Gene Lees

Lees was a Canadian music critic, biographer, lyricist, and above all a journalist. His writing, even when ostensibly about music, had the gravitas of anthology. He was writing about human history, and his insight connected everything in the background to everything in the foreground up to and including a protagonist.

In the book You Can't Steal A Gift, published in 2001 he connected broadly the post WWII American rural diaspora and the effect of brutal racism on the careers of Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Jackson and Nat King Cole. Effectively it's one of the finest histories of bebop you will ever read. The book spans two decades of history but never becomes impersonal for his subjects or himself. His words have a certain economy. He dedicated the first chapter to his own roots in both music, and journalism. He visited Paris and realized the magnitude of WWII; he wrote:

"At last it became real to me that men really did from time to time dress alike , go out and, on the orders from someone unseen, obediently kill each other."

Lees died in 2010 obscure to most popular fiction readers but well-known among jazz heads.