Bill Lee, jazz bassist and composer, has died at the age of 94

Bill Lee, a jazz bassist and composer who scored his son Spike Lee’s early films, wrote folk jazz operas, led an acclaimed ensemble of bassists, and was a prolific sideman to Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and others, passed away at noon on Wednesday morning. his home in Brooklyn. He turned 94.

Spike Lee confirmed the death.

Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 record albums, Mr. Lee’s soft and exuberant string bass a pantheon of music stars, including Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.

mr. Lee wrote the soundtracks for Spike Lee’s first four feature films, a musical challenge calling for the independence of a romantic black woman to be captured in “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), a satirical look at life on a black college in “School Daze” (1988), racial violence in “Do the Right Thing” (1989), and the harrowing hardships of a black jazz musician in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990).

Bill Lee had small parts in all but “Do the Right Thing”, and Spike Lee’s sister, Joie, starred in all four roles. Bill Lee also scored an early Spike Lee short, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads”, the first student film to be released. exhibited at the 1983 New Directors/New Films Festival at Lincoln Center.

The feature films received mostly positive reviews and made significant profits. Bill and Spike Lee argued over family matters, money and other issues in the early 1990s, ending their partnership. Spike Lee’s later films – he directed more than 30 and starred in many himself – were scored by trumpeter Terence Blanchard.

Born into an Alabama family of musicians and teachers who instilled in him and his siblings a passion for music, Bill Lee learned drums, piano and flute early on. He attended segregated public schools in small towns and studied music at Atlanta’s historic Black Morehouse College.

Inspired in his early twenties by listening to the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, Mr. Lee played the double bass, the largest and lowest string instrument, and performed with small jazz groups in Atlanta and Chicago before moving to New York City in 1959. .

Over the next decade, Mr. Lee, who favored a battered straw hat and often recited his own poetry between songs, often performed in piano-bass duos and piano-bass-drum trios in smoky clubs that served soul food with jazz, many on the western edge of Greenwich Village, sandwiched between meat warehouses and truck depots on the banks of Manhattan’s Hudson River.

He recorded extensively on Strata-East Records, a label owned by musicians, and founded and conducted the New York Bass Violin Choir, a company of seven bass players, sometimes accompanied by piano or saxophone. Critics praised the ensemble for weaving a deft harmony of pastel and harsh moods when performing Mr. Lee at Town Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and the Newport Jazz Festival.

His numerous operas, including “One Mile East,” “The Depot,” and “Baby Sweets,” were based on people and events from his early life in the South. They sometimes enlisted the singing talents of Mr. Lee and his two sisters, Consuela Lee Moorehead, a jazz pianist and music teacher at Virginia’s Hampton University, and Grace Lee Mims, a librarian, whose voices added stilted color to the stories.

Reviewing a performance by the Violin Choir at the 1971 Newport Jazz Festival, John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Lee served as bassist, vocalist and narrator of his sketches of small town life in Snow Hill, Ala. He built both his stories and his music from a rich vein of folk sources. His team of bassists, hunched over their unwieldy instruments, produced ensemble passages that were by turns delightfully warm and singing or so startlingly light and airy you’d guess there were flutes in between.

In the 1970s, when the electric bass became a preferred instrument in many jazz ensembles because its booming tones matched the commercial sounds of jazz-rock fusion, Mr. Lee, an acoustic bass purist, and lost his job as a result. . “Some things you just can’t live with,” he told The Boston Globe in 1992. I knew I could never live with myself.”

Spike Lee explored the problem of commerce, with its racial implications, in “Mo’ Better Blues,” which starred Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter fighting exploitation by white club owners.

“Musicians are cheap slaves, while athletes and entertainers are expensive slaves,” Spike Lee told The Times when the film opened. “It’s their music, but it’s not their nightclub, it’s not their record company. They only understand the music, not the business, so they are treated old-fashioned.”

Despite other differences, Bill and Spike Lee agreed on integrity. “Everything I know about jazz comes from my father,” Spike Lee told The Times in 1990. “I saw his integrity, how he wouldn’t just play any kind of music no matter how much money he could make.”

William James Edwards Lee was born in Snow Hill on July 23, 1928 to Arnold Lee, a cornet player and band director at Florida A&M University, and Alberta Grace (Edwards) Lee, a classical concert pianist and teacher. In addition to his sisters Consuela and Grace, he had four other siblings, Clifton, Arnold Jr., Leonard, and Clarence.

Their maternal grandfather, William J. Edwards, a graduate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded a log cabin art school for black students in Snow Hill in 1893. In 1918, the Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute had 24 buildings and 300 buildings. up to 400 students pursuing academic subjects and vocational training. Mr Edwards died a few years later, but the Institute continued as a segregated state school until 1973 when it closed. Bill Lee graduated from there in the mid-1940s.

Mr. Lee and his first wife, Jacquelyn (Shelton) Lee, an art teacher, had five children: Shelton (Spike), Christopher, David, Joie, and Cinque. After Jacquelyn’s death in 1976, Mr. Lee with Susan Kaplan. They had a son, Arnold. Christopher died in 2013. Mr. Lee’s sister, Consuela, died in 2009 at the age of 83.

In addition to Spike Lee, his survivors include his wife; his sons David, Cinque and Arnold; his daughter Joie; and two grandchildren.

After arriving in New York, Mr. Lee settled in Fort Greene, a Brooklyn neighborhood that became a magnet for black musicians and other creative artists who took pride in their lifestyle and their art. The neighborhood was the setting for ‘She’s Gotta Have It’.

The Lee household, overlooking Fort Greene Park, had nearly banned television but was overrun with music, often with jam sessions going well into the night, leading to noise complaints from neighbors but spawning jazz artists who found their sound in the heart of Brooklyn.

During a 2008 interview with The Times at his home, Mr. Lee piano and double bass. “His music has the complex harmonies of bebop and hard bop, but it also has a sincere, down-home, churchy feel to it,” wrote reporter Corey Kilgannon. “His passages come in interesting and unexpected places, but they quickly dissolve in a way that is simple and heartfelt, earthy and somehow very satisfying.”