Lee Lessack has been lauded as ­­“The best male cabaret singer to come along since Michael Feinstein,” by the Chicago Tribune and “One of the best singers around.” by London’s Cabaret Showcase. He is a force to be reckoned with in the world of vocal performers, and yet, beyond being a performer, he is also a successful entrepreneur. He is the man behind LML Music, an independent label that he founded in 1996, because, as he says, “I needed a label for my own album.” Today, it is a well-established player in the music industry, distributing for over a hundred vocalists associated with Broadway, cabaret and jazz.

Lessack also manages to balance his business duties with his creative output and released a new album entitled Chanteur in ­­­­August 2011. “This album was born out of a concert that was written for me, by Brian Lane Greene, the Tony nominee, and wonderful actor and singer” describes Lessack, “I said to him, ‘I need a new show,’ and he came up with this concept. It’s an homage to the great French songbook, but the show is all about the fact that so many of the songs we consider American standards – like the song “She” – a lot of people think Elvis Costello wrote it for the movie Notting Hill, but it was actually written by Charles Asnavour. So the show that I do is all about shining a spotlight on this material and how it has been woven into the pages of the great American songbook and how it has influenced the great American singers.”

Lessack grew up in Philadelphia in a musical home, influenced at a young age by a grandmother a professional singer and his mother, who was under contract by the Philadelphia Opera Company for 20 years. Despite this, Lessack describes himself as a late-bloomer: “I didn’t really discover my voice until my late twenties. I always sang and I could always get cast in a show but I didn’t find the uniqueness of my voice until late.” Lessack says, recalling the moment in L.A. when he had his breakthrough as a singer, “In that moment, for whatever reason, it was sort of like the music, mind, heart connection all came together. From that moment on I never sang the same. I felt like I had something to offer that no one else can offer – I felt like it was my unique spin, and that was the beginning for me.”

In 1982 Lee Lessack moved from Philadelphia to New York City, but the hustle and bustle of the city didn’t keep him there for long. “I think the west coast, for me – it feels like everything is more of a possibility. There’s such a producer consciousness, because everyone is producing something, it seems – maybe it just gave me permission to kind of run with things, that in New York, I may not have.” While Lessack truly discovered his voice after his move to Los Angeles, he still has a connection to New York City as a performer, “The energy that is New York is undeniable; there’s nothing like it. When I do perform in Manhattan, the bar is just higher because there’s such a wealth of talent in entertainment there, and there’s so much available. So I would say that the stuff I’ve done in New York, they are some of the most thrilling performance moments because they’re kind of surreal.”

Lessack continues to tour and perform throughout North America and Europe, though he has moved on from his beginnings in the cabaret to performing arts centres, where his audiences are graced by his moving voice and his determination to tell the story of every song he sings. “You can sing anything if that’s the message that needs to be told,” says Lessack, “you tell it. You figure out how.”

Find more information on Lee Lessack and his latest album, Chanteur, at www.leelessack.com or at www.lmlmusic.com

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