One highlight of our “Songs, Sonnets and Touches of Sweet Harmony” concert program on May 10 will be a series of pieces by jazz legend George Shearing. Blind since his birth in London, young Shearing could play practically anything he heard and later said that by age 16 “it was obvious I would become a jazz pianist.” Over his 70-year career, Shearing was an award-winning performer, conductor and composer, first in Great Britain and then as a US citizen.

In Shearing’s Songs & Sonnets you’ll hear both his English musical background and his American jazz influence. Though of course, as Shearing put it in his program notes, “…if Mr. Shakespeare hadn’t done HIS part in the first place, we’d all be in the soup.”