Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

«Apr 2010»
SMTWTFS
    123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930 
 

In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

April 24, 2010

Gene Lees RIP

It's not too much to say that I wrote a few books, one of which is still earning royalties, because I read Gene Lees in Stereo Review and High Fidelity back in the 1960s. He wrote so well about stuff that he loved, like Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mercer, that reading him was a painless lesson in both music and writing. My Encyclopedia entry for Lees is here. He died two days ago.
      Lees was a Canadian, born in 1928, who lived in the USA since the 1950s. He was a journalist, lyricist, a more than competent vocalist, and the publisher of the monthly Jazzletter since 1987, most of which he wrote himself. With no advertising or illustrations, the average issue probably had as many words as Time or Newsweek. He finally got so far behind that a couple of years ago he skipped a whole year in order to catch up, but the Jazzletter was always worth waiting for, and his articles in it were collected in several books. His knowledge of popular culture, especially jazz, was wide; he was not at all self-effacing, constantly backing into the limelight, but he had the connections and the anecdotes to back it all up.
      Terry Teachout, with his usual accuracy, has described his friend Lees as "a vain, difficult, endlessly crotchety man". I only found out by accident, a year or so ago, that he was sore at me, to my regret. I reviewed his biography of Woody Herman in the NY Times in about 1995; I thought it was a dullish book about an interesting man, though I tried not to say so, and he thought I had singlehandedly killed its sales. I was reminded of Herbert Hoover saying "I must be a financial genius, causing the Great Depression all by myself."
      But I read Gene Lees with great pleasure for many years.