British folk singer Sam Lee jams with nightingales every spring

Nightingales are the jazz musicians of the bird world, said British folk singer and conservationist Sam Lee (right), who has jammed with the night-singing bird in the woods every spring over the past decade.

- Shawn Hoo

In a lecture performance at the Singapore Writers Festival on Nov 16, Lee went behind the scenes of his enchanting live experience event Singing With Nightingales – in which Lee and a guest musician perform with the little brown bird in the Sussex woodlands.

"When the nightingales are singing – and it's the males who are singing to find the female – they are so determined to be heard by the female and the other males that they don't get scared and fly off," says the author of The Nightingale: Notes On A Songbird (2021), a love letter to nature's musician.

When playing with his musicians in the woods one night, Lee recalls: "The bird started to change his tune and sing with us, and I realised that this was another musician who understood collaboration."