Gene Lees – författare

Jim and Andy's in New York was one of the city's four musicians' haunts in the 1960s. In a vivid series of portraits, we meet its clientele, an unforgettable gallery of individualists including Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Art Farmer, Billy Taylor, Gerry Mulligan, and Paul Desmond.

This book is a celebration of the generation of popular singers which emerged during and after the war: singers such as Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Sarah Vaughan. Universally praised as intuitive performers, Gene Lees's expert analysis also shows them to be intelligent, skilful artists, didicated to their work. Sinatra is singled out for special praise: Lees describes him as 'our Poet Laureate, and best singer we've ever heard', and points out his technical virtuosity and his unique style of phrasing.The book also looks at some of the composers and lyricists whose material was finely tuned to suit the abilities of these new popular stars. A lyricist himself, Lees gives us an illuminating account of the language used by writers such as Johnny Mercer, their choice of subject matter, and their extraordinary gifts for rhyme and rhythm.

It was none other than Louis Armstrong who said, `These people who make the restrictions, they don't know nothing about music. It's no crime for cats of any colour to get together and blow.' In Cats of Any Color, Gene Lees takes a long overdue look at the shocking pervasiveness of racism in jazz's past and present - both the white racism that long ghettoized the music and generations of talented black musicians, and what Lees maintains is an increasingly virulent reverse racism aimed at white jazz musicians. In candid interviews, living jazz legends such as Horace Silver, Red Rodney (Charlie Parker's white trumpet player), and Dave Brubeck (part Modoc Indian), step forward and share their thoughts on how racism has affected their lives. At the heart of this book is a passionate plea to recognize jazz not as the sole property of any one group, but as an art form celebrating the human spirit.

Woody Herman was a central figure in the development of jazz - a musical giant whose career spanned the big band and bebop eras. Gene Lees has spent close to a decade interviewing Herman's friends and fellow musicians, to produce a vivid portrayal of the triumph and tragedy of a life in jazz.We follow his rise to prominence in the 1930s as leader of `the band that plays the blues,' through success in the 1940s , when bebop rapidly developed, to the ultimate tragedy that broke Herman's career - when his manager diverted the band's withholding tax to settle gambling debts. Along the way, Lees brings to life the weary routine of performing on the road, with its constant one-night engagements and unending travel, broken only by brief stays at home and moments of camaraderie.

In this wise, stimulating, and deeply personal book, an eminent jazz chronicler writes of his encounters with four great black musicians: Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Hinton, and Nat "King" Cole. Equal parts memoir, oral history, and commentary, each of the main chapters is a minibiography, weaving together conversations Gene Lees had with the musicians and their families, friends, and associates over a period of several decades. Lees begins the book with an essay that tells of his introduction to the world of jazz and his reaction to racism in the United States when he emigrated from Canada in 1955. The underlying theme in his book is the impact racism had on the four musicians’ lives and careers and their determination to overcome it. As Lees writes, “No white person can even begin to understand the black experience in the United States. . . . All [of the four jazz makers] are men who had every reason to embrace bitterness—and didn’t.”

A celebrated jazz writer offers fascinating portraits of friends he’s known during a lifetime in jazzFor more than half a century, jazz writer and lyricist Gene Lees has been the friend of many in the world of jazz music. In this delightful book he offers minibiographies of fifteen of these friends—some of them jazz greats, some lesser-known figures, and some up-and-comers. Combining conversations and memoirs with critical commentary, Lees’s insightful and intimate profiles will captivate jazz fans, performers, and historians alike. The subjects of the book range from the versatile orchestrator and arranger Claus Ogerman to legendary jazz broadcaster Willis Conover, from the gifted young Chinese violinist Yue Deng to undersung pianist Junior Mance. Lees writes about these figures both as musicians and as human beings, and he writes out of a conviction that jazz as an art form represents the highest values of American culture. Inviting us into the lives of these unique individuals, Lees offers an affectionate view of the jazz community that only an insider could provide.

In a series of candid interviews with jazz players, composers, and critics, Gene Lees explores racism in the past and present of jazz,both the white racism that for decades ghettoized black musicians and their music, and the prejudice that Lees documents of some black musicians against their white counterparts. With subjects ranging from Horace Silver to Dave Brubeck to Red Rodney, and a new introduction analyzing recent developments, Cats of Any colour chronicles jazz as a multiethnic art.