BARBARA
LEA CELEBRATES NEW CD RELEASE
On
Friday, May 27th at 7:00 pm, world-class jazz singer, Barbara Lea
with Dick Miller on piano come to New York's hottest new club,THE
ENCORE (266 West 47th Street, NYC - 212-221-3960 - http://www.theencorenyc.com/
), to celebrate the release of their new CD, DEEP IN A DREAM, a collection
of Jimmy Van Heusen songs. There is a $15 cover, $12 food/drink minimum.
Ms. Lea is one of the most widely respected and admired interpreters
of the classic American popular song. She was born Barbara LeCocq;
her musical heritage is traceable to a great uncle, Alexandre Charles
LeCoq, an important nineteenth-century composer of French light opera.
Born into a musical family in Detroit, she worked with small dance
bands there before attending Wellesley College on scholarship and
majoring in music theory. Boston was a hotbed of jazz in the late
40s and early 50s, allowing Barbara to sing with major instrumentalists
such as Marian McPartland, Bobby Hackett, Vic Dickenson, Frankie Newton,
Johnny Windhurst, and George Wein. At the same time, she sang in the
college choir, worked on the campus radio station and newspaper, and
arranged for and conducted the Madrigal Group and brass choir concerts
Her professional career started upon graduation. Her
early recordings for Riverside and Prestige met with immediate critical
acclaim and led to her winning the DownBeat International Critics'
Poll as the Best New Singer of 1956. She appeared in small clubs in
New York, including the renowned Village Vanguard, and throughout
the eastern U.S. and Canada, as well as on radio and TV.
She studied acting to improve her stage presence and,
with the near-demise of classic pop in the early 60s, turned to the
legitimate theatre, performing an impressive list of leading and feature
roles in everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim. She moved to the
West Coast and received her M.A. in drama at Cal. State-Northridge,
then returned to New York and taught speech at the American Academy
of Dramatic Art and acting at Hofstra College. In the 1970s, with
the resurgence of interest in show tunes and popular standards, Barbara
Lea was literally sought out to appear in the Peabody Award-winning
National Public Radio series "American Popular Song with Alec Wilder
and Friends". This led to two lengthy feature articles in The New
Yorker and a renewed singing career.
For more information, see http://www.barbaralea.com/
.
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