Even a Londoner Can Have A Natural Feeling for Jazz By Leonard Feather Next time someone hands you the old argument that jazz is a One Hundred Per Cent American art, for which the native background and environment are essential to a natural feeling for the idiom, I'd like to suggest that you cite the case of George Shearing. It's hard to imagine a setting less conducive to artistic endeavors than Battersea, the East side London district where George was born and raised, Your correspondent first heard a Shearing piano performance at a Rhythm Club meeting on Regent Street, when George was 17. British jazz fans were astonished by the natural mastery of jazz he had acquired simply from listening to records by Hines, Tatum, Wilson and Waller. Making a living out of honest uncompromising hot jazz is even harder in Britain than over here, yet George's phenomenal gifts made him commercially acceptable to the "square" English public. Night club bookings, a Decca record contract, frequent radio appearances combined to make him as big a success as you could be in the limited British wartime music profession; and George won the London Melody Maker poll seven straight years as the country's No. 1 pianist. A year ago, feeling he had reached the end of a blind alley and beset by a "Where-do-I-go-from-here?" complex, George decided the answer was "New York." He pulled up stakes and, with wife Trixie and blue-eyed daughter Wendy, started from scratch on 52nd Street, a complete unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Success has come slowly but surely, with a Town Hall concert, an album of his recordings on the imported London label, a Talent Scout prize from Arthur Godfrey.