Keiko Lee sits quietly on a couch in her Taipei hotel room. She is a picture of composed cool compared to the scurrying cloud of hotel staffers who mill about trying to explain why her luggage has failed to arrive with her from the airport. "It will be here shortly, they assure her. But for now, Lee seems content to just relax in the clothes on her back a baggy T-shirt, black pants and a pair of yellow sunglasses.
After all, you don't get voted the No. 1 female jazz vocalist three years in a row by Japan's foremost jazz authority, Swing Journal, by being uptight about things like luggage. So, Lee reclines, oblivious to the staffers who scurry in and out, and the interview begins.
A third-generation Korean who was raised all her life in Japan's Aichi Prefecture, in Nagoya. Lee became interested in music after hearing her mother's Perez Prado Orchestra music collection.
"I started studying piano when I was four years old, she says casually, her voice a combination of silk and gravel. "And I kept at it until I was twenty when I switched to singing.
She explains that it was a fellow band member who insisted that she make the switch. "You have to switch, he told her. "Because your voice is great greater than your keyboard playing.
Fortunately, Lee listened and made the change and the rest is shaping up to be a significant chunk in the annals of modern, genre-bending Japanese jazz history. Since 1996 Lee has performed all around the world from Paris and London to Hong Kong, Beijing, Seoul and Singapore. And the list of musicians who have accompanied her reads like a who's who in modern jazz. Lee Konitz, Ron Carter and Jiro Yoshida, just to name a few.
But despite her blooming success as a jazz artist, Lee stubbornly refuses to be pigeonholed. "I'm not really a jazz singer, she protests. "I'm more like a singer who can sing jazz.
Lee's argument can be seen in the singers she lists as having the most influence on her career and vocal style a list as likely to include non-jazz names like Stevie Wonder as it is Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. It can also be heard in her music that swings as easily between Latin and R&B as it does between jazz standards, bee-bop and fusion.
"I like to improvise, Lee says. "I never know what I'm going to sing on a given night until a few minutes before the show. Lee says that it depends on her mood, the setting and the feelings she has as the curtain call approaches.
"That's why I need good musicians, she laughs, "They have to be able to pick up on my mood and go with the flow at a moment's notice. That's what I love about performing, the exhilaration of letting go. I sing the same songs over and over again, she says, "But they never come out the same way.
Perhaps one of the biggest influences on Lee's free-wheeling style was the time that she spent in New York City. It was there, in the smoky clubs and alleys of the world's jazz Mecca, that her love of the genre really began to take root. But despite her growing appreciation of jazz, Lee explains that she never really intended to become a professional singer.
"I just loved singing, like anyone who does something out of love, I wanted to do it better and better, she says. "One day I woke up and I was actually doing it better and, suddenly, I was a professional singer. Lately, Lee says she has been listening to Jose Feliciano and the music of 72-year old Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer. "I just can't get enough of Jose Feliciano's new CD (And the Sun Will Shine), Lee says.
She hems and haws when asked about what would be her idea of a dream concert. After changing her mind four or five times she finally settles on a concert on the moon with Bill Evans and Miles Davis. "If it's really a 'dream concert,' she says laughing, "Why not go for something really spectacular like bringing back the dead greats of jazz to play on the moon?
Perhaps people would think a concert on the moon is a strange idea, but after speaking for a while with Keiko Lee, one gets the impression that she would take it right in stride. That she would coolly stride right out in her space suit, sidle up to Miles and put on the show of her life. And she wouldn't even get too ruffled if the space ship forgot her luggage.
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