Don Shirley - Don Shirley Solos

Styles: Piano Jazz
Year: 2000
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 41:49
Size: 96,4 MB
Art: Front

(4:24)  1. It Could Happen To You
(2:25)  2. Laura
(4:39)  3. I'll Be Around
(2:36)  4. Bewitched
(3:31)  5. Something To Remember You By
(3:28)  6. Ill Wind
(3:28)  7. Little Girl Blue
(4:35)  8. I'm In The Mood For Love
(2:16)  9. This Is My Beloved
(3:44) 10. April In Paris
(2:27) 11. It Never Entered My Mind
(4:11) 12. Don't Worry 'Bout Me

Donald Walbridge Shirley (January 29, 1927 – April 6, 2013) was an American jazz pianist and composer. Donald Walbridge Shirley was born on January 29, 1927, in Pensacola, Florida, to Jamaican immigrants Stella Gertrude (née Young; 1903–1936) and Edwin S. Shirley (1885–1982). (Don Shirley's place of birth was sometimes given as Kingston, Jamaica, because promoters falsely advertised him as being Jamaican-born.) His father was an Episcopal priest. His mother, a teacher, died when Shirley was nine years old. Shirley's siblings were Dr. Calvin Shirley (1921–2012), Dr. Edwin Shirley, Jr. (1922–2006), Stella Lucille Shirley (1924–1926), and Maurice Shirley (b. 1937).  He also had a half-sister named Edwina Nalchawee (née Shirley) (b. circa 1955). He started to learn piano when he was two years old. At the age of nine, he was invited to study theory with Mittolovski at the Leningrad Conservatory of Music. He also studied with Conrad Bernier and Thaddeus Jones at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.  Shirley earned a doctorate of Music, Psychology, and Liturgical Arts after temporarily giving up the piano.  He spoke eight languages fluently and was also a talented painter. In 1945, at the age of 18, he performed with the Boston Pops,  with Dean Dixon as guest conductor, playing the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor concerto. 

A year later Shirley performed one of his compositions with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He received an invitation from the Haitian government in 1949 to play at the Exposition International du Bi-Centenaire de Port-au-Prince, followed by a request from President Estimé and Archbishop Le Goise for a repeat performance the next week. Discouraged by the lack of opportunities for classical black musicians, Shirley abandoned the piano as a career while young. He studied psychology and began work in Chicago as a psychologist. There he returned to music. He was given a grant to study the relationship between music and juvenile crime, which had broken out in the postwar era of the early 1950s. Playing in a small club, he experimented with sound to determine how the audience responded. The audience was unaware of his experiments and that students had been planted to gauge their reactions. During the 1950s and 1960s, Shirley recorded many albums for Cadence Records, experimenting with jazz with a classical influence. His single "Water Boy" reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed on the chart for 14 weeks. He performed in New York City at Basin Street East, where Duke Ellington heard him, and they started a friendship. At Arthur Fiedler's invitation, Shirley appeared with the Boston Pops in Chicago in June 1954. In 1955, he performed with the NBC Symphony at the premiere of Ellington's Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall. He also appeared on TV on Arthur Godfrey and His Friends. In the fall of 1968, Shirley performed the Tchaikovsky concerto with the Detroit Symphony. He also worked with the Chicago Symphony and the National Symphony Orchestra.[5] He wrote symphonies for the New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra. He played as soloist with the orchestra at Milan's La Scala opera house in a program dedicated to George Gershwin's music. Only two other pianists, Arthur Rubinstein and Sviatoslav Richter, have performed there as soloists. Shirley wrote organ symphonies, piano concerti, a cello concerto, three string quartets, a one-act opera, works for organ, piano and violin, a symphonic tone poem based on the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, and a set of "Variations" on the legend of Orpheus in the Underworld. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Shirley

Don Shirley Solos

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