Books by Gene Lees

Jim and Andy's on 48th Street was a favourite haunt of New York musicians in the 1960s. This book gives vivid portraits of its clientele, including Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Art Farmer, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, and Bill Evans.

In this volume, a 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.

Based on extensive interviews, Oscar Peterson is a well-informed and provocative exploration of Peterson's music.

This title offers minibiographies of 15 figures from the jazz world - some of them jazz greats, some lesser-known figures, and some up-and-comers. Combining conversations and memoirs with critical commentary, Lees's profiles should captivate jazz fans, performers and historians alike.

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.

Reflecting the social history of twentieth-century America through the mirror of popular music, this celebration of the generation of singers which emerged during and after the war, discusses vocalists such as Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Sarah Vaughan, and the composers and lyricicts whose material so perfectly complemented the abilities of these new stars.

Lees is the glowing jewel of jazz for his understanding of it [and] for his writing about it.-Dizzy Gillespie

Gene Lees is probably the best jazz essayist in America today, and the book that consolidated his reputation was Singers and the Song, which appeared in 1987. Now this classic work is being released in an expanded edition: Singers and the Song II. This volume includes famous selections from the original edition, including Lees' classic profile of Frank Sinatra, as well as new essays.

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 this collection of essays, Gene Lees brings together candid interviews with Jazz's greatest musicians and his own thoughts on the issue of racism, past and present, in jazz.