Don Shirley is a black American musician and composer. He experimented a lot with jazz music mixed with classical elements.
A new movie came out about his friendship with Tony lip called Green Book.
So it is the perfect time to find out some facts about this talented musician’s amazing life!
- His full name is Donald Walbridge Shirley
- He was born on January 29, 1927
- His birth place was Pensacola, Florida
- Don Shirley’s parents were Jamaican immigrants
- Their names Stella Gertrude, a teacher, and Edwin S. Shirley, an Episcopal priest
- Shirley 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
- His studies, also, were with Conrad Bernier and Thaddeus Jones at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C
- Don Shirley’s first lessons were with his mother on an old broken piano
- Shirley earned a doctorate of Music, Psychology, and Liturgical Arts
- He spoke eight languages fluently
- He was a talented painter
- For a brief time, Don gave up playing the piano
- In 1945, at the age of 18, Shirley performed the Tchaikovsky B – flat minor concerto with the Boston Pops
- A year later, Shirley performed one of his compositions with the London Philharmonic Orchestra
- In 1949, he received an invitation from the Haitian government to play at the Exposition International du Bi – Centenaire de Port – au -Prince
- There Don Shirley received a request from President Estimé and Archbishop Le Goise for a repeat performance the following week
- 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
- While 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
- In these records he experimented with jazz with a classical influence
- In 1961, his single “Water Boy” reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100
- It stayed on the chart for 14 weeks
- He performed in New York City at Basin Street East
- Don Shirley met Duke Ellington, there, where the later heard him play 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
- During the 1960s, Shirley went on a number of concert tours, some in Deep South states, believing that he could change some minds with his performances
- He hired New York-nightclub bouncer Tony “Lip” Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard
- Despite their different personalities, they became close friends
- In the fall of 1968, Shirley performed the Tchaikovsky concerto with the Detroit Symphony
- He also worked with the Chicago Symphony
- Αnd the National Symphony Orchestra
- Don Shirley 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
- Don Shirley wrote organ symphonies, piano concerti, a cello concerto, three string quartets, a one-act opera, works for organ, piano and violin
- He wrote 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
- Shirley was married to Jean C. Hill in Cook County, Illinois on December 23, 1952
- They were later divorced
- There were rumors that Don Shirley was gay
- He never came out during his lifetime
- He died of heart disease April 6, 2013, at the age of 86
- He and Tony stayed closed friends until death
- They died between months from each other
- Their friendship and journey through the Deep South is portrayed in the film Green Book
- Screenwriter for the movie is Tony’s son Nick
- Nick believes Don Shirley to be a pioneer of jazz and of the #BlackLivesMatter movement!
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