Basic Facts
Born: January 29, 1939, New York City
Died: October 25, 2000, Tijuana, Mexico
Type of Performer: Vocalist
Genre: Jazz
About Jeanne Lee
Born in New York, Jeanne Lee attended Bard College to study child psychology and modern dance. She went on to receive her Master's degree in Education from New York University, with assistance from a Martin Luther King Fellowship for Urban Studies. For her Master's program, she developed an education curriculum that focused on using music and dance in the classroom combined with academic subjects.
One of her most famous albums came as the result of a duet with Bard College classmate and pianist Ran Blake. In 1961, the pair competed in the Apollo Theater's Amateur Night contest. The album that resulted was called The Newest Sound Around (later reissued as The Legendary Duets) and has remained a cult favorite. She gradually became more involved in the avant-garde movement in jazz throughout the 1960s. In the mid 1960s, she was invited by experimental composer John Cage to be one of four vocal soloists for his bicentennial work "Renga and Apartment Building 1776." She married the vibraphonist and composer Gunter Hampel in 1967 and the two of them explored different jazz-related forms and recorded over twenty albums together by the 1980s.
In 1976, inspired by her work with other contemporary composers, she won a National Endowment for the Arts Grant to fund her adaptation of a 13th century Persian poem into a two act jazz oratorio called "Prayer For Our Time." She also later won a Diapson D'Or Award for her 1994 album After Hours, and her performance of "Don't Worry Now, Worry Later" was included on the Smithsonian's GRAMMY-nominated jazz anthology The Jazz Singers 1919-1994. She died of cancer in 2000.
Listen
"Night In Tunisia," from The Newest Sound You Never Heard (released 2019, recordings made 1966-1967)
"All About Ronnie," live in Antibes, 1963
"Caravan," from After Hours (1994)
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