Critic and lyricist
Gene Lees, the jazz writer who took arrangers seriously
8 February 1928 – 22 April 2010
Gene Lees wrote lyrics that jazz singers still perform and criticism that most jazz writers avoided, and he is the main reason a body of serious writing about orchestral arrangers exists at all.
An editor’s chair at thirty-one
Gene Lees took over the editorship of DownBeat in 1959, at thirty-one, which put a Canadian journalist in charge of the most influential jazz magazine in the United States at a moment when American jazz was pulling apart into hard bop, the third stream and the free players at once.
He was born in Hamilton, Ontario, on 8 February 1928, and came to criticism with musical training behind him. That combination was uncommon. Most jazz writing of the period was done by enthusiasts who could describe the effect of a performance but not its construction, and the gap shows in the prose: a great deal of it is atmosphere and adjectives.
The editorship lasted about two years. What followed was more important, and it was made possible by having held the job: he had the contacts, the standing and the reputation to work independently afterwards.
DownBeat, and what jazz journalism was
The magazine he edited was not a neutral chronicle. DownBeat had a readers’ poll, an advertising base of instrument makers and record labels, and a readership that regarded its verdicts as rankings. An editor was therefore running something closer to an institution than a publication, and the choices about who was profiled and who was reviewed had consequences for working musicians’ fees.
He edited it at an awkward moment. The jazz audience was fragmenting, the older swing and dance-band players still had a substantial constituency, and the newest music was actively hostile to the idea that a magazine’s readers should be adjudicating anything. A jazz editor in 1960 was managing a coalition that no longer wanted to be one.
Two things about his later work make more sense against that background. The independent newsletter he eventually ran was a deliberate escape from advertisers and coalitions. And his interest in arrangers, the least fashionable subject available at the time, reads less like eccentricity than like a considered judgement about where the neglected work was.
The Canadian thread
One connection is worth drawing out, because it recurs on this site and is usually left implicit.
Lees was Canadian. So was Robert Farnon, the arranger he did most to promote. So were a good part of the musicians who staffed British and American orchestras through the middle of the century, and the reason is institutional: Canadian public broadcasting maintained studio orchestras and employed players and arrangers on a scale disproportionate to the country’s population, and it trained people who then left for larger markets.
Farnon learned orchestration in Canadian radio studios in the 1930s before the war brought him to Britain. Lees learned his trade as a Canadian writer before moving to the United States. Neither career would have taken the shape it did without a national broadcaster that paid musicians and journalists to practise in front of an audience, and both were exports.
It is not a coincidence that the writer who took arrangers most seriously and the arranger other arrangers most admired came out of the same system, though it is probably not a conspiracy either. A broadcasting institution that employs orchestras produces people who understand orchestras, and some of them write.
The lyrics
Lees wrote English lyrics, and two of them are performed constantly by people who could not name him.
The Brazilian songs came first in importance. Working with the material of Antônio Carlos Jobim, he produced English versions of songs written in Portuguese, including the lyric sung as “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars”. Writing an English lyric for a Brazilian song is not translation. The syllable count, the stress pattern and the melodic phrasing are fixed by music written for a different language, and the lyricist has to produce something that scans, means something, and sounds unforced within those constraints. Most attempts at it are bad. His are not.
The second is “Waltz for Debby”, where he set a lyric to Bill Evans’s piano piece. This is the reverse operation: taking an instrumental composition, written with no words in mind, and giving it a text that does not fight the melody’s shape. It is the version most singers know, and it is the reason a piece written for solo piano has a place in the vocal repertoire.
Neither achievement is the sort of thing that builds a public reputation. A lyricist’s name travels poorly, and an English lyricist of a foreign song travels worse.
Writing about arrangers
This is why a jazz critic appears on a site about British light music.
Jazz criticism in the second half of the twentieth century concentrated on soloists and, increasingly, on the avant-garde. Its central question was individual expression, and its subject was the improviser. Within that frame the arranger is invisible: somebody who writes the parts, a functionary between the composer and the players, of interest only when he gets in the way.
Lees rejected that. He wrote about arrangers and orchestrators at length, treated their work as authorship, and argued that the sound of a large body of recorded music was the arranger’s achievement rather than the leader’s or the soloist’s. He had the technical vocabulary to make the argument concretely, describing what a particular writer had done to a voicing or a section division, and he had the personal access to get first-hand accounts of how the work was done.
Robert Farnon was among the figures he championed. That advocacy is worth noting precisely, because Farnon’s position was always asymmetrical: enormous respect among working arrangers, very little attention in print. Lees was one of the few writers who could close that gap, and the fact that a British light music readership cited him is a direct consequence.
The Jazzletter
From the early 1980s Lees wrote and published the Jazzletter, a subscription newsletter sold directly to readers.
The format was the point. Writing for a magazine means writing to a word count, for an editor, alongside advertising, on subjects the publication thinks its readers want. A self-published newsletter has none of those constraints and none of the support either. It let him write at the length a subject actually required, take positions no editor would have carried, and return to arrangers and orchestrators as often as he thought necessary.
Much of his best work is there, and that creates a problem addressed at the end of this page.
The books, and the argument about them
The books range across profiles of arrangers and orchestrators, a study of Oscar Peterson, an account of the New York musicians’ world he had known as a young writer, and a book on race in jazz that was publicly disputed when it appeared.
The arranger profiles are the ones consulted by people researching this repertoire, for a simple reason: almost nothing comparable exists. A researcher wanting to know how a mid-century orchestral arranger worked, what the sessions were like, how the charts were produced and what the musicians thought of each other has very few places to go, and Lees is one of them. The material is not always systematic and it is not neutral, but it is first-hand.
His writing on race in jazz attracted argument, and readers should expect to encounter both the book and the response to it. That he wrote polemic as well as reportage is part of the picture rather than an aberration.
Reading him carefully
A note on use, since this page recommends him as a source.
Lees was well informed, technically competent and openly partisan. He knew his subjects personally, which is what makes the reportage valuable and what makes the assessments unreliable as neutral judgement. When he says an arranger voiced a passage a particular way, he is a good witness. When he says an arranger was underrated, he is making an argument, usually a persuasive one and sometimes a tendentious one, and he is not pretending otherwise.
The most useful thing about him is also the thing to watch: he had a thesis about arrangers being neglected, and he was right about it, and a writer who is right about his thesis will still select evidence for it. The practical approach is to take his facts and test his judgements. Where he reports what a musician told him about a session, treat it as testimony from a competent witness. Where he ranks one arranger above another, note that he is arguing a case he had been making for thirty years.
The access problem
The Jazzletter is where much of the arranger writing is, and it is the hardest of his work to reach.
A self-published subscription newsletter is distributed to subscribers. It is not systematically deposited in copyright libraries, not indexed like a periodical, and not reissued by a publisher with a commercial interest in keeping it available. Access therefore depends on institutional archives that happened to subscribe and on private collections.
For anyone researching mid-century arrangers, including the British figures covered elsewhere on this site, that gap is a practical obstacle rather than an academic one. A substantial body of the best first-hand writing on the subject exists and is difficult to consult, and no amount of secondary citation substitutes for it.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Gene Lees?
A Canadian writer, critic and lyricist, born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1928 and resident in the United States for most of his career. Gene Lees edited the American jazz magazine DownBeat at the start of the 1960s, wrote English lyrics that jazz singers still perform, published books on jazz musicians, and produced a subscription newsletter for nearly thirty years. He died in California in 2010.
What songs did Gene Lees write lyrics for?
His best-known English lyrics are for Brazilian songs by Antônio Carlos Jobim, including the version of “Corcovado” sung as “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars”. He also wrote the lyric to Bill Evans's “Waltz for Debby”, which is how a jazz piano piece became a song. These are performed continuously by singers who often do not know the lyricist's name.
Why does Gene Lees matter to light music?
Because he wrote about arrangers as significant artists when almost nobody else did. Jazz criticism of the period concentrated on soloists and on the avant-garde, and the people who scored records for orchestras were treated as tradesmen. Lees profiled them at length and argued for their importance, and Robert Farnon was among the figures he championed.
What was the Jazzletter?
A subscription newsletter he wrote and published from the early 1980s until near the end of his life, sold directly to readers rather than through a publisher. It let him write at whatever length a subject needed, with no advertiser and no editor, and it became the venue for his most substantial work. Back issues are the principal source for his later criticism.
Was he a musician himself?
He was musically trained and wrote songs, which distinguishes him from most critics of his generation, and it is visible in the writing. He could describe what an arranger had actually done to a chord voicing rather than resorting to atmosphere, and musicians noticed. That competence is the reason his profiles of arrangers carry weight that admiring journalism does not.
What did he edit?
DownBeat, the American jazz magazine, in 1959 to 1961. It was the most influential jazz publication of the period and the editorship placed him at the centre of American jazz journalism in his early thirties. The tenure was short, and the independent work that followed it was where he did the writing he is remembered for.
Which books did he write?
A body of books on jazz and popular music, including profiles of arrangers and orchestrators, a study of Oscar Peterson, a memoir-shaped account of the New York musicians' world, and a book confronting race in jazz that was argued about on publication. The arranger profiles are the ones most often consulted by people researching this repertoire, because comparable material barely exists.
Did he write about Robert Farnon?
Yes, and he was among Farnon's most articulate advocates outside Britain. That advocacy matters because Farnon's standing was always higher among working arrangers than in print, and Lees was one of the few writers with both the technical vocabulary and the platform to make the case publicly. The relationship is the reason a jazz critic appears in a reference work on British light music.
How reliable is he as a source?
Well informed and openly partisan, which is a usable combination if you know it. He knew his subjects personally, had strong views and did not disguise them, and wrote polemic as readily as reportage. On matters of technical fact and first-hand recollection he is valuable. On assessments of reputation he is an advocate, and should be read as one.
Where can his writing be found?
The books are in print or findable secondhand. The Jazzletter, being a self-published subscription newsletter, is harder: it was distributed to subscribers rather than deposited systematically, and access depends on archives and on private collections. That is a real gap, because the newsletter contains a great deal of his best work on arrangers and much of it is not reproduced elsewhere.
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