Sir George Shearing*

The youngest of nine children, Sir George Shearing was born blind in 1919 in Battersea, a district of South London, England. His father delivered coal and his mother cleaned trains in the evenings. He started studying piano at the age of three and began formal training at the Linden Lodge School for the Blind, where he lived from ages 12 to 16.

After high school, Shearing turned down multiple university scholarships to perform at a local pub for 25 shillings a week. Later, he joined a 16-member, government-sponsored, all-blind band, whose theme song was "I'll See You in My Dreams." He made his first BBC radio broadcast during this time.

In 1947, Shearing came to the United States with his wife and daughter. After a few years as a cocktail pianist and intermission player for jazz legends such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, a friend suggested he combine his own rhythm section of bass and drums with a guitar and a vibraphone. This combination became the foundation for the George Shearing Quintet, which met in a recording studio and tried out the sound with "September in the Rain." The recording sold 900,000 copies almost overnight.

For nearly 30 years, the quintet enjoyed an international reputation that included concerts, hotel and club dates, radio and television appearances, benefit concerts for the blind, foreign travel, and White House visits. In 1978, Shearing broke up the quintet to go on and try new things. In 1979, he collaborated with Mel Tormé. That duo won Shearing two Grammys, one in 1982 and one in 1983. Over the years, Shearing also collaborated with Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, and Nancy Wilson.

Shearing's interest in classical music resulted in performances with concert orchestras in the 1950s and 1960s. He became known for a piano technique known as Shearing voicing, a type of double melody block chord, with an additional fifth part that doubles the melody an octave lower.

Shearing wrote more than 300 compositions, including the classic "Lullaby of Birdland," which became a jazz standard. In 1993, he was presented with the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1996, he was included in the Queen's Birthday Honors List and was invested by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his "service to music and Anglo-U.S. relations."

In 1998, the National Arts Club gave him the first American Music Award, and in 1999, Shearing celebrated his 80th birthday by playing sold-out concerts at both the Birmingham Symphony Hall in England and Carnegie Hall in New York.

In conjunction with the 2005 publication of Shearing's biography, Lullaby of Birdland, Concord Records released a composite of Shearing recordings in a 2-CD set titled "Lullabies of Birdland: A Musical Autobiography." In 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him at a Buckingham Palace ceremony "for his services to music."

A U.S. citizen since 1956, Shearing and his wife divided their time between their New York apartment and a house in the Berkshires. He defined success as those who are fortunate enough to work at what they like to do. "I am one of those people," he said.