George Shearing at the Kennedy Center 12/5/00

by Alan Greenblatt

Introducing "Lullaby of Birdland" Friday night at the Kennedy Center, George Shearing said, "I have been credited with writing arguably 300 songs, 299 of which have enjoyed a bumpy ride from relative obscurity to total oblivion. Here's the other."

His concert was full of that sort of light charm. Shearing, a blind Briton for those of you who don't know, has spent much of his career in the shadow of others. His career got its early boost when he played with Stephan Grappelli and had a kind of renaissance during the mid-1980s on onwards when he made an excellent series of recordings with Mel Torme for Concord.

Shearing's backed a lot of singers, and it occurred to me Friday that he's better as an accompanist than a soloist. He's had a fair number of hits -his albums from the 1950s are often hilarious period pieces, with comely blond maidens coaxing the prospective buyer still after all these decades -but his effects are soft. He provides wonderful voicings and color, but his improvisations, at least Friday, stuck pretty close to the original melody. He sounded more intriguing laying down chords behind his longtime bass player Neil Swainson.

Standing ovations nowadays aren't the sure thing they were 10 years ago, and this one felt a little forced. But the audience was with George all the way, listening as intently as any musician of small affect could want.

Duke Ellington was kind of the prevailing spirit of my weekend. He contributed a couple dozen songs to Arena's "Play On," not "a couple" as I idiotically wrote yesterday. Shearing began and ended with Ellington songs. And there is a big bust of Ellington smiling near a piano the Duke once owned toward the end of the Smithsonian's Piano 300 exhibit at the Ripley Center.

The show displays a number of pianos of different styles from the past three centuries. Thursdays and Saturdays at noon, tours are led by pianists who actually play the old Chickerings and Steinways. Saturday's host was Jose Caceres, an excellent player and a breathless scholar. I've seen him this way before, where his talk is a blend of gossip and serious musical knowledge. He played Mozart minuets on some old keyboards with no action and banged away happily on an Ernesto Lecuona showpiece on a Baldwin built for Liberace.

It was a happy little tour, one of those things that makes you appreciate living in a big city with all kinds of resources. The show is up for another six months, so go see Jose or Burnett Thompson or one of the other good players they've got doing this thing.

One of the other joys of living in Washington is hearing Ellington's version of the Nutcracker performed at Blues Alley. Eric Felten, conservative journalist by day and trombone player by night, leads a big band of many fine musicians from the area, typically including Larry Eanet, Chuck Redd and others. They skipped the last couple of year's due to Felten's production of offspring but they'll be back next Wednesday, December 13. It will be one of the most delightful hours of music you're likely to hear.