George E. Lee

George Ewing Lee (mostly abbreviated to George E. Lee; born April 28, 1896 in Boonville , Missouri , † 1958 ) was an American band leader, singer and saxophonist. Lee led the successful and popular band His Novelty Swinging Orchestra during the 1920s and early 1930s , based in Kansas City, Missouri .

Live and act

George E. Lee from Boonville, Missouri, came from a musical family, playing in the family band violin and cello, and in France in the First World War . At that time he was singing. He also played the piano and baritone saxophone. After his discharge from the military in 1919 he formed a small ensemble with his sister Julia Lee , a talented pianist. Lee played at Lincoln Hall and Lyric Hall in Kansas City, promoting that he play the latest songs. The orchestra was initially more of a vaudeville than a jazz band. Lee paid his musicians below average (in contrast to Moten), which led to a constant fluctuation of the musicians in his band. His dominant personality also contributed to the fluctuation in the band. Nevertheless, Lee's band at times reached the quality of Bennie Moten 's band . Like Moten's band, Lee's band grew over time in the 1920s. George and Julia's entertaining and vocal skills made the band a success at Kansas City's venues on 18th Street and Vine. The addition of the name Novelty identifies the band as a ragtime band, similar to others during this period . The Novelty Rag is a revival of ragtime around the turn of the century in the 1920s.

In 1923 the six-piece band recorded for the Okeh label . This made them the first African American band from Kansas City to record their music. However, Okeh assessed the recordings "Just Wait Until I'm Gone" and "Waco Blues" unsatisfactory and did not release the two tracks. As a consequence, Lee moved the group; he toured further through the dance halls and cabaret stages. The band got bigger and bigger and the music more and more sophisticated. His powerful voice carried several blocks out of the windows of Lincoln Hall at concerts.

In early 1927, the Lee Band took on again, this time for Meritt Records , a Kansas City label owned by Winston Holmes . Holmes was owned by the Winston Holmes Music Company, and he started the Meritt label after producing the recording sessions with Lee (and those with Moten) for Okeh. The two recordings made for Meritt give an impression of the rough, stomp-down style of the Lee band: Down Home Syncopated Blues is a vocal number with rather short and mediocre solos. Meritt Stomp contains chords that are not very common at the time, but it is not convincing. According to Gunther Schuller , trombonist Thurston Maupins and pianist Julia Lee alone are convincing in terms of style and rhythm. The record sold very well locally.

In the summer of 1927, Lee's band began an annual engagement at Spring Lake Park, Oklahoma City . Lee played the tenor saxophone and clarinet. For the engagement, Lee enlarged the band to nine musicians. Robert Russell and Sam Auderbach (trumpet), Herman Walder and Clarence Taylor (clarinets, saxophones), Charles Rousseau (banjo), Julia Lee (piano), Clinton Weaver ( sousaphone ) and William D. Wood now played alongside him in the enlarged band (Drums). When they returned to Kansas City in 1928, Lee expanded the band's reach into the white dance halls, while he found his other work base in 18th and Vine. Over the next several years, Lee toured the American Southwest, adding new band members and honing the band along the way.

In early 1929, Jesse Stone joined the band. Stone's masterful arrangements and compositions improved the Lee Band's music significantly, bringing it on par with Moten's band. On Sunday, April 28, 1929, Lee defeated Moten in front of 4,000 dancers in a battle of the bands at Frog Hop in St. Joseph , Missouri. Lee's victory challenged Moten's regional supremacy. The defeat caused Moten to bring Eddie Durham and Bill "Count" Basie into the band so that they could move the band forward again.

In November 1929 the Lee Band recorded six tracks for the Brunswick label, after which they spent two months preparing. On the recordings of November 6, 1929, compared to the recordings from 1927, there is a real improvement due to the new musicians and the arrangements. Utterbach (trumpet) and Jimmy Jones (trombone) give powerful solos on their recordings. One of the pieces was St. James Infirmary . Louis Armstrong had made a faster-paced recording of this piece a year earlier, but it didn't sell well. Lee's slower version fitted better with the solemn verse describing a gambler pondering his own mortality while looking at his dead lover in the Saint James cemetery. The record sold well locally, but Brunswick failed to promote the recording nationwide during the onset of the Depression, and Cab Calloway's cover version of Lee's St. James Infirmary became a national hit the following year. Lee played tenor saxophone, guitar and sang in this line-up. Baritone and bass saxophone and ukulele can be heard in a different line-up. Compared to Bennie Moten's competing band, Lee stood out for his entertainer qualities (until 1932 as a singer with his sister, then alone). The band had outstanding soloists. The young Charlie Parker also played briefly in the band in the early 1930s. The extended tours between “One Night Stands” in Paseo Hall in Kansas City and venues that were far apart from golf to the northwest of the USA wore the band members down. Lee, despite his musical background, was primarily an entertainer and as such was not so focused on building a band.

In February 1932, Jesse Stone, drummer Baby Lovett, alto saxophonist Herman Walder and trumpeter Richard Smith left Lee's band to join the Thamon Hayes band newly formed by former Moten musicians . In 1933 Lee joined forces with Moten, and formed the Lee-Moten Band for an engagement at the Harlem Nightclub . In 1934 Lee's sister Julia left the band to start her own career with a long-term engagement at Milton’s , a club popular in Kansas City. The next year, Lee broke up his band and freelanced on 12th and 18th Streets in Kansas City. In 1936 Buster Moten brought him back into the reduced Moten band. From time to time Lee would put big bands together for special performances, but he never regained the success he enjoyed with his band in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In addition to the band's own recordings, a record was released under the name Julia Lee with George E. Lee and His Novelty Swinging Orchestra .

Web links

• George E. Lee
• Julia Lee

Individual evidence

1. ^ Frank Driggs , Chuck Haddix: Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History . Oxford 2005; ISBN 0-19-530712-7 , pp. 41f.
2. ^ ^{A b c d e} Albert McCarthy: Big Band Jazz , Berkley Publishing, 1977
3. ↑ Driggs / Haddix, Kansas City Jazz , p. 42
4. ^ Driggs / Haddix, Kansas City Jazz , p. 51
5. ↑ A strong voice was important in the huge dance halls in order to entertain the audience with singing when there were no microphones for amplification. Megaphones were used as the first means of amplification, and the sound quality must have been correspondingly unsatisfactory
6. ^ Gunther Schuller: Early Jazz. Its roots and musical development . Oxford 1986 p. 298f. Driggs / Haddix, Kansas City Jazz, come to a similar conclusion. P. 51, which also accept solos by Sam Auderbach and Clarence Taylor.
7. ^ Driggs / Haddix, Kansas City Jazz, p. 51.
8. ↑ also Otterbeck and Utterbeck
9. ^ Driggs / Haddix, Kansas City Jazz , p. 89
10. ^ Driggs / Haddix, Kansas City Jazz , p. 93
11. ↑ Driggs / Haddix, Kansas City Jazz , pp. 89f.
12. ↑ Lee on Red Hot Jazz
13. ↑ at the location of the former Paseo Hall
14. ↑ Homepage ( Memento of the original from June 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Local 627