RIPMJAZZ
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Gene Lees Jazzletter

As made clear in the title, Gene Lees Jazzletter was the product of the jazz writer and critic Gene Lees (1928-2010). Born Frederick Eugene John Lees in Hamilton, Ontario (Canada), he began his career in the 1950s writing in Canadian newspapers before becoming editor of Down Beat from 1959 to 1961. In the 1960s he was the English-language lyricist for many Brazilian bossa nova songs and worked as a freelance writer for various hi-fi magazines; in the 1970s he pursued recording and broadcasting in Canada before moving to Ojai, California.

Lees began publishing his Jazzletter on the urging of musician friends and his readers in High Fidelity magazine. Lees provided a critique of the jazz and music press in 1981 as being too dependent on advertising and the music trades, including stereo equipment, instrument sales, and record labels. Lees focused directly on music and musicians, in engaging and readable prose, presented in a spare, advertising-free format. Each monthly issue ranged between four and eight pages and Lees was the author of the vast majority of the content, with occasional contributions from Grover Sales, Michael Zwerin, Steve Allen, Bobby Scott, Phil Woods, Judith Schlesinger, and more. Many of Lees’s articles were serialized and formed the basis of later published books, including biographies of Johnny Mercer, Oscar Peterson, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and Woody Herman. Many of the articles involve personal histories, reflections, and have a feuilleton-like quality: the reflections of a jazz lover with a long, personal history of musicians, performances, venues, and more. Lees’s writing was well-sourced, frequently threading in references to articles, books, discussion, and recordings, always with an easy, lyrical flow and a cantankerous edge against that which he disliked. 

The Jazzletter ceased with Lees’s illness and passing. As Lees recounted in the New York Times, “The beauty of this thing [the Jazzletter] … is that it has permitted me to write what I want to write, not what editors want me to write. And the beauty of it for the other contributors is that they’ve got total freedom. No money, but total freedom.”

“[Gene] Lees founded his Jazzletter in 1981. He has written, edited, and published it with the rigor of an old fashioned-managing editor who enforces high standards of accuracy, clarity and fairness—he once threw out one of his own pieces at press time on grounds of lack of objectivity—and with the passion of an editorial page editor who cares about his community.”

Doug Ramsey, Singers and the Song II by Gene Lees,
Foreword to the Second Edition (1999)