the name of the school I attended. Although it could not be counted among the twenty most beautiful residences in England, we had wonderful grounds, with a lawn, flowers, tennis courts for the staff, football and cricket fields, and all the things a little boy from Bat-tersea didn't know existed. Cricket and football were played in the open air only by the partly sighted children. We blind kids played handball by using a football with a bell on it. Cricket was played inside by using a fair-sized balloon with a bell on it."

Shearing got up and went back into the living room and sat in his Eames chair. "That's all I've written so far," he said. He crossed his hands on his stomach. "I learned my Bach and Liszt and studied music theory at the Lodge. When I graduated, I went straight to work in a pub. A year or so later, I joined Claude Bampton's all-Blind Band. It was sponsored by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, and had been put together under the aegis of the bandleader Jack Hylton. There were fifteen of us, and we played Jimmie Lunceford and Benny Carter and Duke Ellington. We carried our own rostrum, and six grand pianos for the finale. Our suits were from Hawes & Curtis, on Savile Row. None of the bands of top condition would have dreamed of surrounding themselves with such glamour. Our leader was sighted, and he used a huge baton, which went swish, swish and told us what was what. Our music had been transcribed into Braille. We played all the major theaters in England and Scotland, and the tour lasted almost a year. I had my first contact with jazz in that band. Someone would pick up the new Armstrong or Berigan or Tatum record and say, 'Here's the new sender' — a good musician being known at the time as a solid sender. 

Through the band, I met Leonard Feather, who lived in London, and he helped me get recording dates and radio broadcasts. In 1941, I married my first wife, Trixie. I'd met her in an air raid shelter where I used to play four-handed piano with the song plugger I was rooming with. Trixie and I had a daughter, Wendy, who now lives in North Hollywood. I had three or four jobs at once during the war — in theatres, supper clubs, jazz clubs. I had my own little band, and I also worked for the bandleader Ambrose. I toured a lot with Stephane Grappelli, who spent the war in London. My mother was bombed out three times. We were Cockneys, and Cockneys tell jokes all the time. I remember one: This bloke says to his wife, 'Come on, Liza, the siren just went off.' She says, 'Hold it, Alf. I'm looking for my teeth.' And he says, 'Never mind that. They're dropping bombs, not sandwiches.' 

Around this time, I heard a recording of me speaking, and that told me I should do something about my Cockney accent. One time, I came home from school and my mother asked me what I had studied and I said, 'Six pieces of suet,' Or that's what she thought I had said. When she saw the teacher next, she asked her why we had been studying suet, and the teacher said the subject was 'Seek peace and pursue it.' Ellie tells me that when we visit London I revert to my old accent, and that if we stayed long enough she wouldn't understand a word I said. And when I see Grappelli I start talking like him: 'Stephane, we go eat now.' I saved some money during the war, and in 1946 I visited New York. American musicians like Mel Powell and Glenn Miller had told me in England that I would kill them over here. I wasn't sure. Why would they want England's Teddy Wilson when they had the genuine article? But I liked New York so much I came back for good the next year.

"My first job was at the Onyx Club, on Fifty-second Street. I was the intermission pianist for Sarah Vaughan. I would be announced — 'Ladies and gentlemen, from England the new and exciting pianist George Shearing' — and somebody would yell, 'Where's Sarah?' Then I spelled Ella Fitzgerald at the Three Deuces. She had Hank Jones and Ray Brown and Charlie Smith with her. When Hank took a night off, I played for Ella. I began to be asked to sit in on the Street, and Charlie Parker took me for walks between shows. Leonard Feather had moved to New York, and he introduced me to people and arranged gigs for me. In 1948, I played the old Clique Club, at Forty-ninth Street and Broadway, with Buddy De Franco on clarinet and John Levy and Denzil Best on bass and drums. 

We broke up after the engagement, and Leonard suggested I keep Best and Levy and add Marjorie Hyams on vibraphone and Chuck Wayne on guitar. I made some arrangements. Marjorie did some. We used a unison-octave voicing, like Glenn Miller's reed section. Our first New York gig was at Cafe Society Downtown, for six hundred and ninety-five dollars a week. We did the Blue Note in Chicago, and then the Embers and Bird-land in New York — and the quintet took off. It lasted twenty-nine years, and a lot of wonderful musicians passed through — Cal Tjader and Gary Burton on vibes, Joe Pass and Toots Thielemans on guitar, Ralph Pena and Al McKibbon on bass, Charli Persip on drums. Toward the end, we travelled in a twenty-six-foot motorhome with nine airplane seats and a couch and a refrigerator. On our last big tour, in the seventies, we did fifty-six concerts in sixty-three days, and I think that's what finally did me in.’”