Shawn Lee

Beginning in the late 1980s, multi-instrumentalist and producer Shawn Lee launched an expansive musical path that spanned film, television, and video game scores along with indie soul material and funk-infused electronica. He completed his debut solo album in 1996, although the project remained unreleased in any official capacity. During the 2000s he placed solo releases on Ubiquity and Wall of Sound while assembling Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra, and he also issued collaborative albums with Clutchy Hopkins while starting to score projects such as the 2006 game Bully. The Ping Pong Orchestra remained active into the following decade as Lee formed the psychedelic soul outfit the Electric Peanut Butter Company alongside Adrian Quesada and launched the indie electronic partnership AM & Shawn Lee, while his occasional scoring assignments included the documentaries Elevate in 2011 and Let It Soul in 2018.

A Wichita, Kansas native, Lee moved first to Los Angeles, California to refine his craft and collaborate with Jeff Buckley, then relocated again in 1995 to London, England. After his intended debut album Discomfort appeared only as a French promo the next year, he began a partnership with Wall of Sound that yielded multiple singles and the official first album, 2000’s Monkey Boy, an off-kilter collection of funk and soul. Ubiquity Records began issuing his instrumental breakbeat series Ape Breaks in 2002, reaching Ape Breaks, Vol. 5 before the close of 2003, and also released Music and Rhythm, the first of numerous Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra albums. The orchestra continued with Moods and Grooves in 2005 and Strings and Things in 2006, some of the material created for television soundtracks including Desperate Housewives and Malcolm in the Middle. Also in 2006 the 2004 Japanese solo release Soul Visa reached the United States through BBE, and the following year brought Voices and Choices, which featured a track by Ubiquity labelmate Nino Moschella, followed by A Very Ping Pong Christmas: Funky Treats, his reinterpretation of holiday standards. The year 2008 saw the release of the stylistically wide-ranging Miles of Styles together with Clutch of the Tiger, his first project with producer Clutchy Hopkins; a second Hopkins collaboration, Fascinating Fingers, arrived in 2009 shortly before Soul in the Hole, a vocal-driven album featuring Darondo, Nicole Willis, Paul Butler, Karime Kendra, and Orgone’s Fanny Franklin.

Early 2011 opened with World of Funk by the Ping Pong Orchestra, an album in which Lee handled beats, multiple instruments, and samples while exploring global sounds on instruments ranging from sitar and ektar to balaphone, steel drum, and udu, among others, and enlisted Brazilian vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Curumin, NOMO’s Elliot Bergman, and British/Egyptian singer Natacha Atlas. That same year Lee teamed with singer-songwriter AM for the album Celestial Electric. Tabla Rock, his track-by-track re-creation of the Incredible Bongo Band’s Bongo Rock, appeared on Ubiquity in early 2012, followed by Reel to Reel from the Ping Pong Orchestra in mid-July and Synthesizers in Space just weeks later. Continuing his steady output, Lee reunited with AM in 2013 for La Musique Numerique while the Electric Peanut Butter Company issued Trans-Atlantic Psych Classics, Vol. 2; the next year he contributed to the KPM library release KPM: New York Trouble/Electric Progression and delivered Golden Age Against the Machine, a tribute to rap from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s. The 2015 remix collection Skeewiff vs. Shawn Lee appeared alongside AM & Shawn Lee’s third album Outlines and, somewhat confusingly, Vol. 1 of the Electric Peanut Butter Company series. The Ping Pong Orchestra resurfaced with Techstar in 2017, and Lee, still accepting occasional television, short-film, and game assignments, composed the score for the documentary feature Let It Soul, which premiered in 2018. In late 2019 he issued Rides Again, a set of soulful Americana and his first vocal album in more than a decade.