In the Key of Gordon Lee

February 1, 2012

By Claire Sykes

The first piano in my life was a huge, old, olive-green-painted upright that ruled the living room in my childhood home in Columbus, Ohio. I remember the way my mother played it: a two-beat bass (single low tone and upper third) from any keys that her left hand happened to land on; and her right hand stretched thumb to pinky in octaves belting out songs like “Oh! Susanna” and “The Erie Canal.”

Every so often, she’d roll the piano away from the wall and ask me to clear out whatever had fallen off the top or gotten shoved underneath. There, like treasure-hunt fortunes, I’d discover crayons and coloring books, the doll I thought was gone forever, stuffed animals and socks, my brother’s toy cap pistol, all smothered in balls of dust. Behind this booming, resonant beast that played some of my mother’s happiest moments lay a whole world in itself, as rich as the one I’d create when I sat by myself at the piano.

Before I knew how to read or write, I’d gather up storm clouds in the low notes and rumble them into thunder, lightning slashing and rains pelting at the other end of the keyboard. Or, sometimes, a little four-year-old girl just like me skipped up the black keys through the forest, birds trilling from my hands as I narrated. It was talent enough for my mother to send me to Miss Volp down the street, who showed me Middle C and slapped my knuckles when I forgot to curve my fingers. I told fewer and fewer stories the more I practiced my scales and “Cubby Goes to Town.”

Who knows whatever happened to that green piano. But the stories remained. I’d hear them in my parents’ Peter, Paul and Mary albums; in the Bach organ preludes from my teenage headphones; at high school dances and college rock concerts; in symphony halls and smoky bars; and in the free-form piano improvisations I’ve scribbled out, in between my Mozart sonatas and Chopin nocturnes.

Then there’s the jazz of pianist/composer/arranger Gordon Lee—the haunting melody that rides the rocking chords of his original “Loss is Freedom,” the impressionist accents in his arrangement of Chinese folk songs, and his unexpected take on “Someone to Watch Over Me.” As he says of his newest jazz-piano compositions, in the liner notes of This Path (OA2 Records, 2010), the latest of his seven CDs and among 15 on which he appears, “The melodies are personalities, characters in a story, the harmony is the plot and the groove is the setting or time line.”

Whether solo or with an ensemble, from my stereo or live, Gordon easily pulls me into a storied universe of the visual and the emotional. When I listen to his music, I can’t help but see pictures—abstract and illustrative, symbolic and epic—as films and sketches and photo-album snapshots. I sigh, call out, feel so happy and sometimes even cry. When I listen to his music, I want to play the piano even more.

I try to imagine the first time Gordon ever put his hands on a keyboard. What melodies and rhythms? By then, at age 14, he’d been playing rock ‘n’ roll drums in a garage band for a couple of years and, soon, double bass in high school. A more serious look at music had him eyeing the piano.

Gordon Lee, circa 1987

Born in 1953 in New York City and raised just north of it, in Westchester County, he’s lived in Portland, Oregon since 1977, except for a five-year return in 1980 to his hometown. As a 24-year-old newcomer to Portland, Gordon began performing around North America and Europe with Native American saxophonist, songwriter and jazz-rock fusion innovator Jim Pepper. Over the years, he’s played with famous jazz artists such as cornetist Don Cherry, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Leroy Vinnegar; plus major pop groups Gladys Knight and the Pips and The Temptations.

Bassist Leroy Vinnegar, Gordon Lee, drummer Dick Berk and saxophonist Warren Rand, 1992 (Photo and copyright by Hiroshi Iwaya)

In 1986, he joined the band of Portland jazz drummer Mel Brown, also a veteran of the Motown sound, and a few years later The Mel Brown Sextet was performing Gordon’s pieces and arrangements, which won the group the prestigious Hennessy Cognac International Jazz Search award in 1989, beating 700 other bands from around the world. Since then, Gordon has been playing with The Mel Brown Septet every week at Jimmy Mak’s here in town.

The Mel Brown Septet at Jimmy Mak's (Photo courtesy of www.jazzpdx.com)

If a weekly dose of Gordon isn’t enough for you, every month here in Portland his Gordon Lee Trio, with Phil Baker on bass and Ron Steen on drums, sounds it out at Arrivederci; and his trio with drummer Dick Berk and bassist Dan Schulte heats it up at Wilf’s.

Gordon puts his talent on the page with his compositions and arranged works for symphonies and string quartets, choruses and other vocalists, piano solos and duos, small jazz ensembles and big-band groups. He teaches jazz studies at Western Oregon University (“a funny dude who really knows his stuff,” posts one student) and since 1989 has participated in the state’s Art-in-the-Schools program. From clubs and concert halls all over the world to living rooms and classrooms here in Portland and the region, Gordon has made his musical mark as one of the most well-known and respected jazz artists in the Pacific Northwest. In a part of the country that for decades has been celebrated as home to a host of jazz greats, clearly Gordon is one of them.

Gordon playing at my home, as part of my Velvet Sofa Salon series, 1/21/12 (Photo and copyright by Edmund P. Klein)

Claire Sykes: How does the piano best speak the language of jazz for you?

Gordon Lee: It’s a percussion instrument, so it’s rhythmic, of course. But more than any other instrument, the piano is melodic and can play extremely complex harmonies. There’s no other instrument that you can get so many different notes from.

CS: I’ve read that your father was a musician, and that as a child you suffered from insomnia and spent nights listening to New York City AM radio, and that’s what got you into music. How did you come to the piano, and to jazz?

GL: I started with drums, playing in a garage rock ‘n’ roll band at 12. Then, everyone told me if you really want to know music, you have to learn the piano. By age 14, I took that up, and six months later had my first professional performance at a high school dance, playing The Rolling Stones, The Animals and three-chord blues. That’s pretty late if you’re wanting to be a professional pianist, but I didn’t think I would be, even at age 21. At that time, I was into conducting. But I also started hanging out and playing with jazz musicians, and fairly quickly was playing gigs.

Portrait of the artist as a young man

CS: What jazz artists and other musicians have influenced your original compositions and improvisations over the years?

GL: McCoy Tyner is a pretty obvious influence on my playing. People have hired me because of my ability to pick up some of his sounds. I was listening to Thelonius Monk and Art Tatum years before I was a jazz piano player. Eventually, I discovered Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans. Those are some of the main jazz pianists you can hear in my music.

CS: You’ve played with many jazz greats. Who would you say have influenced you the most?

GL: From 1977 to 1992, when he died, I traveled around North America and Europe with Jim Pepper, who introduced me to some of the big musicians in New York and LA. Jim was a huge influence for me. He brought the American Indian sound into jazz music, and that’s where I first got the idea to incorporate an ethnic component in with my jazz. Pepper is a bizarre combination of traditional Indian; and rhythm and blues, avant-garde jazz, and even country western. He wasn’t at all self-conscious in combining all those things together. It wasn’t out of character for him to play a simple pentatonic melody one second and a screech and roar from his sax the next, in a natural transition. And I liked that. It was pretty inspiring to me.

(Photo and copyright by Ron Schwerin, courtesy of www.jimpepperlives.wordpress.com)

Mel Brown was another. He has kept me consistently working for over 26 years, playing every week. We have a huge repertoire, over 200 pieces, of bop and post-bop-period songs. I have most of them memorized. Mel wants them played in the style in which they were created, so we “speak” bebop. We also play quite a few of my own compositions.

Mel Brown (Photo courtesy of www.saphurecords.com)

CS: I hear so many styles in your playing, as you draw from your many influences. Tell me about that.

GL: I’ve played a lot of different ways with different people, and everybody has a different style. I think it’s important for jazz musicians to change the way they play, depending on who they’re playing with. If it’s just me and a singer or a sax, I’m going to be doing different things with my hands than when I play with a drummer and bass player. I accommodate and change in relation to who’s there with me.

CS: Would you say you have a signature style?

GL: I hope so. It’s impossible for anyone to hear themselves completely objectively. I think I’m getting there, or I have a certain sound, whatever that is, that’s my voice. I’ve been working at that for a long time.

CS: I hear a European classical sensibility in your compositions, improvisations and arrangements; and some sound impressionistic, like Debussy. You tend toward complex and unexpected melodies, harmonies and rhythms—many of them carrying that ethnic flavor you were talking about earlier. There’s both a congruence and contradiction in what you do; you don’t go off the edge exploding into some kind of Cecil Tayloresque rant, but you don’t stay in any safe, predictable zone either.

GL: Certainly Debussy is a huge influence for me. I’ve always loved his music. Sometimes I’m playing my own music and it sounds impressionistic, particularly in some of the solo-piano pieces I do. I’m aware of that. I might even be consciously going for it sometimes. But how can you improvise on the whole-tone scale and not sound like Debussy? You can also sound like Monk. I’m somewhere in between.

For many years, I focused more on classical piano than jazz. I’ve spent thousands of hours on Chopin and Bach, and keep coming back to them and other classical composers, because I love that music. Practicing it teaches my hands to do what the music tells them to do. The notes are very specific, and that’s the challenge. At the same time, I can better hear and understand the music of Bach, Debussy, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Scriabin, Chopin, [György] Ligeti and others, having listened to, studied and played jazz. Because I know Hoagie Carmichael’s “Stardust Melodies,” I can understand a Bach fugue even better: Functional harmony is a system of predictable chords that has been developed for centuries, going back long before Bach and continuing with jazz compositions.

CS: Along with these classical influences, you mentioned Jim Pepper and the Native American tonalities and rhythms in some of your compositions. What other ethnicities find their way into your hands?

GL: I recorded a couple of Chinese folk songs that I reharmonized, after my 2007 trip to China. I was invited there as a performer and lecturer by Anshan Normal University. I performed in Anshan and Beijing. The original Chinese folk songs have only one to two chords, and I added chords, which is a modern-jazz thing to do. No one from China has complained to me yet!

I’ve played quite a few Brazilian songs, and incorporated some of the Brazilian grooves into my own compositions. In 2005, I orchestrated Ghanain drummer Obo Addy’s symphonic concerto, “Cry of Our Mothers” for singer, Shanaian drummers, orchestra and chorus. It’s been performed numerous times around the country. And recently, I reharmonized a Siberian waltz—same melody, but the chords of the harmony are different—that was played by [Portland State University music professor] Darrel Grant in Khabarovsk, Siberia in December 2011.

Obo Addy (Photo courtesy of www.newworlddrumming.com)

CS: What does it feel like to be able to play as creatively, as remarkably, as you do?

GL: When I feel I’m playing really well—and this is a common response that a lot of artists give, but I actually feel this—I feel that I’m a vessel for ideas that I don’t know where they’re coming from, in my mind or outside of me. But there are these ideas and they’re passing through me, and I’m the translator of them. When this happens, I feel I’m really inspired. But inspiration for me isn’t something I can summon up whenever I want it. That’s why I think about the actual songs I play, the repertoire, are very important. Each song brings out a certain mood that helps me get into a certain frame of mind, a space, and all of a sudden, I’ll have a bunch of ideas of what to play and just how to direct the energy.

CS: It must be a blast.

GL: It’s also very nerve-racking. There are times I’m hitting so many bad notes. I don’t know why that is, but I’m trying to curve it around and get it under control. It’s worse some times more than others. Of course, the worst is to lose concentration during a performance for a measure or two, knowing some guys in the band heard that, or even worse, that the audience did.

CS: Why would that lack of concentration happen?

GL: Probably lack of self-discipline or getting nervous, stage fright, or a bad sound system can cause it. As jazz musicians, we’re not reading everything on the page; we’re usually playing off the groove, so it takes really listening and trying to get back to it. It happens to everybody who improvises; they have to hear their way back. It happens to me a lot less than it used to. But there’s nothing like those embarrassing moments in show business. These moments are educational, but they may not sound very good!

CS: Would we even notice?

GL: I don’t know. Hopefully not. I teach this to my improv students, the reason why you never hear great jazz musicians make a mistake is because they don’t let the mistake stop their flow of ideas, their concentration. And the first thing they don’t do is curse themselves, because it puts negative energy in, condemning their stupidity, which only interferes further with concentration.

CS: While you’re playing a gig, how much of your music is your own compositions and how much is it you improvising?

GL: In jazz, there’s always a bit of both. I’m really trying to mix it up, improvisation and original composition within each piece, unless I’m commissioned to write or arrange something for someone. So it’s maybe hard for the listener to tell. I’ve been working on this combination, though, in different ways for a long time. I’ve written a jazz sonata for clarinet and piano, and it’s got a lot of written parts to it. You could remove all the improvisations and still have a complete sonata, but if you call it a jazz piece, you’d have to have the improvisation.

CS: How is your music changing?

GL: I want to find a new sound and style that pay homage to the past, but don’t imitate the past. I think my influences are obvious, but I hope I don’t sound like one person, specifically. For instance, you may say I remind you of Debussy or McCoy Tyner, yet I don’t sound exactly like them.

One thing I’ve been focusing on in the last year or so is pianistic, more of a two-handed style. There’s a lot of jazz where the right hand is improvising the melody and the left hand plays predictable chord progression, which is a typical one in jazz and blues piano style. But usually in that style, you’re not mixing the two hands together. It’s usually right hand melody, left hand chords, like most classical piano music. And I do a lot of that, but I don’t want that to be a habit for me. I’m trying to integrate it so the left hand is improvising as much as the right. Sometimes that means doubling the melody, in octaves, but also it could be rhythmic, mixing up the two hands. But either way, you’ve got to have a strong left hand.

CS: As your own music progresses, where do you see jazz, in general, headed? What’s going to happen with it?

GL: It’s hard for me to say; it’s a constantly evolving art. But hopefully, it will get more popular.

CS: There’s so much jazz to choose from out there. For anyone who listens to your music, how would you suggest they receive it?

GL: I’m not hung up on trying to challenge the listener. I’m trying to come up with new musical ideas, so that could be challenging to them, but that’s not my primary goal. And they don’t have to know a lot about different styles of jazz, or about music in general. What I hope is to communicate emotionally to people, and it can be very complex—happy and sad at the same time. They should be listening for that emotional content, that expressivity. I really want people to feel that.

CS: I think it’s this emotionality in music that explains, in part, why “music is the healing force of the universe,” as you quote on your website.

GL: I don’t know who originally said that, but I’ve heard it many times from lots of different jazz musicians. Music also certainly helps bring people together, from different cultures and backgrounds. It heals by not emphasizing our differences from one another, and letting people realize their similarities, no matter where they’re from or what they do. Human beings have a lot of things in common with each other—and music is one of them.

For more about Gordon Lee, his upcoming performances and to order his CDs, go to his website, at www.gleefulmusic.com.

Words © 2012 Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.
Photos © 2012 Gordon Lee. All rights reserved.

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