S.O.D. "Yesterday" by George Martin and The Beatles

4/14/2016     This is a hard one.  Sir George Henry Martin has left us. He passed on to Masterpiece Music Heaven on March 8 at the age of 90.  Often referred to as the 5th Beatle due to his involvement on all of their original albums.  Being awarded just about every musical award you can imagine, he received three honorary doctorates of music from different colleges.  Imagine being able to sit down with him just for 30 minutes and pick his brain.  Actually just listening would be the way to go.  For "Yesterday," he wrote the string section which him and Paul at first disagreed on until Paul realized George was right.  

     Sir Martin has worked with numerous popular artists such as Queen, Jeff Beck, Cheap Trick, UFO and Celine Dion. In the 50s he did quite a bit of work with comedy, collaborating with the likes of Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore and Spike Milligan.  He was a musician as well as a conductor, arranger and producer with his instruments being piano and oboe.  He joined the Royal Navy at 17 and became an aerial observer and an officer.  With the help of his veteran grant, he studied piano and oboe at the Guildhall School of Music.  

     One of his dreams was to become the next Rachmaninoff and he recalls the BBC Orchestra coming to his school; "it was absolutely magical.  Hearing such glorious sounds I found it difficult to connect them with 90 men and women blowing into brass and wooden instruments or scraping away at strings with horsehair bows."  Any stories concerning this icon?