Joe Lee Wilson (December 22, 1935 – July 17, 2011) was an American jazz singer from Bristow, Oklahoma, whose reputation never matched those of such male stars as Jon Hendricks, Mark Murphy or Kurt Elling – yet his eloquent baritone voice invited him into their league, even if an easygoing nature and an inclination to sidestep the mainstream diverted him.
Part African American and part Creek Native American, Wilson was born to farming parents near Bristow in Oklahoma. Early in life, he found he had almost instant recall of any song he heard once, and from discovering jazz through radio broadcasts by the jump-band star Louis Jordan, he moved on to Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington. When he was 15, he left the farm for the Los Angeles High School, where he majored in music and sang in an a cappella choir.
Walking with his aunt on an LA street, the teenager heard a voice drifting from a club, singing the bebop anthem Parker's Mood. The singer was Eddie Jefferson, a pioneer of the vocalese style in which lyrics were written to famous improvised jazz solos – but when Wilson asked what the sound was, his aunt said it was "the devil's music". Wilson and Jefferson were soon friends, and the former would later observe that Jefferson's approach continued an African tradition of local history and experience expressed through poetry and song.
Wilson briefly studied classical singing, then jazz, at Los Angeles City College, and began to work the Santa Monica club scene – his first professional gigs being with Fletcher Henderson's alto saxist Roscoe Weathers, who told him: "As a musician sometimes you're gonna starve. You gotta learn to make your own work." The advice was to leave a lasting impression.
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Wilson met the jazz diva Sarah Vaughan on the west coast, and heard most of the best bands in the country in California in 1958-59, including Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and the Miles Davis band that made Kind of Blue. From 1959, he worked in Mexico, and was spotted there in 1960 by the singer Ernestine Anderson, who advised him to contact her New York booking agent. Wilson was reluctant to move at first, but he quickly realised that jazz's cutting-edge was being honed in NYC. Wilson met Shepp, the writer LeRoi Jones (subsequently Amiri Baraka), and Murray. They liked the newcomer's sound and his appreciation that jazz was in transition, and both Shepp and Murray invited him to sing their music.
In
1968, Wilson tied with Sly and the Family Stone for first prize on NBC's show
Talent Search, and won a record deal with Columbia, but the company never
released his albums. In the 1970s, he rented a building on Bond Street, close
to the famous Rivbea loft run by the saxophonist Sam Rivers and his wife Bea,
and built the 100-capacity music room he called the Ladies' Fort. Wilson
understood the value of promotion, and encouraged other local lofts to join a
loft association and run a regular music festival.
Some of Wilson's best known recordings were with Shepp, with whom he collaborated on landmark albums such as Things Have Got to Change (1971) and Attica Blues the following year. Livin' High Off Nickels and Dimes was a 1972 recording of a live radio show from Columbia University, and three years later, Wilson had a radio hit on New York stations with his rousing account of Jazz Ain't Nothing But Soul.
In 1977, he married his English partner Jill Christopher and moved to Europe. While based in Paris, Tokyo, and the United Kingdom (for a time living in the London flat of Val Wilmer, before settling in Brighton, Sussex),he periodically worked with the pianists Bobby Few and Billy Gault, and in recent years had toured the UK with local musicians, partnered by the formidable American pianist Kirk Lightsey. Wilson made the Candid Records album Feelin' Good during this period (its highlight was an unrehearsed duet with Lightsey on the poignant ballad There's No You) and a fine 2004 album with Italian musicians entitled Ballads for Trane – the intertwining of his voice with the tenor saxophonist Gianni Basso recalled the partnership of Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane in the 1960s.
In 2010, despite having undergone heart surgery, Wilson was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in November 2010, where he gave his last public performance and dedicated a song he performed there to Barack Obama. He died of congestive heart failure at his Brighton home in the UK on July 17, 2011 aged 75.
(Edited from Guardian obit by John Fordham & Wikipedia)