Biography
With acrobatic vocal techniques paired to a profoundly resonant timbre, Jeanne Lee shifts without strain between high-reaching upper-register excursions and sharply etched emotional readings. Her exacting control and supple range let her descend from the peak of any piece or improvisation straight into its central and lower registers, locking seamlessly with an instrumental line. Although numerous reviewers have singled her out for forging free jazz’s most original vocal language, she has issued remarkably few recordings, almost none under her own name and still fewer on domestic labels. Her widest recognition stems from repeated collaborations with Gunther Hampel. At Bard College she concentrated on dance rather than music, yet there she encountered Ran Blake; the two formed a duo and cut her debut sessions, which drew immediate critical notice. They traveled through Europe together in 1963. Relocating to California the following year, she performed with Ian Underwood and sound poet David Hazelton, whom she subsequently married. While in Europe again in 1967 she initiated her enduring partnership with Hampel, an alliance that yielded more than twenty albums. During the late sixties she also recorded alongside Archie Shepp and Sunny Murray, and throughout the seventies she appeared with Marion Brown, Anthony Braxton, Enrico Rava, and Andrew Cyrille while maintaining ties to Cecil Taylor. In the eighties she turned increasingly to composition and focused her performances on original works that regularly incorporated poetry and movement. The bulk of her discography appeared on European or small independent imprints. After residing in New York during the mid-nineties, she instructed at two European music conservatories for several years. In 2000 she confronted colon cancer without health coverage. Several months after surgery, creative music lost one of its singular voices. Fellow musicians Joseph Jarman, Gunther Hampel, Rashied Ali, Hamiet Bluiett, Abbey Lincoln, and others organized benefit concerts to assist her family with expenses.
Albums
