Gene Lees

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Frederick Eugene John "Gene" Lees (born February 8, 1928 in Hamilton , Ontario , † April 22, 2010 in Ojai , California ) was a Canadian journalist, jazz writer, songwriter, singer and music critic.

Life

Lees began writing as a journalist for Canadian newspapers from 1948 (The Hamilton Spectator, Toronto Telegram, Montreal Star ). From 1955 he was in the USA, where he wrote music reviews for the Louisville Times in Kentucky . 1959 to 1962 he was one of the editors of the jazz magazine Down Beat . He then wrote freelance for High Fidelity, Stereo Review, The New York Times, Toronto Star, Toronto Globe and Mail, among others. In total, he received five Ascap-Deems-Taylor Awards for his reviews. From 1981 he published the "Jazzletters" monthly, with jazz reviews by himself and other authors, which he also published in three edited volumes. He wrote over 100 liner notes on records by John Coltrane and Stan Getz, among others .

Lees wrote the English text "Quiet night and quiet stars" for " Corcovado " by Antônio Carlos Jobim (written on a tour of Brazil with the Paul Winter Sextet in 1961), written by Frank Sinatra , Peggy Lee , Sarah Vaughan , Diana Krall , among others has been interpreted. He also wrote other English lyrics for Brazilian musicians of the Bossa Nova wave, for "Waltz for Debby" by Bill Evans and for example for Charles Aznavour .

He wrote the biographies of Oscar Peterson , Alan Jay Lerner , Frederick Loewe , Woody Herman and Johnny Mercer and was co-author of the autobiography of Henry Mancini (1989). He also wrote two novels and published several records on which he sings his own songs, first in the early 1970s when he ran his own record company Kanata in Canada from 1971 to 1974. Lee studied piano, guitar (with the Brazilian guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves in New York) and composition (distance learning at Berklee College of Music ) in the early 1960s . In 1971 he briefly had his own late night television show on CBC and in 1973/74 his own radio show "Gene Lees and Friends" in Toronto.

Fonts

Jazz biographies
  • Portrait of Johnny - The Life of John Herndon Mercer , Pantheon Books 2004
  • Inventing Champagne - The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe , New York, St. Martin's Press 1990
  • Oscar Peterson . The Will to Swing , Toronto 1988, Cooper Square Press 2000
    • Übers. Wolfram Knauer : The will to swing, Oscar Peterson (a life for music). Hannibal, Vienna 1990
  • with Graham Lees: Leader of the Band - The Life of Woody Herman , Oxford University Press 1995
  • with Henry Mancini: Did They Nention the Music? , Chicago, Contemporary Books, 1989 (autobiography by Mancini)
Collections of his jazz reviews
  • Singers and the Song , Oxford University Press 1987
  • Singers and the Song II, Oxford University Press 1998
  • Meet me at Jim and Andy's - Jazz Musicians and their World , Oxford University Press 1988
  • Waiting for Dizzy , Oxford University Press 1991
More jazz books, some mixed with personal memories
  • Jazz Lives - 100 Portraits in Jazz , Toronto, Stewart House 1992
  • Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White , Oxford University Press 1994
  • You Can't Steel a Gift: Dizzy, Clark, Milt and Nat , 2001 (chapters on Dizzy Gillespie , Milt Hinton , Clark Terry , Nat King Cole )
  • Arranging the Score: Portraits of the Great Arrangers , Continuum, New York, 2000 ISBN 9780304704880
  • Friends Along the Way - A Journey Through Jazz , 2008 (autobiography)
Others
  • The Modern Rhyming Dictionary: How to Write Lyrics A Practical Guide to Lyric Writing for Songwriters and Poets, Greenwich, Cherry Lane Books, 1987
  • And Sleep Until Noon , New York, Trident Press, 1967 (novel)
  • Song Lake Summer . 2008 (novel)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lees, Gene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lees, Frederick Eugene John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian journalist, jazz writer, songwriter, singer and music critic
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamilton , Ontario
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 2010
Place of death Ojai , California