Sleeve Notes:
a choir of stringed instruments creates a plush velvet carpet for the wonderfully listenable shearing sound
This album presents for the first time, Shearing with strings. Combining cellos, violas, and violins with the celebrated George Shearing Quintet yields music as smoothh and polished as old mahogany, a fresh as a meadow in spring. Whether the assembled strings swoop dramatically in a cadenza, offer pizzicato backstopping, or provide, in ensemble, a vast velvet carpet of harmony – their effect is to embellish, broaden, and bring to an even more exciting focus the classic ingredients of the now famous George Shearing style.
Shearing’s music is a lot of things to a lot of people. To his sophisticates his urbane piano seems to emanate from a penthouse terrace high against an awesome city skyline. To those who like jazz, Shearing offers a beat as basic and danceable as any that rolled out of the open windows of basin Street on a sweltering summer night,and they will find in his music individuality and a restless exploration for fresh sound and meaning. The truth is that George Shearing’s music is all of the those and more, because he is an artist whose style is an intensely personal as his fingerprints, no matter what the fabric of the music he creates – chiffon or burlap of deep-piled velvet.
Label: Capitol T-720
