Thomas Oboe Lee has been played on NTS shows including Perfect Lives w/ Bruno & Daniel, with The Mad Frog! (1974) first played on 20 April 2025.

Thomas Oboe Lee was born in Beijing, China, in 1945. He and his family left Communist China in 1949, and lived in the former British Colony Hong Kong for ten years until 1959 when he moved to São Paulo, Brazil. He emigrated to the USA in the summer of 1966.

His musical education began in Brazil during the Bossa Nova craze. He performed as a jazz flutist with many illustrious Brazilian musicians, including the singer/song-writer Chico Buarque de Hollanda. He continued his music education in the United States at the University of Pittsburgh, the New England Conservatory of Music and Harvard University. He has been a professor of music at Boston College since the fall of 1990.

In 1981, he and five other composers from the New England Conservatory formed a composers group called "Composers in Red Sneakers." The group produced a number of successful concerts in the Boston-Cambridge area. Lee left the group in 1986 to live in Italy for a year when he won the Rome Prize Fellowship. Subsequently, Lee's music has won many other awards and Fellowships: two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowships, the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, First Prize at the 1983 Friedheim Kennedy Center Awards for his Third String Quartet … child of Uranus, father of Zeus, and recording grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.

Lee has composed over a hundred works: six symphonies, ten string quartets, concerti for various instruments, choral works, song cycles and scores of chamber works. Some of his early works, originally published by Margun Music Inc., have since been transferred to G. Schirmer Inc./Associated Music Publishers. The majority of his recent orchestral music is available for rental and sale from the Theodore Presser Company. The rest - choral, vocal and chamber music - is self-published under the moniker "Departed Feathers Music." His music has been recorded on Nonesuch, MCA Classics, Koch International Classics, BMG Catalyst, Arsis Audio, Northeastern and Gunther Schuller's GM Recordings, Inc.

His most popular work, "Morango … Almost A Tango," written for and recorded by the Kronos Quartet, has been used in dance by choreographers like Michael Tracy for Pilobolus (dance company), Jiri Kylian for the Netherlands Dance Theater, Danny Rosseel for the Royal Ballet of Flanders, Nicolo Fonte for the Pacific Northwest Ballet and Australian Ballet, Carolyn Carlson for the Cullberg Ballet of Sweden, Olivia Rosenkrantz for Tapage - a tap duo, et al. Additionally, "Morango …" was used as a sound track for "Call It Sleep" - a documentary on Henry Roth.

Lee has recently ventured into the world of opera. His two-act chamber opera, "The Inman Diaries," (libretto by Jesse J. Martin) about the infamous Boston diarist Arthur Crew Inman was produced and premiered in Boston in 2007 by Intermezzo - The New England Chamber Opera Series. His on-going opera-in-progress is "Oscar Wilde … An Opera in Two Acts."

Also known for only wearing yellow socks, and dancing ballet five days a week.