Album Notes

2006 LEE AARON BIO

“Lee Aaron has pulled off one of the biggest musical transformations… while it may be hard for some to believe that Aaron could tread so confidently in so many jazzy sub genres, the fact is, she did.”
Globe And Mail

“While her peers are content to get fat and play “Classic Rock” festivals, Lee Aaron was aging more gracefully into a jazz singer….Beautiful Things winds it’s way through pop, jazz, torch, lounge and blues like a well laid out buffet. Most importantly it shows that she is still learning and growing as an artist.”
Stylus Magazine

To sum up Lee Aaron’s career in one page is a difficult task. She is an award winning singer, songwriter and performer and over the course of her career has been nominated for eight Juno Awards, won the CMPA Songwriters Award, a Much Music Video Award, three Toronto Music Awards, and an Ampex Golden Reel Award. In addition, she has graced the covers of an assortment of international magazines - TV Guide, Melody Maker and Sounds - to name three - and topped dozens of music-polls.
As a young girl, she sang jazz and Broadway standards in local Toronto choir and community theatre yet ironically, this painfully shy girl who hung around in the music room after school to study and practice went on to become a world-renowned rock diva.
Aaron was discovered singing in a musical production at the age of fifteen and was asked to join a local rock band playing keys and back-up vocals. Naïve and fresh out of school at 17 – with honors and two scholarships – things moved quickly…..Aaron met the man who became her first manager and within a year he had replaced her entire band and proceeded to groom the unknowing Aaron into a sultry pin-up girl. By nineteen she had written and recorded her first album as well as created quite an industry buzz, yet, despite the attention, she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the image that had been created for her. Two years later she walked out on her management deal but continued to write and record with Attic/A&M records embarking on a new phase of her career that saw nine album releases, radio and video hits, multi-platinum sales, world tours and many accolades over the next decade.
By the mid – nineties, frustrated at the residual perception that defined her as a one-dimensional ‘rock chick,’ Aaron decided to take a year long hiatus from the music business. She resurfaced in ’97 on the West Coast, performing cool jazz and blues material in intimate club settings. The metamorphosis surprised fans and industry insiders alike with it’s unpretentious charm - and in 2000 Lee released her 10th disc, Slick Chick to glowing reviews. Videos for ‘Why Don’t You Do Right’ and ‘I’d Love To’ charted in the Top 10 on The Bravo Countdown and Slick Chick was subsequently released in Europe and South America followed by a nine country tour.
Slowly, perceptions began to change and the industry eventually started hailing Aaron as a pioneer and icon. Chart Magazine rated Lee’s 1989’s release BodyRock as one of the ‘10 most influential albums of the 1980’s’ - citing Shania Twain and Alanis Morrisette as artists influenced by Aaron’s sound and image. In 2005 Much More Music named Aaron one of the 20 Best Rocker Chicks of all time, alongside such luminaries as Janis Joplin, Avril Lavigne and Patti Smith.
Her newest disc Beautiful Things is her most creative and personal work to date seamlessly blending jazz, roots and pop. A brilliant collection of originals and select covers, Beautiful Things features some of Canada’s finest musicians including acclaimed piano whiz Michael Kaeshammer. Aaron is one of the rare artists who has survived those awkward early career years and transcend an image that never did her talent justice, evolving into an artist of grace and distinction…..

“Beautiful Things features Lee Aaron producing music of rare beauty that not only captures the power, range and sensitivity of her invincible voice but successfully melds her rock, blues and jazz influences.” Larry LeBlanc, Billboard

“Such canny choices in collaborators and material and such tasteful production, add up to a varied and very cool pop record. Beautiful Things proves that at this point in her career, we underestimate Aaron at our own risk.”
Georgia Straight