Lee Baby Simms

When deciding upon a name for his musical project, Lee Baby Simms went a step further and created a myth to go along with it. Inspired by the film Down By Law , Simms discovered the perfect source of creativity and legend to create a musical body of work. Taking influence from film composers of the sixties (John Barry, Ennio Morricone, Lalo Schifrin, Jerry Goldsmith) experimental artists from the last several decades (Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, Tom Waits, Marc Ribot, Barry Adamson, Mick Harvey, Roland Howard) to more recent avatars (David Holmes, Kevin Shields, Tricky...) Simms expands on a genre focused more on mood than pop formulas.

So who's the real Lee Baby Simms? Is he the famed 60's DJ from Detroit? Is he the ne'er-do-well played by Tom Waits in the movie Down By Law ? Is he a character in Salman Rushdie's novel, The Ground Beneath her Feet ? Or is he a musician based in Portland, OR who's been playing music in one form or another for over twenty years, studying with aging jazzers like Archie Schepp and Yuseff Lateef or performing in experimental bands from Boston and Portland? Maybe he's a film fanatic with a penchant for the noir era and German Expressionism. Or a music fiend into everything from Mingus to the Flaming Lips, and all stops in between. Maybe he's held every kind of job working as music director and DJ, a literary editor, or at a record label putting out albums by John Fahey, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Cobain and Gus Van Sant.

But what really matters isn't who he is, but what the music sounds like: the sound of weary eyes looking out of the windows of an aging Buick rumbling through the desert with no other purpose than to get across, the soundtrack for the lost thoughts and images that cross your mind on a midnight bus trip, the sound of a bar in the middle of Havana at 3am, the sound of standing by the side of the road in the middle of the night waiting for a ride that's never coming, the sound of being lost in a world where no one sees, hears or understands you, the sound of anonymity, the sound of invisibility.