16 Facts About Everett Lee

Everett Astor Lee was an American symphonic conductor, opera music director, violinist and music scholar.

Everett Lee moved with his parents to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1927 as part of the Great Migration.

Everett Lee studied violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he received a Ranney Scholarship.

Everett Lee was selected to be an aviation cadet at Tuskegee Army Airfield, one of the air fields for the elite African American pilot squad known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

In 1943, Everett Lee was asked to join the orchestra of the Broadway musical Carmen Jones, an all-black contemporary retelling of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen.

Everett Lee played violin in the pit and performed the oboe onstage in one scene; he was one of only two African-American musicians in the orchestra.

Leonard Bernstein saw a performance of Carmen Jones with Everett Lee leading the orchestra and asked him to become the permanent conductor of his musical On the Town.

When Everett Lee joined the show in September 1945, he was celebrated for being the first African American to regularly conduct a Broadway musical.

In 1946, Everett Lee won a Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award to conduct at Tanglewood, and played first violin in the New York City Symphony, conducted by Bernstein.

Everett Lee served as director of Columbia University's opera department in the early 1950s and traveled to Europe on a Fulbright scholarship.

In 1953, Everett Lee served as a guest conductor of the Louisville Orchestra, becoming the first African American to conduct a white symphony orchestra in the American South.

Everett Lee was a conductor at Carnegie Hall in New York City with the Symphony of the New World and the American Symphony Orchestra from 1969 to 1983.

Everett Lee was a speaker on the program for the Tribute to Sylvia Olden Everett Lee, Master Musician and Teacher concert at Carnegie Hall on June 29,2017.

Everett Lee conducted nearly 1,000 orchestral pieces, about 100 choral and operatic works and two Broadway works in the United States, Europe and South America.

Everett Lee married the accompanist and vocal coach Sylvia Olden in 1944.

At the time of his death, Everett Lee lived in Malmo, Sweden, where he died on January 12,2022, at the age of 105.