Sometimes I wonder if fans of Jazz who grew-up listening to the music in the analog era realize how fortunate we are that so much of it has been reissued in digital CD and Mp3 formats.
Since Jazz, in general, accounts for less than 3% of all recordings sold, it is amazing how much of it has been subsequently released in digital configurations.
Although not all of my favorite LPs have been included in this transition, fortunately, over time, most have and I for one am very grateful for the convenience of having some of the more obscure among these in a digital conversion.
One such album is Latin Escapade [Capitol T737] which features pianist George Shearing and his quintet. In addition to George, the quintet is made up of a guitarist, vibraphonist, bassist and drummer. Although these are all instruments that must be struck or plucked, George’s group has managed to achieve one of the more beautiful and easily identifiable sounds in Jazz.
The uniqueness of “the Shearing Sound” comes from the way the group states the melody of each tune. This is formed by Shearing playing blocked chords around the notes of the melody with each hand an octave apart and the vibes playing in unison up an octave from the piano’s right hand and the guitar playing in unison down and octave from the piano’s left hand.
When hearing "The Shearing Sound," essentially the listener is experiencing a melody that is harmonized into four-parts in which Shearing's upper melody note is doubled on vibes and the lower note is doubled on guitar.
You can hear this four octave span quite distinctly on every track of Latin Escapade. Each of the album’s twelve [12] tracks is less than 3.30 minutes.
Here are some YouTube videos that will provide you with a Shearing Sound sampling of the music from the album.
Along with vibraphonist Cal Tjader, who had occupied the vibes chair in George’s quintet before forming his own combo, Shearing was one of the earliest adapters of Latin rhythms in a small group setting. Many of his 1950’s album contained Latin Jazz tracks or were thematically based on Latin Jazz themes as was the case with Latin Escapade.
George developed such a deep interest in Latin rhythms that he went so far as to insert a segment in his club sets or concert performances that highlighted tunes with a Latin-flavor. During these Latin features, Shearing would augment his quintet with conga drums and timbales with the Jazz drummer in the group playing various Latin percussion instruments, thus creating the instrumentation for authentic Afro-Cuban rhythms.
Of course, George was always a very commercial-minded musician [in other words, he liked to eat regularly and pay his rent on time] and it certainly didn’t escape his attention that dancing to the [then, newly-introduced] Mambo rhythm was a craze that swept the US in the 1950’s.
Hence, the following Mambo with Me cutfrom Latin Escapade:
The long-playing record provided Jazz groups with room to “stretch-out” take longer solos] and it was not uncommon for Jazz LP’s to have 2 or 3 tracks per side that produced 18-20 minutes of music per side.
During his career [1919-2011], Shearing did make some LP’s with fewer cuts per side, especially with the quintet in performance, but he made many more with the more commercial or popular music format of 12 tracks per LP.
Although Latin Escapade belongs in the latter category, its finely crafted and well-executed arrangements, while easy on the ear, are anything but commercial.
With none lasting longer than 3:35 minutes, each of the album’s twelve tracks is a miniature musical masterpiece.
George is the only soloist and during his solos he reveals a thorough familiarity with Latin Jazz piano stylings; particularly the heavy use of riffs and “montuno” [repetitive refrain.
All of these qualities are reflected in this YouTube which uses vintage postcards of Cuba from the University of Miami’s collection and Mi Musica Es Para Ti[“My Music is For You”] from the from the album as its audio track.
George has always had an ear for pretty melodies. He can swing hard, too, but his affinity for appealing airs results in a healthy variety of ballads on all of his recordings. He always arranges his treatment of such tunes very artfully so as to further enhance their beauty and, in many cases, their romantic or alluring aura.
At a time in the 1950’s and 60’s when AM radio in Southern California still offered programs that specialized in “mood music,” it was not uncommon to hear a Shearing Sound ballad treatment during one of these late night broadcasts.
One such example of Shearing charming way with a ballad can be found on his Latin Escapade interpretation of Ray Gilbert and Osvaldo Farres’ haunting Without You that serves as the audio track to this You Tube commemorating The Shearing Sound.
Over the years, in addition to leading his marvelous quintet, George performed with Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Mel Torme and a host of other vocalists. including, toward the end of his career, guitarist and vocalist, John Pizzarelli.
In addition to the recordings that he has made with these artists, George has a substantial discography under his own name – none better than Latin Escapade [1956].
After sampling the music on this album, we hope you will agree.
“To call George Shearing a jazz pianist is certainly accurate, yet also limiting and nowhere near complete. It fails to encompass the immense diversity of riches in his playing and a sheer pianistic brilliance which can move easily from what Whitney Balliett calls the "swinging abandon" of improvisation to a grasp of the language of Beethoven or Bartok or Mozart or Bach.
Pianist Marian McPartland says, "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."
All of the Shearing influences — from classical composers to the jazz masters — Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Nat Cole, Hank Jones, Erroll Garner, Bud Powell — become a natural part of what is a very individual sound. Each performance he creates is a little gem, a sort of tone poem of invention that relates a story, building dramatically and logically with incredible wit.
- Donald Elfman, Jazz producer, director and writer
"Most of what I know is based on having stolen everything I could from Farnon. I'll say that right off. I've listened to him and tried to approximate what I thought he was doing. He made strings sound like they always should have and never did. Everybody wrote them skinny. He knew how to write them so that it could wrench at you. I'd never heard anybody like him before and I've never heard anybody like him since. We're all pale imitations of him, those of us who are influenced by him."
- Johnny Mandel, Academy Award and Grammy winning composer-arranger
Pianist George Shearing [1919-2011] was one of the most accomplished Jazz musicians who ever lived.
During his lifetime Robert Farnon [1917-2005] was considered by many to be the finest arranger in the world an acclamation connoted in the reference to him by many in his trade as “The Guv’nor.”
It took a very long time in their respective careers for them to record together and when they finally did with George’s trio and the Farnon Orchestra in 1979 on the MPS album entitled On Target, the LP had very limited distribution when it was released in 1982, andsubsequently has not, to my knowledge, made it to CD/digital.
Those of us who love beautiful sounding Jazz had to wait again until 1992 when George Shearing [who was knighted for services to music in 2007 hence the honorific in the title of this piece] had switched to the Telarc label which issued the magical results of the union between the George Shearing [this time with his quintet] and The Robert Farnon Orchestra on the CD named after an original composition by Farnon entitled How Beautiful is Night[Telarc CD-83325].
Inexpensive copies of the CD are still available through online sellers along with MP3 and audio cassette versions of the recording.
George recounts the background to both of these unions in these excerpts from his autobiography written with Alyn Shipton, Lullaby of Birdland.
“Through the years I've been with several record labels. First there was Decca in England, then my first American recording was on Savoy and the launch of the Quintet on Discovery. I joined MGM in February 1949 and stayed with them until I began my long association with Capitol in the fall of 1955. That ran until the end of the 1960s and after recording in the early 70s for my own label, Sheba, I went first to MPS, and then to Concord, where I had another long-running business relationship, including all my work with Mel Torme.
At the beginning of the 1990s, I made another move to Telarc. Things began for them with a couple of live albums from the Blue Note in New York, where I appeared during February 1992 with Neil Swainson on bass and Grady Tate on drums. I never had to say one word to Grady or Neil about the musical conception of the album; we just played. We covered all kinds of material from bebop pieces by Charlie Parker and Bud Powell to Brazilian tunes by Antonio Carlos Jobim. Plus there were some originals, too, by me and Neil, including his waltz Horizon.
Later that same year, I made an album in London with Robert Farnon for Telarc, called How Beautiful is Night. Bob wrote the arrangements and conducted a full orchestra. I've been a fan of Bob's since the days of World War Two. In the world of composing and arranging, he's known as the guv'nor and deserves all the many accolades he's received over the years. Our first recording together, On Target, dates from my MPS period, in 1979. That was an interesting recording, because I originally made the trio cuts in Villingen-Schwenningen in the Black Forest. Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, the producer, decided it was going to be a Bob Farnon album and that we would lay in the orchestral tracks at a later date in England. So Bob received the cuts from MPS and worked on the orchestrations. I had the MPS engineer record an "A" on the piano for the orchestra to tune to, and they only did so in Wembley, two years later!
Hans Georg, the owner and chief engineer of MPS, is one of the nicest people in the world, with a marvelous family and a great studio in his house, although you did occasionally get the impression that he loved everything he did so much that he was reluctant to see it leave his shelves. Nevertheless, the studio he had set up was fantastic, and overall it was one of my best experiences in terms of recording of my whole career. When you went to the Black Forest to work there, you flew first class, stayed in the finest hotel in the area, and were well paid. This was followed up by regular accounting, so the company was good to work for, except as I say it sometimes took a long time to get things out. It certainly can't have been cheap to bring in Bob and a big orchestra to complete the disc we made together. Overall, recording with Hans Georg was a joy and a privilege, never just another job.
When I was reunited with Bob for the Telarc recording, How Beautiful Is Night, we did the whole thing live with all the musicians — my Quintet and his orchestra — together in the studio. Prior to the sessions, Bob came over to our cottage in the Cotswolds during the summer before we recorded, and spent the whole day with us. He had no manuscript paper with him, just a notepad and a pencil. He'd jot down a note or two here and there, and more often than not he'd write down a word, rather than a musical idea.
Later, his son told Ellie that what Bob did next was to go home to the Channel Islands, where he would sit down in his favorite chair. Once he's there, he thinks and thinks, and then he thinks a while longer. Then he pulls out some manuscript paper and starts writing. There's no piano involved.
And the sounds that come out from the orchestra are not to be believed.
I can't think of anybody better at writing a beautifully orchestrated ballad than Robert Farnon. But he has his jazz moments too. He has been a good friend of many jazz musicians over the years, including a lot of the guys who played at Minton's, as well as leading the Canadian Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force during the war. He stayed on in London to write for Ted Heath, Ambrose, and Geraldo, and to make his own discs for English Decca. In the days when I had my own radio show on WNEW in New York I played several of Bob's jazzier London recordings from the 1940s, including You're The Cream In My Coffee, which I announced as You're The Crime in My Cafe.
On four of the tracks we recorded together in 1992,1 featured a group playing in the style of the old Quintet, with the English musicians Frank Ricotti on vibes and Allan Ganley on drums alongside guitarist Louis Stewart, an Irishman who had played in my trio in the 70s, and Neil Swainson on bass.”
More details about the Shearing-Farnon association are recounted in Neil Tesser insightful sleeve notes to How Beautiful is Night[Telarc CD-83325].
“In 1957, Jack Kerouac wrote:
‘Suddenly Dean stared into the darkness of a corner beyond the bandstand and said, Sal, God has arrived.
I looked. GEORGE SHEARING. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears opened like the ears of an elephant, listening to the American sounds and mastering them for his own English summer's-night use. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. He played innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the piano, and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. He went back to his dark corner, old god Shearing, and the boys said. There ain't nothin' left after that.’
It's a long drive from Kerouac's off-road encounter with Shearing, in a Chicago bop dive, to the reserved-seat, black-tie collaboration heard on this disc. Too long? Kerouac might think so; he might tell us the old god Shearing had wandered off into the long dark night of "culture," far from the seeds of the music heard on that magical summer's night north of the Loop.
But George Shearing, the many-faceted product of two English-speaking cultures, would beg to differ. The world of the concert hall belongs to him by rights, just as he made the bebop nights of the '50s his own; and he has almost always navigated these two poles with ease.
In fact, when Shearing first unveiled his innovative quintet sound in 1949, he had already begun to bridge his musical interests. The band's foreground instrumentation — featuring vibraphone, guitar, and piano, but no horns — seemed to straddle the worlds of chamber music and bebop combos. (The quintet proved politically correct before the phrase, let alone the concept, even existed. It comprised four men — two white, two black — and a woman, the vibraphonist Margie Hyams.) And Shearing's own compositions contributed to this sense of fusion: songs like "Conception" and "Lullaby of Birdland." while undeniably jazz, nonetheless showed a restraint and attention to development not always present in the exuberance of bop.
Shearing's previous Telarc release, I Hear A Rhapsody, briefly recounts his biography; for our purposes, it is important to note that by the late '50s Shearing had returned to the classical music he studied as a teenager, performing concertos with symphony orchestras and occasionally using his quintet within the same context. So by 1979, when he first collaborated on record with the Canadian-born composer and arranger Robert Farnon, the biggest shock lay in how long it had taken them to get together.
Farnon's career contains as many accolades as Shearing's; while his name may turn fewer heads, his music has been at least as influential, a result of his arrangements for such singers as Bennett, Sinatra, and Vaughan. and of a flurry of film scores (including Captain Horatio Hornblower, Where's Charley? and the last Hope-Crosby travelogue. The Road To Hong Kong). What's more, his colleagues lend to regard him with the respect, if not awe, that Kerouac accorded Shearing. Andre Previn has called him "the greatest living string writer in the world." and Tony Bennett says that every orchestrator with whom he's worked "steals from Robert Farnon. They really look at him like he's a god."
As a result, this album stacks up as much more than "George Shearing with Strings." That phrase — which connotes jazz performances sweetened by violins and the occasional high reed — has virtually nothing to do with these elaborately conceived settings for the style of George Shearing (and, on four tracks, his quintet). In wedding his control of the orchestra with Shearing's taste and swing, Farnon has done all but the impossible: he has created an album full of mini-concertos, in which the piano plays the prominent role while fully blending into the larger ensemble, and in the process he has drawn on a vast array of musical devices.
Only a handful of orchestral jazz projects have so fully accomplished this integration of seemingly incompatible components, and for obvious reasons. First, only a handful of orchestrators display the conceptual prowess of Robert Farnon. And second, only a handful of modern instrumentalists combine the traditional virtues of classical and jazz musics with the elegance of George Shearing.
Dancing In The Dark, the darkly romantic, even fatalistic Arthur Schwartz ballad, concerns more than ballroom swirls in a power failure. Titled after a book by the philosopher Martin Buber. who used the phrase as an analogy for the human condition, it reflects lyricist Howard Dietz's ambition to delve beneath the usual love-song surface. The arrangement showcases Shearing's lovely quintet sound — a sound for which he is noted — and Louis Stewart's carefully stated improvisation on guitar.
Farnon's treatment of Heather On The Hill (from the musical Brigadoon) is less an arrangement than a fantasia, which uses the original song as its source material. It contains some unusual associations. For instance, in the flute solo of the introduction, Farnon borrows a phrase from the verse of
Gershwin's But Not For Me: at the end, the music is reminiscent of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. The piece has the structure of ballet music, with Shearing's piano the lead dancer.
Farnon further extends his invitation to the dance on the next two songs. He has unexpectedly turned Oh, Lady Be Good! — the classic Broadway tune from the show Lady Be Good, and a longtime jazz vehicle — into a waltz, delightfully reharmonized by Shearing (who tosses in a snippet of Farnon's own Portrait of a Flirt in closing). After a somewhat melodramatic verse, he treats More Than You Know with a light, swinging lope. If you listen carefully, you will hear a quote from Farnon's To a Young Lady.
Our Waltz will surprise those fans of television's Red Skelton Show, who figured never to hear it again after Skelton left the air in 1971. Written by David Rose, who led the orchestra on Skelton's show, it served as an intermittent theme for much of the program's twenty-year history. A double-time waltz feeling sets the mood for the quintet entrance.
Shearing insisted that this recording contain one of Farnon's compositions; thus the new arrangement of How Beautiful Is Night, one of Farnon's most recorded compositions. With its chromatic harmonic movement and pastel tone portraiture, it's Farnon's Clare de Lune. and Shearing brings to his part all the impressionistic passion and control one could want. Once Upon A Time calls for similar qualities in the entirely different context of northern European folk music. The piece is actually an adaptation of an adaptation: Farnon has grounded his flights of fancy in Edvard Grieg's Lyric Pieces For Piano, which is itself based on both a Swedish folk song and Norwegian folk dance.
Days Gone By,a sweepingly gorgeous ballad by the Canadian jazz bassist and pianist Don Thompson, glories in a perfectly realized setting. It also adds a new sound to the wide palette explored by Farnon and Shearing: the unmistakable jazz color of Tommy Whittle's tenor saxophone and Shearing's piano obligato, against a layered backdrop of strings and harp. The full quintet returns, front and center, for Farnon's inventive version of Put On A Happy Face (from the first "rock musical," Bye Bye Birdie). For the theme, Shearing unveils his famed quintet sound — vibes on top, guitar on the bottom, and piano chords sandwiched in the middle — before a classic locked-hands solo.
If Haunted Ballroom sounds like more dance music, it comes by il naturally: the theme derives from a ballet of the same name, composed by Geoffrey Toye. Farnon opens with harp, vibes, strings, and bass flute combining to create pools ot raindrops before the waltz tempo grows active. Towards the end of Just Imagine, from the musical Good News, there is an interesting question and answer segment between the piano and solo violin. The quintet returns lor this program's finale, The Surrey With The Fringe On Top, for which Farnon has saved some of his best ideas. His rhythmic displacement of the theme both confounds our expectations and re-examines the melody, while the arrangement's airy reliance on flutes provides an orchestral correlative to the lightly swinging sound of the Shearing ensemble.
— Neil Tesser
What a joy it was to record this album with Robert Farnon. He has earned every accolade he has received. To me. he will always be "The Guv'nor."
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.’”
