Jennifer Lee vocal and guitar | Peter Horvath piano | Jim Kerwin bass | Michael O'Neill saxophone and bandleader
Nine years is a long time between albums, but JENNIFER LEE has been busy taking her music into rarely explored emotional terrain. My Shining Hour, the third album by the esteemed Bay Area jazz vocalist, guitarist, and pianist, reintroduces an artist long known as a gifted interpreter of the American and Brazilian Songbooks. But with her ensemble the Ever-Expanding Universe and a stellar cast of special guests, including trumpet legend Randy Brecker, bass master Bob Magnusson, Grammy Award-winning violinist Mads Tolling, and percussion maestro John Santos, Lee has emerged as a songwriter with an unusual gift for evoking uncanny experiences, hard-won wisdom, unbridled joy, and liminal states of consciousness.
While My Shining Hour marks a sea change for Lee, she’s still swimming with longtime collaborators, which is one reason why her music sounds so finely wrought and fully formed. Like on her previous, critically-hailed albums, 2003’s Jaywalkin’ and 2009’s Quiet Joy (both on Peter Sprague’s label SBE Records), Lee draws on two deep pools of talent from San Diego and the Bay Area. The line of continuity runs through Peter Sprague, the brilliant San Diego guitarist known for his extensive work with Chick Corea, Charles McPherson, and Hubert Laws. For Lee, the collaboration has provided, among many other things, an education. “Peter is an extraordinary musician and a deeply soulful player,” she says. “Working with him over the years, watching how he’ll reharmonize or phrase a line, I’ve learned so much. It’s definitely influenced my writing.”
While she continues to perform as Jennifer Lee, the artist’s full name is Jennifer Lee Sevison, which is how she publishes and copyrights her songs to avoid confusion with other musicians recording as Jennifer Lee. Born in Redwood City and raised in Menlo Park, Lee attended Woodside High School, but in her senior year she transferred to Menlo-Atherton High as a pianist to take advantage of the school’s respected jazz program.
She continued her jazz piano studies at Foothill College, often accompanying vocalists, all the while nursing her secret desire to sing. She didn’t take the plunge until an early, unwanted glimpse at mortality radically changed her priorities in the late 1980s, when she dropped out of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst to tend to her stricken father. I realized that none of us knows how long we have here on planet earth, so I’d better do what I want to do now.” After her father’s passing, she returned to the Foothill College music department, but instead of backing other singers she took over the microphone herself. Subsequently studying with esteemed Bay Area jazz singer Kitty Margolis, Lee gradually worked up the courage to start performing in public.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, PETER HORVATH attended the Bela Bartok Conservatory of Music. At age 17, he won the National Jazz Combo Competition in Hungary and two years later moved to Austria to attend the Vienna Conservatory of Music. In 1983, Peter moved to the United States, where he studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He has since performed, recorded and toured nationally and worldwide with Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson, Richie Cole, Ernie Watts, Eddie Henderson, Charles McPherson, Benny Maupin, the Victor Bailey Group, Lenny White, Arturo Sandoval, Randy Brecker, Marcus Miller, Bob Mintzer, Bob Sheppard, Craig Handy, Pete Escovedo and the Oakland Symphony. Peter is currently on faculty at the California Jazz Conservatory, Saint Mary’s College of California and Stanford Jazz Consortium.
MICHAEL O'NEILL, a San Diego native, began studying clarinet at an early age. His first mentor was his neighbor, the great jazz and studio drummer, John Guerin. After the usual involvement with school bands and orchestras, Michael did a stint in the Air Force Band. In college, while majoring in Biology, he minored in music studying composition and arranging as well as jazz performance. After a brief career in science, Michael returned to music full time, studying saxophone with the great Joe Henderson while playing in dance bands, salsa bands and doing local jazz gigs. During this time Michael became interested in composition and formed groups to perform his original material, a trend that is ongoing today. Besides jazz composition, Michael’s interests have taken him into orchestral and ethnic musical forms. In the 1980's he began writing music for documentaries and television for which he now has a long list of credits. Jazz performance residencies as leader include 13 years at the Ritz Carlton Half Moon bay, 7 years at Cetrella Half Moon Bay and 6 years at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood Shores. Michael has performed and/or recorded with Idris Muhammad, Joe Locke, Michael Wolff, Giacomo Gates, Geoffrey Keezer, Maria Muldaur, Eddie Fisher, Rodney Jones, Kim Nalley, Jackie Ryan, Tony Lindsay, Margie Baker, Faye Carol, Brenda Boykin, Jeff Chambers, Rob Schneiderman, Mark Levine, Frank Jackson, and many others.The Michael O'Neill Quintet featuring the great vocalist, Kenny Washington, has headlined the Monterey Jazz Festival, San Jose Jazz Festival, the Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival, SF Jazz, the Blue Note in Napa, Jazz at Pearl’s, Oakland and San Francisco Yoshi’s, Anna’s Jazz Island, the Jazz on the Hill Festival, the Oakland Art and Soul Festival, the San Jose Jazz Society Concert Series and many others.