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Gordon Lee

Gordon Lee is a composer, jazz pianist, arranger, conductor and music educator. Although he is best known for his jazz performances and compositions, Lee is active in many styles of music. He has had commissions to compose chamber music and music for large ensembles from Oregon Symphony members, the Amadei String Quartet, big bands, and vocalists including a collaboration with Ghanaian singer Obo Addy on an orchestral suite in 2004. He taught improvisation, theory and jazz history at Western Oregon University from 1999 to 2019 and was Executive Director of the award winning W.O.U./Mel Brown Summer Jazz Camp. He conducted the jazz ensembles at Reed College from 2009 to 2017. 

After a degree in music at Indiana University, Lee moved to Portland, Oregon in 1977 and began playing with one of the originators of jazz-rock fusion, Native American saxophonist and song writer Jim Pepper. This association lasted until Pepper’s death in 1992. Lee has organized and presented many Pepper memorial concerts since then, including at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. in 2007. 

In 1980 Lee moved to New York City and worked as a jazz pianist. He was one of the house pianists at 1/5 Avenue from 1981-1984. He performed with such jazz and pop stars as Don Cherry, Bill Frisell, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, and the Temptations. The roster of great musicians Lee has worked with are Benny Golson, Bobby Hutcherson, Dewey Redman, Houston Person, Lew Solof, Frank Foster, Joe Lovano, Javon Jackson & Richie Cole .

In 1985 Lee returned to Portland, Oregon. He began playing with drummer Mel Brown in 1986, a musical relationship that continued for over 20 years, playing every Tuesday night at Jimmy Mak’s jazz club in Portland. In 1989 the Mel Brown Sextet, playing Lee’s compositions and arrangements, won the international Hennessy Jazz Search beating out over 700 bands from around the world. The next year Lee’s cd “Gordon Bleu” won Best Jazz Recording of 1990 from the Northwest Music Association. Lee has other cd’s since then: “Land Whales in New York” featuring Jim Pepper, 1991; “On the Shoulders of Giants” with Leroy Vinnegar and Dick Berk in 1993; and “Rough Jazz” with John Gross and Alan Jones 1997. His 2004 album, "Flying Dream”, featuring Lee’s music and an all star big band, “This Path” a trio album from 2010 and “Tuesday Night” with the Mel Brown Septet in 2014 are on the Origin Arts label. “One, two, three” and “Rough Jazz Live at Jimmy Mak’s” are on the Diatic Records label

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21
Album Review

Gordon Lee: How Can It Be?

Read "How Can It Be?" reviewed 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.

3
Album Review

Gordon Lee: How Can It Be?

Read "How Can It Be?" reviewed 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? ...

5
Album Review

Gordon Lee with the Mel Brown Septet: Tuesday Night

Read "Tuesday Night" reviewed 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 ...

180
Album Review

Gordon Lee and the GLeeful Big Band: Flying Dream

Read "Flying Dream" reviewed 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 ...

97
Album Review

Gordon Lee and the Gleeful Big Band: Flying Dream

Read "Flying Dream" reviewed 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.

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1

Recording

Pianist Gordon Lee Finds Space For Self-expression In Dark Places On 'How Can It Be?,' Arriving June 16 On PJCE Records

Pianist Gordon Lee Finds Space For Self-expression In Dark Places On 'How Can It Be?,' Arriving June 16 On PJCE Records

Source: Terri Hinte Publicity

Deep catharsis is the order of the day on How Can It Be?, the seventh album by pianist and composer Gordon Lee, set to drop June 16 on PJCE Records. Written during the COVID-19 pandemic, the album’s nine originals—performed by the jny: Portland, Oregon-based Lee and his quartet with tenor saxophonist Renato Caranto, bassist Dennis Caiazza, and drummer Gary Hobbs—reflect the leader’s urgent need to express powerful emotions at a time when musical performance was limited at best. In addition ...

“Lee unravels a series of original melodies that are insinuating or soulful or both”

—Jazz Times

“Pianist Gordon Lee’s solos are often vast feats of architecture, their immense proportions looming up with great suddenness…symphonic precision as well as spontaneous improvisation”

—Jazz Society of Oregon

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

How Can It Be?

PJCE Records
2023

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The Remainder

PJCE Records
2023

buy

Tuesday Night

OA2 Records
2014

buy

This Path

OA2 Records
2010

buy

Flying Dream

OA2 Records
2004

buy

Low Profile

From: Tuesday Night
By Gordon Lee

This Path

From: This Path
By Gordon Lee

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