Gene Lees Jazz Historian and Critic Dies

Gene Lees, a jazz historian and critic known for his pugnacious, highly personal essays and biographies of such jazz greats as Oscar Peterson, Woody Herman and Johnny Mercer, died Thursday at his home in Ojai. He was 82.

Lees had struggled for many years with heart disease, said family friend Leslie A. Westbrook.

A Canadian by birth who moved to Ojai more than 30 years ago, Lees was also a lyricist and composer who wrote the words for a number of classics, including the English lyrics for Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim's “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars." As a collaborator, Lees also wrote “Waltz for Debby" with pianist Bill Evans and “The Right to Love" with composer Lalo Schifrin.

Lees also had the distinction of collaborating with a pope: He translated poems written by Pope John Paul II when the latter was a Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla. The result was a cycle of songs recorded in 1985 called “One World, One Peace." Sarah Vaughan was the vocalist.

A former editor of Downbeat, the influential jazz magazine, Lees was most prolific as a critic and historian, writing essays on jazz and other topics for the Gene Lees Jazzletter, a private monthly newsletter he founded in 1981 that had more than 1,000 subscribers, including many musicians.

Former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb, who excerpted two Lees pieces in his 1996 anthology “Reading Jazz," described Lees as “a strong presence in jazz" who was “equally fierce as advocate and enemy outspoken, passionate, even polemical."

Gottlieb said Lees was “at his formidable best" in the appreciations he wrote on musicians he knew intimately, such as Evans, the influential pianist whose heroin habit contributed to an early death in 1980 at 51. Lees, as critic Nat Hentoff once wrote, was “one of the relatively few chroniclers left who has known the musicians he writes about long and well."

Among Lees' 18 books are “The Modern Rhyming Dictionary: How to Write Lyrics" (1981), “Oscar Peterson: The Will to Swing" ( 1988), “Waiting for Dizzy" (1991), “Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White" (1994), “Leader of the Band: The Life of Woody Herman" (1995) and “You Can't Steal a Gift: Dizzy, Clark, Milt and Nat" (2001). He recently completed a biography of band leader Artie Shaw.

Eugene Frederick John “Gene" Lees was born Feb. 8, 1928, in Hamilton, Canada. He attended Ontario College of Art in Toronto and from 1948 to 1955 worked as a journalist at several Canadian newspapers.