By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: April 26, 2010
Gene Lees, a prolific jazz critic and historian who approached his subject with a journalist’s rigor and an insider’s understanding, died on Thursday at his home in Ojai, Calif. He was 82.
The apparent cause was a stroke, said Leslie A. Westbrook, a family spokeswoman.
The author of numerous books, Mr. Lees was not just an observer of the music scene, he was also a participant.
He was an accomplished lyricist whose credits included “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars,” the English-language lyric for Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Corcovado,” which was recorded by Frank Sinatra, Astrud Gilberto and many others. He was also a vocalist, with several albums to his credit.
That experience, and the friendships he built over the years with musicians, singers and songwriters, informed the project that had been his primary focus since 1981: publishing (monthly at first, later at irregular intervals) the subscription-only Gene Lees Ad Libitum Jazzletter, mostly as an outlet for his own biographical and historical essays.
“The beauty of this thing,” Mr. Lees said of his journal in an interview in The New York Times in 1987, “is that it has permitted me to write what I want to write, not what editors want me to write. And the beauty of it for the other contributors is that they’ve got total freedom. No money, but total freedom.”
The Jazzletter, published out of Mr. Lees’s house, carried no advertising, and its circulation was small, although it included readers whose names any jazz fan would recognize. He initially financed it with income from his book “The Modern Rhyming Dictionary” (Cherry Lane, 1981), and his book and songwriting income helped keep it going. Ms. Westbrook said Mr. Lees’s wife of 38 years, the former Janet Suttle, planned to continue publishing it.
Mr. Lees’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son from his second marriage, Philip; a sister, Victoria; and a brother, David. His sister Patricia died in 1990.
Mr. Lees had strong, often contentious opinions and expressed them forcefully. He was steadfast in his contempt for rock music, calling it “junk” produced by “illiterates.” He was equally outspoken on the delicate subject of race and jazz, acknowledging the vital role played by African-American musicians but resisting the notion that jazz was an exclusively black art form.
“It is of course insane to classify someone who is seven-eighths white as black,” he wrote of New Orleans in the early days of jazz in “Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White” (Oxford University Press, 1994), a collection of his Jazzletter essays. “It was a fiction by which white racists kept light Creoles in their place. It is a fiction by which black racists maintain the definition of jazz as ‘Negro music.’ “
Mr. Lees supported his strong opinions with strong research. At times that research took him far afield of his ostensible subject. The first chapter of another essay collection, “Singers and the Song” (Oxford, 1987), for example, was a history of the English language from the 10th century to the present.
Eugene Frederick John Lees was born on Feb. 8, 1928, in Hamilton, Ontario, the eldest of four children of an expatriate British couple, Harold Lees and the former Dorothy Flatman. After dropping out of the Ontario College of Art, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Canada before moving to Kentucky to become music editor of The Louisville Times in 1955. He was the editor of Down Beat magazine from 1959 to 1961 and went on to write about music for The New York Times and other publications.In addition to seven collections of Jazzletter essays, Mr. Lees’s books include biographies of Woody Herman, Oscar Peterson, Johnny Mercer and the songwriting team Lerner and Loewe. He was also a co-writer of the composer Henry Mancini‘s autobiography and author of two novels. At the time of his death he was working on a biography of Artie Shaw.
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Source: ~www.nytimes.com
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