The Jamie Lee Trio: Introspective at 5
The drummer embarked on a seminal Vancouver jazz album release of the 2020s, then reinvented both her music and her career
Jamie Lee's first and only album to date as a drummer-bandleader, Introspective, came out at the end of February 2020. Its release pointed toward a new decade of Vancouver jazz, but it also saw the doors close on the pre-covid scene. The Jamie Lee Trio includes pianist James Dekker and bassist Marcus Abramzik; Lee wrote all ten compositions on Introspective.
To mark five years since the release, I interviewed Lee and others involved. The story presented itself to me in five parts: the background, the sound of the trio, Lee's rise through the scene, her musical pivot, and ultimately a reinvention of her career. We begin with the background – the road to recording.
Jamie Yoongi Lee, born and raised in South Korea, arrived in the lower mainland as a teenager. "My family came to Canada in 2008, and I went to high school in Surrey," she said. "And then I got to Cap in 2013."
Lee met Abramzik at Capilano University in the fall of 2015. "Marcus had come back to the program to finish his bachelor's degree, and him and I played in ‘C’ band together," she said, referring to the jazz program's third-ranked big band.
Abramzik is an active multi-genre bassist today, just as he was then. He recalled playing with Lee in the band. "It really brought us together," he said. "We vented about our malcontents of being in an organized educational system for learning an oral-aural tradition, which felt like a contradiction. But we also learned to lean on each other to make the music come to life and found a connection in listening and reacting to each other in that band, which really helped us to make music that was fun for both of us."
Lee later ended up alongside Dekker, who had burst onto the CapU scene as a first-year pianist. "James started a year later than me, but then I ended up taking most courses with that cohort later on. I just saw James play all the time in combo classes and I was like, yup, that's the guy." (I didn't complete an interview with Dekker before publication. I will add to the story if and when I do.)
Around 2018 and 2019, Lee graduated from CapU with a Bachelor of Music. Her earliest gigs with Abramzik happened at places like the Tangent Cafe and Aperture Coffee Bar.
Off-campus, Lee joined a rock band called Porteau. Led by Victoria Williams and Craig Stevenson, the band also featured bassist Chad Galpin and guitarist Madeleine Elkins. Their time in the band culminated in the album What I Need.
"Porteau is the [group] that fulfilled my indie-band dream," Lee said. "We had a lot of great shows together. We went to BreakOut West in Whitehorse. That was super fun. I met a ton of really cool musicians; that was my first conference-esque experience as a musician, and we had so much fun."
Lee and Elkins also played together in the Sister Jazz Orchestra big band and in Kria Wall's Spindle!, a seven-piece band.
"Spindle! was just the perfect mixture of music that people maybe can sing along, can connect to a little bit more on a personal level than instrumental music I think," Lee said. "There's a vocalist, there's lyrics, there's melodies. But then also compositionally, it was very interesting to play as well. There was a lot of odd time signature stuff, very fluid musical structures, and it was a bigger band than the Jamie Lee Trio. It was really interesting to play in that configuration."
That balance between accessibility and odd time signatures eventually found its way to Introspective. Spindle! has released two singles to-date, the earlier of which is self-titled and opens with Lee's drums.
Lee also worked with another CapU-trained artist of Korean descent: vocalist Sara Kim. Lee played in Kim's ensemble called Watermill and shared a bill with her WCMA-nominated band Omianan.
The trio developed its material while Lee undertook these experiences. She said that with Dekker and Abramzik, she "rehearsed quite a bit, almost every week at James' place, probably for at least six months."
The gigging lifestyle that Lee was exploring hadn't yet translated to the trio, other than a couple small nights at Presentation House or the Tangent Cafe. "Eventually, Marcus was like, Jamie, actually, we need to record. I think we can't just rehearse all the time!"
Lee received a $2,000 kickstart toward the project via the FACTOR Artist Development grant. She booked Crew Studios at 181 East 1st Street, North Vancouver, formerly known as Bakerstreet Studios when the late Paul Baker ran it. Engineer Charlotte Duggan recorded the trio over three days in August 2019.
Lee's personal reflections on recording were mixed and spoke to the experience of being a new graduate. "I think I was operating in a very autopilot mode, and I was making the album... honestly, looking back, I wasn't really making the album for myself, where it should have been. It was more like a career milestone that I should take as a musician: if I want to be taken seriously, I need to have an album, you know?"
Regardless, Lee "knew what she wanted to hear," Abramzik said. "I think she has a really individual artistic voice, but she also knows how to express that voice clearly."
Abramzik said the trio became a liberating force in his career. "I came from a more rock, pop, and folk background where it’s less interactive. Sometimes taking risks in those settings can get you fired, so it was a big confidence-builder for me to have Jamie and James get excited by me taking risks and throwing new ideas at them."
Before continuing the story in 2020 and onward, I'll direct my attention to the music itself.
Introspective contains no drum solos. Lee deploys a conservative amount of bop language on the kit and doesn't rely on only jazz chords to adorn the tunes. Dekker's solos aren't full of bebop licks. Flourishes of the Western notated music tradition show up in the pianist's approach, too, like at the end of the widescreen, dynamic track "Sarajida".
"'Sarajida' means disappearing [in Korean]," Lee said. "When I wrote the tune, I don't think I had that in mind. Later on, this song is like... it reminds me of death. Any living creatures are meant to disappear from our plane eventually, and I think, with... There were just a lot of tragic deaths in the community, and some personal stuff as well, so I just wanted to have a song dedicated to that kind of feeling I was feeling at the time."
Which other tunes sound introspective? Here's one: the longest track "Bits and Pieces", which has a plaintive piano intro and bowed upright bass. Like several other tracks it's in the sentimental key of five flats, the key of so much Strayhorn, the key of "here comes the boy".
My favourite track has always been the pop-informed "Trust Issues", which shows the trio at their most confident. They charge in and out of sections and play louder than the engineer might have expected. Dekker hits a plain D-major chord to accompany himself as he winds down his solo: we're rocking out, everything's alright. Abramzik's upright bass tone carries lots of his fingers as he syncopates his solo against Lee's quiet rim clicks. They all slow down together on a single note, and in the outro vamp, they find their biggest catharsis. Then it's gone, and the entire next track "Not Everything Has a Reason" – a ballad featuring Abramzik on a processed electric bass melody – feels like the lingering comedown.
The most jazz-rooted tracks remind me of our finest piano trios. There's the Bruno Hubert Trio's lilt on the melody of "Striped Sox" and the waltz of "Don't Complicate", or perhaps the Brad Turner Trio's insistent dance on "Butterfly Effect" and "Into the Green".
But off the top, the opener "Overclock" rocks an aggressive style unlike any of the other tracks. Lee blasts out the intro groove. Using a Wurlitzer-like keyboard sound, Dekker floats over the repeating odd-time phrases then plays a long solo. Overclocking is what students and graduates do, trying to do it all like a computer with a hundred tabs and a video editor open.
The last track is called "Beginning". It opens with the wordless voice of Lauren Tivadar and is the shortest piece. The arrangement is "a nice little Easter egg of the album," Lee said. "I had the privilege to work with a lot of great vocalists during my time at Cap. We were just so blessed with really strong vocalists and great musicians at the same time, and I am friends with a lot of them, and I just wanted this album to be a celebration of me and the friends I have [who] are a big part of what makes me who I am, right?"
Lee said Tivadar has since moved to Alberta, but the other five vocalists have stayed local. Wall, the Spindle! bandleader, is one. The others are Cindy Dai-Thiessen, who works in the non-profit arts sector and continues to sing; Laura Bower, who has taught lessons and performed over the years while keeping a relatively private profile; and Alex Scott and Karen White, co-creators of the podcast Vicarious. On "Beginning", the friends' voices reply from the wings and gather into a stately harmony. It's the opposite of "Overclock", not an expedition but a reception.
After the completion of recording, Lee sent the tracks to Brad Turner for mixing and mastering. She did the graphic design for Introspective herself using photography by Laura Harvey, ordered CDs, and released the album on February 28, 2020.
A release show took place the next day, Saturday, February 29, at Guilt & Co. in one of the venue's single-set early shows. The set included "Beginning" with all six vocalists present. Lee described the stress of the moment. "I wasn't even going to do the release gig, because I was just so overwhelmed. I booked the studio, I recorded it [...] And then now what: I need to book a venue and then get all this stuff together? I was really burnt out. But then Marcus and James were like, Jamie, I think it's really important for you, to have a moment to celebrate with your people, and just showcase your music that you really worked hard on. I was like, that's right. You know what? That's right."
With hindsight, the stress melted away. "It was awesome," Lee said. "It was actually a really good memory for me. A lot of people, it was packed. My family came out as well. It was basically the first time my family heard my music. Obviously they came to my gigs sometimes here and there, but my music and my band, my album, it was the first time for them. So that was really meaningful for me and my family. Yeah, there were a lot of my friends. I played just like how I wanted to play, and obviously Marcus and James just killed it as always, and I was really proud of it."
Introspective earned some media coverage upon release, which doesn't always happen with an independent Canadian jazz album. In CITR-FM's Discorder magazine, Jordan Naterer wrote that the tunes are "quite catchy and impressively show off the artists’ performance chops". A CBC article in April 2020 included quotes from Lee while featuring the album in a roundup.
Perhaps the clearest indicator of Lee's rise was that Coastal Jazz booked her for the 2020 Vancouver International Jazz Festival, the consideration for which would've happened right around the album release. Unfortunately, Coastal ended up fully canceling that festival, but they didn't cease engagement with the acts. "We did a big online thing at Performance Works," Lee said. "No audience was there, but it was streamed." I covered the presentation:
Will Chernoff
Tim Reinert was the online show's emcee. Though he hadn't yet started presenting shows as Infidels Jazz, he did so later that year and booked Lee several times.
When Coastal returned in the summer with the 2021 jazzfest, Lee had two more gigs. First, the trio played at Frankie's Jazz Club, where Lee brought new material for a possible follow-up trio album. Her second gig was with keyboardist-songwriter Amanda Sum, who remains in her musical life. "Amanda is truly one of a kind. She's so special, and I think her music is very personal in a way, very vulnerable and organic. That's just how she composes. I really appreciated playing with her, because it challenged me musically too, honestly. Because there is a vocalist, I can't go super-crazy, but there are parts that need to go really hard in a interesting musical structure, so that was creatively challenging."
After the festival, in a 2021 video for Coastal Jazz, Lee revealed a new phase of learning about music technology. She recorded the video after receiving support from a program called Creative Music Commissions, presented by TD via Coastal. "I turned my attention to more producing and recording, which I actually had no knowledge about," she explained, "so I kind of set up a strategy for myself to still keep myself creative, by picking up some very basic recording devices and watching a lot of YouTube videos."
What resulted from Lee's technological learning was Ujusun (anglicized Korean for 'spaceship'), an electronic duo with her former bandmate, Chad Galpin.
Galpin, who plays both keyboards and bass, is now a schoolteacher in Vancouver. "Jamie and I became good friends playing in Porteau together," he said, "and then when the pandemic hit, we had this nightly ritual of playing video games till two or three in the morning [...] One day I asked her, hey, what if we, instead of playing video games, pretended we were musicians again and just wrote a song online?" That song was "Quantum Nebula", which I wrote about upon release in 2021:
Will Chernoff
I wrote then that Lee had been working as a drum teacher, including at Rufus Drum Shop, which earned a thank-you in Introspective's liner notes. Ujusun quickly became the artistic focus. "Within a week, we had multiple songs on the go," Galpin said. "We had all the stuff set up, and we were putting together timelines and things. Most of that was Jamie, because I'm more of the ‘start a project, say I'm gonna do it, and then don't do it’ [type]. I think her confidence in our abilities was like… you know, for her it was like, why wouldn't we do this?"
The self-titled UJUSUN album came out as a digital-only release on October 31, 2021 after post-production work with Josh Eastman of the non-profit Helm Studios. Elkins plays a guitar feature – reuniting the indie-dream team – on the track "Hail Mary".
Galpin, like Abramzik, described how working with Lee was liberating. "Her creativity and willingness to go different places musically was really awesome. I would end up trying to box myself into a genre or what sounds ‘right’, whereas she's like, oh, let's add like a section that goes to drum-and-bass, or does this... It made it so much more interesting, and made the process so much more creative, and less analytical and critical."
Lee didn't slow down as a drummer after launching the duo. One month after releasing UJUSUN, Lee led one of five dates for the first-ever prominent Infidels Jazz series, which took place at Numbers Cabaret on Davie Street.
To my memory, Lee was jovial on the mic that night and played with a strong forte. Her face lit up when I mentioned the series. "Numbers gigs! That one was crazy. I just remember being so stressed about it, because it was with a different band [...] I think at that one, I tried to talk to every table, because I just really appreciated [them] coming and hearing us."
In 2022, Lee again played twice at the jazzfest. The first show was with Spindle! at Ocean Artworks. Then, on July 2, 2022, the Jamie Lee Trio played a free-of-charge outdoor set in central Lonsdale under the North Shore Jazz banner. This set was the final performance by Lee, Dekker, and Abramzik together to date.
Lee played in different configurations for Infidels throughout 2022. Her improvised set, subbing for another drummer, with trumpeter Feven Kidane and veteran bassist Clyde Reed was a departure from all she had done before:
Will Chernoff
Her next Infidels bookings as a leader sported fresh concepts. She led a Frankie's After Dark presentation (with Dekker and with Conrad Good on bass) of Britney Spears songs in June 2022, and in the fall, she returned to that series with three Spindle! bandmates – Wall, Elkins, and bassist Sydney Tough – to play Avril Lavigne's songs.
Wbile some traditionally-minded jazz players might have eyed them with skepticism, Lee ran with the themes. "Yeah, [Avril] with Kria, and Britney Spears was my trio," Lee said. "I was obsessed with Britney Spears […] For the Britney night, random people came into Frankie’s because they saw the sign that there was a jazz band playing Britney Spears tunes, and they loved it."
"And then Avril was my quote-unquote retirement gig."
Lee basically didn't play a show in 2023. (That said, I heard her at last year's jazzfest, playing in the Sister Jazz Quintet at Ocean Artworks on June 23, 2024. She even took a drum solo.) She embarked on a whole new career: she had attended music industry conferences, now she would attend other conferences in the video game industry. Two summers ago, she opened up about it here in her own words:
Jamie Lee
In our interview, I read back to Lee the conclusion she wrote for that piece. She reaffirmed the theme of burning out from the playing lifestyle. "It is hard being a musician. If I want to do that again, I probably could, but I'm actively choosing not to. That's been an ongoing challenge, honestly. It's hard. I just need to redefine my own definition of success, my own definition of happiness. What do I want, who am I as a person? I'm still very much in that process. I'm in my thirties and I heard it never gets easier, you just do that all throughout your life."
The pivot into game audio has helped her find that definition. "I'm still pursuing my game audio career. I love it so much. I left the company that I used to work at, last August, and I switched to freelancing. Currently I'm working with two clients [...] that's been keeping me really busy. And yeah, I am happy."
Galpin witnessed Lee's enthusiasm and confidence not just through Ujusun but in follow-on projects. "After we made the album," he said, "we started toying with the idea of getting into video game music and seeing what that was about, and it became an obsession for the two of us for a while. We sent plans back and forth for writing a sort of stock background music for games. And then she kind of pushed us off the deep end and was like, let's just do a game jam – which if you don't know what that is, it's where you make a video game in, like, 48 hours."
"We joined some people we had never met, online, and wrote music for a game that was not finished in time to finish the jam – though it did get finished. It was pretty janky, but we did it. And then we ended up sort of splitting off and doing our things after that. I got busy with teaching and she, on the other hand, went all-in on the video game sound effects world. Which goes to show you that she's such a go-getter, which is incredible."
Lee's spirit continues to buoy her collaborators from a distance. Abramzik has stepped out as a leader over the past year. "I’ve started my own band, with friends from the Vancouver community, that plays music that I compose – and covers that I pick and arrange. I don’t think I would have done that if it weren’t for Jamie."
And Ujusun is active, according to Lee. "Believe it or not, we're still talking about it. We are very slowly making music, and we want to make another album soon. We're just really busy, both of us. Life happened. But we still do send each other stuff, and Chad is my ride-or-die, you know? Producer, like partner."
"Yeah, I'm on the right track, I guess."
