Home » Jazz Articles » Gordon Lee
Jazz Articles about Gordon Lee
Gordon Lee: How Can It Be?
by Jack Bowers
Oregon-based pianist Gordon Lee leads a trim quartet through its paces on his seventh album, How Can It Be?, written for the most part during the Covid pandemic and recorded shortly afterward, in October 2022. Before recording, Lee had worked often with tenor saxophonist Renato Caranto and bassist Dennis Caiazza. Drummer Gary Hobbs, “imported" from Washington state to replace the late Carlton Jackson, to whom the album is dedicated, proves a splendid complement to the group.
read moreGordon Lee: How Can It Be?
by Dan McClenaghan
For a couple of years the Covid virus did its damnedest to shut the music down, especially the experience of live shows. During that downtime, pianist, composer & bandleader Gordon Lee put his idled hands to work practicing and composing new music. At his wife's urging, he also began a series of front porch concerts, casual shows for his neighbors and anybody else who happened to wander by. These quartet sessions were the impetus for Lee's How Can It Be? ...
read moreGordon Lee with the Mel Brown Septet: Tuesday Night
by Jack Bowers
For more than sixteen years, jazz fans in and around Portland, Oregon, have had the pleasure of seeing and hearing drummer Mel Brown's hard-blowing Jazz Messengers-style septet each Tuesday Night at Jimmy Mak's nightclub. Among its mainstays is pianist Gordon Lee who has been writing and arranging for the group almost since he enlisted shortly afterward and in fact much earlier, as the then-sextet recorded an album of his music, Gordon Bleu, in the late 1980s, a brief time before ...
read moreGordon Lee and the GLeeful Big Band: Flying Dream
by Jack Bowers
We’re not told much about Gordon Lee except that he’s a Portland, Oregon-based music educator who has performed and recorded with a number of small groups and has been writing big-band charts for eight years. His influences, he writes in the brief liner notes, range from Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Maria Schneider to Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky, and the imprint of one or more of them is visible from time to time in each ...
read moreGordon Lee and the Gleeful Big Band: Flying Dream
by Dan McClenaghan
With big bands, it's all about the arrangements. Those charts have to have that spark, as well as a depth and complexity. Then the solo slots--those punctuating flights of improvisation--have to soar, of course. They do here; they almost always do at this top level of musicianship; but it's the textures, the layerings, the eyebrow-raising counterpoints that make the set.Gordon Lee and the Gleeful Big Band's Flying Dream bubbles over the top of the pot with superb arrangements.
read more
Giveaway
Days remaining: 11
