JEANNE LEE’S TOTAL ENVIRONMENT

Jeanne Lee ’61, Amsterdam, Netherlands, October, 1984, photo by Frans Schellekens/Getty Images

Interviewing singer Jeanne Lee ’61 in 1979, critic Roger Riggins suggests that she seems to use her voice—“one of the most original voices that jazz has produced”—as a kind of organic “instrument.” At this point in her career, Lee was already known, to those in the know, not only for her ability to utterly transform a standard (including those she and Ran Blake ’60 recorded on their 1962 album, The Newest Sound Around) but also for her work in freejazz ensembles, where she pushed nonverbal vocal improvisation beyond established forms of scat singing and into a stunning range of tonal, percussive, and textural effects.

So Riggins’s comparison of voice to instrument is intuitive. But in response, Lee hedges, reflects. She agrees that she has learned some of her most important lessons from instrumentalists: “[Thelonious] Monk’s sense of timing, for example, is like a whole world of knowledge in itself.” At the same time, she suggests that the comparison risks deflecting from the question of “what the voice is in itself.” And part of Lee’s answer is that the act of singing entails unique forms of circulation between body and world, artist and audience: “I look at myself as already an environment, the environment is there and it comes through me in sound,” she says. “In turn the music is created as a total environment to the audience.”

Lee’s wide-ranging career makes it difficult to situate a statement like this within any single artistic or intellectual tradition. Over four prolific decades as a singer, composer, writer, and teacher, she collaborated with Bay Area sound poets; with Black Arts Movement writers and musicians; with Fluxus artists; with everyone from Archie Shepp to Pauline Oliveros, Bobby McFerrin to Ntozake Shange.

Yet her idea of the “total environment” of musical experience does reprise some elements of one specific source: Lee’s own Senior Project in psychology. “The Influence of the Mother-Child Relationship on the Early Social Behavior of the Child” argues for the developmental benefits of a fine-tuned reciprocity between individual and social environment. (Historians of psychology may hear the midcentury influence of Kurt Lewin’s field theory of socialization.) In the project’s opening lines, Lee describes the “give-and-take relationship” between a “socialized being” and “environmental forces.” The “integrated” personality takes in the “mores and ideas” of a social environment and then, Lee writes—in a description of “expressive behavior” that never mentions music but that will echo strongly in her later reflections on the voice—“return[s] them in their ‘person-integrated’ form.”

This connection (and others like it) between Lee’s early studies and her later career provided a point of departure for a Fall 2021 class in Bard’s Literature Program. Titled Jeanne Lee’s Total Environment, the class took her multidisciplinary approach to music as a portal into larger artistic, intellectual, literary, and social histories. Some parts of the story of Lee’s career had to be built from the ground up; she is an iconic figure in some circles, but there’s no definitive biography to rely on. So students scoured liner notes, reviewed old course catalogs, read archived student newspapers, and interviewed Bard alumni/ae and others who could shed light on Lee’s life and music. Jess Belardi ’22 and Zoe Stojkovic ’23, for instance, spoke with Erica Lindsay, artist in residence in Bard’s Music Program, who noted that Lee “stuck to her authentic voice, and played with musicians who were more open and not as commercialized”—perhaps leading to fewer opportunities for a broad audience during her lifetime. “I really hope that people find out about her more.” To that end, students produced a show dedicated to Lee’s music that aired in November 2021 on WGXC (the community radio station based in Greene and Columbia counties, part of the Wave Farm arts organization codirected by Galen Joseph- Hunter ’96 and Tom Roe).

Gunther Hampel, Jeanne Lee ’61 (and her son Rumi), and Galaxie Dream Band, Livorno, Italy, Summer 1976, photo by Enrico Romero

A formative element of Lee’s college years was her friendship and collaboration with pianist Blake. Now chair emeritus of the New England Conservatory’s Department of Contemporary Improvisation (called Third Stream when he and Gunther Schuller founded it in 1972), he spoke with the class in November 2021 over Zoom. The late 1950s were a dynamic time for jazz at Bard; in 1958 Blake initiated a “jazz lab” that met in Kappa House, then a campus social club, offering free music lessons not only to Bard students—Guy Ducornet ’60 played alto saxophone with the ensemble—but also to community members from Red Hook, Rhinebeck, Tivoli, and the Ward Manor retirement community. At the 1959 Bard Jazz Festival, Blake and Lee performed separately. He played with a quartet, while she was accompanied by Martin Siegel ’61—receiving “thunderous applause,” Ducornet wrote in his memoir Annandale Blues: A Journey in Ralph Ellison’s America (2012). Soon after graduating, though, Blake and Lee came together in 1961 in a series of appearances at the Apollo Theater that would turn out to be pivotal. Lee’s daughter Cavana Hazelton related the story to Kevin Cohen ’22 and Elizabeth DeGeorge ’22: at Bard, her mother had still felt “ambivalent about whether she was going to commit to a career as a singer”—but this ambivalence faded after she and Blake took first place at the Apollo’s storied Amateur Night several weeks in a row.

Shortly thereafter, RCA released The Newest Sound Around, and some tour dates would follow. But the audiences were much more enthusiastic in Europe than in the United States, and the album, however revered now, did not immediately launch anybody’s career. In the mid-1960s, Lee moved to California with her first husband, the sound poet D. R. Hazelton. While performing in San Francisco jazz clubs—with a recurring Monday night spot at the Jazz Workshop that earned her a glowing profile in the Oakland Tribune—she also immersed herself in the Berkeley poetry and performing arts scene, staging experimental readings and concerts at the short-lived Open Theater while helping Hazelton edit the magazine Synapse, which published poets including Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, and Jackson Mac Low. Around this time her sense of singing as a fundamentally poetic practice seems to have crystallized. “Poetry was very dear to her,” recalled bassist William Parker (interviewed by Aleda Rosenblum Katz ’24 and Ethan Haapala ’23), her close friend since the early 1970s; central to her experiments with vocalization was “the idea that a word is a word but also a sound, and it has a meaning but it also has a musical tone to it.”

In the short essays she submitted when applying to moderate in 1958, Lee remarks that literature and psychology are closer than often assumed: “One seeks to translate people into terms of ideas and ideals. The other deals with the people as immediate substance.” She also mentions that her plans had originally included teaching. “I am still considering working with children,” she writes, “but I see a larger realm of possibilities in connection with them.” She kept these possibilities alive, and not only in the singing lessons that Parker remembers her offering out of an East Village apartment (shared with her second husband and frequent musical collaborator, Gunter Hampel). In the early 1970s, she earned a master’s degree in education at New York University. And in 1985 she reached out to Richard Lewis ’58, founder and director of Touchstone Center for Children.

They had crossed paths at Bard, perhaps through the Dance Program, where Lee took several courses and where Lewis—as he recalled when interviewed by Leëta Damon ’24 and Bennett Wood ’23—accompanied classes on piano. A quarter century later Lee got back in touch, proposing to introduce a program for elementary students that incorporated poetry, music, and improvisatory play. It was a perfect fit for the arts-based pedagogy that Lewis was developing at the Touchstone Center, in partnership at that time with the Henry Street Settlement. When Lee began working with students at PS 110 on the Lower East Side, she immediately “got everybody out of their seats and they started moving . . . You think, well, what’s so great about it?

But we have to remember the life of a public school. You didn’t have the opportunity of standing up and just moving.” From there, Lee would bring the students into drumming, chanting, writing, dancing, and drawing, creating what Lewis called an “entry point into a multi-dexterous expressive world.”

When Lee died of breast cancer in 2000 at 61, she was, in some ways, “just beginning to move forward,” Parker reflected. Her recordings with pianist Mal Waldron in the 1990s were pushing into new territory, and she had just published a book: a history of jazz written for young readers. Titled Jam! The Story of Jazz Music, it includes an eight-word author’s bio that is both perfectly simple and, knowing her work, the furthest thing from it: “Jeanne Lee is a jazz singer and poet.”

—Alex Benson, assistant professor of literature at Bard College

The Newest Sound You Never Heard by Jeanne Lee ’61 and Ran Blake ’60

Moving between free jazz, standards, and even pop, Lee and Blake inject a freshness into classic jazz compositions like Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” and revisit the popular songs that soundtracked the ’60s as well. With tracks like ”A Hard Day’s Night” and “Mister Tambourine Man,” Lee and Blake interrupt the familiarity of these well-known songs, offering a new and adventurous perspective on musical traditions. The songs on The Newest Sound You Never Heard were recorded on tours in Belgium in 1966 and ’67, and only discovered in 2019 in the archive of a Belgian broadcasting studio. Lee passed away in 2000 (Blake still performs), but the force of their musical collaboration endures. Blake’s piano, playful and taunting at times, operates as a partner and provocateur to Lee’s voice; she never shies from its tone but builds on it and leans into it. Though Lee was not formally trained, she learned to wield the power of low notes early on, as you can hear in The Newest Sound Around, the album Lee and Blake released in 1962 after they won the Amateur Night at the Apollo contest. In the following years, Lee collaborated with West Coast avant-garde artists before reconvening with Blake in 1966 to play in Europe. By then, the pair had gained a more expansive skill set, and the musical connection had deepened, leading to the creative masterpiece that is The Newest Sound You Never Heard. More than a half century later, it’s still new, and you still have got to hear it.

—Miranda Reale ’20