Sherbet-Cold

When young (27) British Pianist George Shearing went job-hunting two years ago on Manhattan's jazz-drenched 52nd Street, he had some impressive clippings to show. For six years he had been voted Britain's No. 1 jazz pianist. Like another successful British-born pianist, Alec Templeton, George had been sightless from birth. But at six he had begun music lessons at London's Linden Lodge School for the Blind, kept at the classics until he was 17, when he decided he could make his living at jazz.

He had started out touring with a blind men's band. The leader used a specially designed baton that made an audible swoosh so the musicians could follow his beat. At one time or another George had played with most of Britain's top dance bands. Among his fans was the late Fats Waller, who assured Shearing, "You'll kill them in America."

Headache Factories. By the time blond, good-natured Shearing made the trip to the U.S., his friend Waller was dead and something called bop was mushrooming in 52nd Street basements. Shearing took the best job he could get: a union-scale, six-night-a-week grind in a 52nd Street club. Surrounded by bop addicts, Shearing's piano soon lost its English accent, picked up American "progressive" doubletalk. But conservative Shearing stopped short of the bop-for-bop's-sake which was turning some U.S. jazz joints into headache factories, instead concentrated on what is called "polite bop." By the end of his first year his good manners had begun paying off. He organized a soft-spoken bop quintet, got a record contract and the first of a long series of nightclub dates.

Last week, after a successful trip to the West Coast, Shearing was at Manhattan's Strand Theatre for his first big-theater appearance. What jazz fans heard was a far cry from the feverishly disorganized, shrilly dissonant music that had made bop box-office poison in a lot of places. Shearing's music was sherbet-cold. Backed by a vibraphone, electric guitar, bass and drums, he played his piano as though he were tapping on tuned icicles.

Covered Hiccups. Shearing, who regards "cleanliness, the perfect internal balance of instruments," as the cardinal musical virtue, had turned bop shrieks into whispers, full-scale bop burps into carefully covered hiccups. There was a steady enough beat so that, in contrast to most bop, Shearing's music was almost danceable.

In such standbys as September in the Rain and East of the Sun, sentimentalists got a straight chorus to hang their memories on before taking off on a jaunt through the weird intervals, lurching rhythms and monotonous riffs of the bop landscape. "The public," Shearing explained, "needs a handle to grab before they'll really catch on to bop."

The U.S. jazz public seemed to be catching on to the handle Shearing offered them. Metronome readers rated his quintet first among U.S. jazz combos for last year. He had been voted second place among popular jazz pianists in Down Beat's 1949 poll. With the quintet's recording schedules doubled to meet the demand and bookings racked up as far ahead as August, Shearing had filed naturalization papers, was looking for a home to settle down in with his wife and seven-year-old daughter.

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