Malcolm Lee, Author at David Neil Lee

August 15, 2017

Don’t you hate people who claim to be hip enough to have websites, but then never update them?

I must raise my hand, guilty as charged, since I haven’t updated my site in nine months.

It has been a busy time, with me balancing my first-ever teaching jobs at Wilfrid Laurier University with finishing my PhD in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. I just now feel that I’m coming up for air.

Meanwhile, thanks to Stuart Broomer for his review of our trio CD, The Phantom Hunter, in The Whole Note. Any musician is lucky to be listened to and written about by this elegant and insightful writer.

On June 15 I successfully defended my dissertation, Outside the Empire: Improvised Music in Toronto 1960-1985. Thanks to my committee: Ajay Heble (supervisor), Daniel Fischlin, and Frédérique Arroyas (who stepped down for the defense, and was replaced by Christine Bold). Also to the outside examiner, Jack Chambers, grad coordinator Gregor Campbell, and David Prentice and Maureen Cochrane, who showed up to offer moral support. I believe that SETS director Ann Wilson, whose office is next to the examining room, paid us a great compliment when she remarked that she had never heard so much laughter coming out of that room during a defense.

The PhD process has been long: I entered the program in September 2011. It has been an intense period: besides university work, I published my first novel (Commander Zero, 2012), as well as the third edition of The Battle of the Five Spot (Wolsak & Wynn 2014), and The Midnight Games (Poplar Press, 2015).

This summer, I am doing some playing with Chris Palmer, and waiting for Connor Bennett to get back from Ottawa so we can reconvene the trio. I am talking to a publisher about a book adaptation of my dissertation. And I am working, whenever I can, on a sequel to The Midnight Games – motivated, mostly, by the readers of all ages who told me they enjoyed that book. Thanks!

December 10, 2016

Although I need to focus on finishing a dissertation, I have had more arts activity than I deserve. Friday December 16 at 8 pm, Connor Bennett saxophones, Chris Palmer guitar and I are launching our CD “The Phantom Hunter” at the Gift Shop Gallery on Rebecca Street in Hamilton.

Meanwhile, I am so pleased to have won the Hamilton Arts Council’s Kerry Schooley Award, presented to the author who “best captures the spirit of Hamilton,” for The Midnight Games. Gary Barwin was kind enough to say that, now having been in academia for a few years, I was starting to sound “professorial.” At least, I think he was being kind. I certainly think I look professorial!

October 25, 2016 –

An email from New York City reminds me that the written word never stops working. David Mulkins writes from the Bowery: “Just had wonderful conversation with Charles Mingus’ son, Charles Mingus III, who contacted me to compliment your Windows on the Bowery poster on the Five Spot.”

Mr. Mingus was responding to the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors’ show “Windows on the Bowery,” 64 window placards celebrating the Lower Manhattan neighbourhood’s many contributions to American history & culture. I wrote the texts for two of the placards. Mounted at the Bowery’s Cooper Union’s Foundation Building and inside the Bowery branch of the HSBC Bank, the placards can also be seen at each of the celebrated historic sites. The 325 Bowery placard (#54 on map) celebrates the Tin Palace jazz club that operated there in the 1970s, and at 5 Cooper Square (#59) can be seen “The Hippest Place on Earth: Five Spot Jazz Club,” the original site of the club which from the 1950s until the 1970s presented Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, Billie Holiday, Ornette Coleman and many others.

Charles Mingus III with the Five Spot Café poster, text by David Neil Lee. Photo by Alfonso Iandiorio.

Thank you Charles, and David Mulkins. Maybe there is some point to writing books! Meanwhile, I am marking papers for my fall TA position, and waiting to hear back from my committee about the first draft of my dissertation. Will they think it’s okay, with a few tweaks … or will it be back to the drawing board!

Hope you are all having a productive autumn ….

June 2016

June 22, 2016 I get to speak at an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Pender Harbour Reading Centre. We lived in the Harbour from 1991 to 2002, and the reading centre was the first library our boys ever went to; it’s an invaluable, volunteer run resource for this rural community. The reading will be at 4:00 pm at our former neighbour Chrys Sample’s Francis Point B&B.

Friday, June 24 I will be at the People’s Coop Bookstore in Vancouver, reading with a poet I have long admired, Tom Wayman.

Then I hope to hear some of the Vancouver jazz festival before heading to Kelowna for a signing Saturday, July 2 at Mosaic Books, 1-4 pm. Then I stop at Winnipeg for a July 7 reading with Matt Cahill and others at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

Before I leave for the coast I get to play in this year’s Something Else! Festival in Hamilton. Thanks to Cem Zafir for moving to Hamilton and making all this possible!

Not only did John O’Neill at Black Gate Magazine write a generous review of The Midnight Games, he invited me to write a Black Gate blog post about it.

OK, back to working on my dissertation on Toronto Improvised Music for the School of English & Theatre Studies at U of Guelph ….

January 2016

Thanks to the folks at Wolsak & Wynn and ChiZine for organizing the Toronto debut of The Midnight Games, January 20 at The Round Venue, 152a Augusta Avenue. It was an invaluable chance to read my work for a whole new audience, sharing the evening with fellow author Matt Cahill and musician Kari Maaren.

Response to the book has been gratifying—recently I especially enjoyed doing my first-ever school visit, talking about Midnight Games and the hows and whys of writing—thanks to Karen Weber, at Aldershot High School in Burlington. Amy Kenny interviewed me about The Midnight Games for the Hamilton Spectator —on Halloween no less!—and the Globe and Mail’s Patrick White did an insightful Facebook posting about the book. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that Patrick is my nephew, but he actually managed to nail an important aspect of the book: “I don’t think I’m giving away too much away,” he writes, “in saying that, from now on, every time I drive by Hamilton, I will think less about industrial decay and more about huge, writhing tentacles emanating from the skies over Ivor Wynne.”

Also thanks to Albuquerque, NM writer Mark Weber, whose end-of-year entry on his blog/newsletter Jazz for mostly focused on Wolsak & Wynn’s new edition of The Battle of the Five Spot. Mark, I might mention, is a distinctive American poet, music writer, performer and photographer whose photos and writings about west coast music in the 1970s and 1980s have special value in illuminating the contributions of neglected artists. To accompany his 1982 photo of Ornette Coleman and Prime Time, he writes, “I recently reread The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field (2006, 2014) by David Neil Lee, and distance (50+ years) is ideal for historical perspective. This study endeavors to quantify how the opinions and conventions and peer pressure and the dynamics of right place, right time, came together, for better or worse, and how Ornette withstood the powder keg barrage simply because he truly had something of worth to add to jazz. The ground zero paragraph (among many) in this very good book happens on page 34: ‘The more populist tendencies of hard bop, the art music experiments of Third Stream, and the tempered bebop style of cool jazz were all attempts to forge a jazz identity that could move outside of the influence of Charlie Parker. The idea of a technical development of jazz, onward and upward, was stalled behind a barrier of technique.’”

August 2015

The new edition of The Battle of the Five Spot coincides with the appearance of a remastered version of the Shirley Clarke film Ornette: Made in America (1985) by Milestone Films in New Jersey. I have arranged with Milestone to show the film at selected readings where I talk about Coleman, his explosive debut at the Five Spot Café in 1959, and the politics and culture of jazz. Thanks to St. Catherines’ Niagara Artists Centre for putting on such an event at their great new rooftop theatre in July. I look forward to doing it as well in Guelph September 20 at Silence as part of the Guelph Jazz Festival, and in Toronto on Friday, September 25 at the Dignam Gallery of the Women’s Art Association of Canada.

July 2015

Thanks to Kevin McNeilly for inviting me to present at the Vancouver colloquium Time Changes: Improvisation, History, and the Body June 20 and 21, where I was able to present on the Artists’ Jazz Band and Ornette Coleman, and present the Shirley Clarke film Ornette: Made in America. Great work from presenters Emma Cleary, Brian Jude de Lima, Julia Úlehla, Kiran Bhumber, Bob Pritchard, Neelamjit Dillon, Gerry Hemingway, Tom Scholte, Ben Brown and Michelle Lui , Geoff Mitchell (skyping from Quebec), the incredible Rupert Common and the Freestyle Rap Alliance, and many others.

It was the culmination of a great week in which I did a brief reading at the launch of the Boneshaker Anthology at the Supermarket in Toronto, along with Lillian Necakov, Bev Daurio, Gary Barwin, Stuart Ross, bill bissett and many others, and played a great set at Hamilton’s Artword Artbar with Terry Fraser, John Oswald and Mike Malone, opening this year’s Something Else! Festival.

2014 Roundup

2014 was a great year, with the New School launch for The Battle of the Five Spot in New York City, the Rhythm Changes Conference in Amsterdam, and a visit to Paris where Maureen and I hit all the high spots: the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and of course the great store “souffle continu.” Guillaume Belhomme has written a very generous review of “Five Spot”: http://grisli.canalblog.com/archives/2015/01/26/31411574.html

August 2014: As well as getting considerable writing done this summer, I played a lot of music—some of it in new and intriguing contexts. My fellow PhD student Kimber Sider is researching animal-human communication, and asked me to be part of her research on improvised music and horses.

At a ranch outside of Guelph, I spent some time with Shiva (l) and Stuie (r), playing in different ways. But only when we moved into the barn, and I began doing some nice slow low bowing sounds, did they come in so close that I had to be careful not to poke Shiva with the bow–so close that while I continued to play, Stuie rested his snout on my tailbone.

June 2014: Just got back from New York where I was able to launch the new edition of The Battle of the Five Spot at The New School! The event, which presented me in a panel with Stacy Dillard and Howard Mandel, was documented on video: The Shape of Jazz to Come (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XshPLvD35ww)

I am currently working on a PhD at the University of Guelph’s School of English and Theatre Studies. Andrew Vowles wrote an excellent article about me and my studies for the university website.

http://atguelph.uoguelph.ca/2013/12/improvised-music-a-universal-language/

I also appear briefly in the university’s 50th anniversary commemorative video! It is around the 4:10 mark:

http://www.uoguelph.ca/50/video/