Bio

Barbara Lea at the Waldorf Astoria — January 2002, New York, NY, Waldorf-Astoria — Photo: Jeanie Wilson

Barbara Lea’s taste and integrity and uncompromising standards, along with her devotion to lyrics and her deep musicality, made her 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 1940s and early 1950s, 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

Barbara Lea with the Crimson Stompers — c. 1950, Cambridge, MA, Sanders Theatre at Harvard, with the Crimson Stompers

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 television.

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 (where Whitney Balliett declared “Barbara Lea has no superior among popular singers”) and a renewed singing career.

Barbara Lea with New Jersey Jazz Society — c. 1974, New Jersey Jazz Society, with Jim Andrews, piano & Phil Flanagan, bass

Barbara starred in the JVC, Kool, and Newport Jazz Festivals several times, but her increasing devotion to the songs as written led to concerts of the works of Rodgers and Hart, Arthur Schwartz, Cy Coleman, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, and the Gershwins, as well as cabaret appearances devoted to Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, and Yip Harburg. There are over a dozen CDs still available on the Audiophile label, which has a reputation for featuring the best in singers of classic pop, plus reissues of two early LPs on Fantasy/Original Jazz Classics, and two later recent releases on the European-based label Challenge as well as one on Cape Song and three on her own label.

Barbara Lea at the Toronto Jazz Festival — 1991, Toronto, Canada, Toronto Jazz Festival — Photo: Tom Siddall

Selected obituaries for Barbara:

• Barbara Lea, Interpreter of American Popular Songs, Dies – The New York Times
• Barbara Lea, jazz singer of quiet subtlety, dies at 82 – The Washington Post
• Barbara Lea: Remembering A Versatile Cabaret Singer : NPR
• Barbara Lea, jazz singer: 1929-2011 | Shiraz Socialist
• Cabaret Singer Barbara Lea Dies at 82 | Playbill
• Barbara Lea Obituary – Raleigh, NC | The News & Observer
• Sam Rivers And Barbara Lea, RIP | Rifftides
• Barbara Lea, 82, cabaret singer known for jazz stylings – The Boston Globe