Sir George Shearing: goodbye and farewell

George Albert Shearing was born in Battersea south-west London, on 19 August, 1919. Without music, he might have ended his days in Battersea, as Stevie Wonder might have ended his days in Detroit.

My father was an exact contemporary of Shearing’s at Linden Lodge blind school, and I went there 20 years later. I would suggest that nobody could attend that Dickensian slum in Bolingbroke Grove, and fail to be enormously grateful for anything better that subsequently happened to them.

On leaving school, he turned down offers of a scholarship-driven academic career in music. His mum and dad were both manual workers, and the prospect of coming straight out of school at 16, to earn 25 shillings a week playing in a pub must have seemed like a no-brainer to him. He was also following his heart, because jazz and entertainment are never far apart. His technical and musical flair were quickly recognised, and he was soon playing with prominent band leaders such as Ambrose and, once the war came, with exiled French violinist Stéphane Grappelli, and many others, including Claude Bampton’s “all-blind” Stage Orchestra.

He became friends with the British jazz critic Leonard Feather, who emigrated to New York after the war. Feather sensed that Shearing would thrive better outside London’s small cultural pond, and invited him to visit in 1946. Here he could experience jazz at the sharp end and in December 1947 he emigrated to the USA. His career as a US-based musician never looked back.

The famous and gentle quintet sound he synthesised from various influences: piano players like Milt Buckner who voiced the tune like a band, with the melody in octaves and the chords filling in the space between, plus the technology that enabled the electrically amplified guitar, and the mechanically amplified sound of the vibraphone, all amounted to a sound which was musically respectable. People could feel sophisticated because they were listening to jazz without getting a headache. Here we have the realism of the working class kid from Battersea. Music could make him rich, and it did.

His discography reveals his enthusiasm, making one or two albums a year from 1949 until 2002, kick-starting the careers of many other musicians, winning two Grammies with Mel Tormé, a phenomenally successful album, Beauty And The Beat with Peggy Lee, and all kinds of other more esoteric projects which leave those of us who aspire to play jazz piano, or piano in general, amazed by that fluency which seems to minimise the linkage between the fingers and the brain.

George Shearing wrote about 300 tunes. He said his “hit”, Lullaby Of Birdland took him “10 minutes and 35 years in the business” to write, while his other tunes “had a bumpy ride from obscurity to oblivion”. He loved cricket, puns and company. George was a warm approachable human being, who was also a truly fine musician, and to be cherished for both those reasons.