Jeanne Lee

Jeanne Lee (1939-2000) was an American jazz singer, poet and composer from New York. She moved between jazz, sound poetry and free improvisation, and is known for her duo work with pianist Ran Blake, beginning with The Newest Sound Around, and for her long partnership with vibraphonist Gunter Hampel, whom she married. Lee and Blake won the Apollo Theater amateur night and toured Europe in 1963. In the mid-1960s she took part in sound poetry and Fluxus-related happenings in California and worked with poets Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles.