Jazz bassist and composer, he wrote early film scores for his son Spike Lee, wrote folk-jazz operas, led an acclaimed ensemble of bassists, and was the prolific author of Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin. Legendary sideman Bill Lee died Wednesday morning. his home in Brooklyn. he was 94 years old.
Spike Lee confirmed dead.
Over 60 years, thousands of live performances and over 250 recorded albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow, frenetic string bass has played with Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon & Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian and Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, Peter, Paul, Mary.
Lee wrote the soundtracks for Spike Lee’s first four feature films, including “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), a musical challenge that expresses the independence of a romantic black woman. Gotta Have It (1986) satirically portrays life in a black college. School Daze (1988), racial violence in Do the Right Thing (1989), black jazz in Mo ‘Better Blues (1990) and her musician’s painful suffering.
Bill Lee played bit parts in all but “Do the Right Thing,” and Spike Lee’s sister, Joy, appeared in all four films. Bill Lee also composed the music for Spike Lee’s early short film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, which was his first student film. Exhibited 1983, Lincoln Center New Director/Newcomer Film Festival.
The feature films garnered generally positive reviews and made large profits. Bill and Spike Lee fell out in the early 1990s over family issues, money and other issues, which ended their collaboration. The music for subsequent Spike Lee films (Spike Lee directed more than 30 films, many of which he also appeared in) was composed by trumpeter Terrence Blanchard.
Born in Alabama to a family of musicians and educators who instilled in him and his siblings a passion for music, Bill Lee learned drums, piano and flute at an early age. He attended public schools in a segregated small town and studied music at historic Blackmorehouse College in Atlanta.
Inspired by listening to the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker in his early twenties, Mr. Lee mastered the double bass, the loudest and lowest of any stringed instrument, and lived in Atlanta until moving to New York City in 1959. and played with a small jazz group in Chicago. .
For the next decade, Lee, who preferred a tattered straw hat and often recited his own poetry between songs, played piano and bass duos and piano and bass in smoky clubs serving soul food and jazz. Often played in a drum trio. Located on the shores of the Hudson River in Manhattan, on the western edge of Greenwich Village, between a meat factory and a truck warehouse.
He recorded extensively for the musician-owned label Strata East Records, and founded and conducted the New York Bass Violin Choir, a seven-man bass troupe sometimes accompanied by piano and saxophone. . Critics say the ensemble weaves agile harmonies of pastels and grim moods as it presents Lee’s folk operas at the Town Hall, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival. praised what he did.
Many of his operas, including “One Mile East,” “The Depot,” and “Baby Sweets,” are based on the people and events of his childhood in the South. They sometimes draw on the singing talents of Mr. Lee and her two sisters, Consuela Lee Moorhead, a jazz pianist and music teacher at Hampton University in Virginia, and Grace Lee Mims, a librarian, and they ‘s voice added a magnificent color to the story.
John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote of the violin choir’s performance at the 1971 Newport Jazz Festival: Lee served as bassist, singer, and narrator on sketches depicting small-town life in Snow Hill, Alabama, constructing the story and music from a wealth of folklore sources. His team of bassists alternates between crouching over awkward instruments, singing gorgeously warmly, and ensemble passages so astonishingly light and airy that you’d suspect a few flutes are hiding there. rice field. “
In the 1970s, when the electric bass became the instrument of choice for many jazz ensembles, Lee, a purely acoustic bass player, chose the electric bass because its intense tone suited the commercial sound of jazz-rock fusion. I refused to follow the base and lost my job as a result. . “Sometimes it’s unbearable,” he told The Boston Globe in 1992. I knew I could never live with myself. “
Spike Lee considered the problem of commercialism with its racial implications: “Mo Better Blues” Denzel Washington plays a jazz trumpeter fighting exploitation by white club owners.
“Musicians are low-cost slaves, but athletes and entertainers are high-cost slaves,” Spike Lee told The Times at the time of the film’s release. “This is their music, but it’s not their nightclub, it’s not their record company. They only understand music, they don’t understand business, so it’s treated the old way.” .”
Despite other differences, Bill and Spike Lee agreed on honesty. “Everything I know about jazz came from his father,” Spike Lee told The Times in 1990. “I saw his honesty. He wasn’t going to play any kind of music, no matter how much money he made.”
William James Edwards Lee was born on July 23, 1928 in Snow Hill between Florida A&M University cornetist and band director Arnold Lee and classical concert pianist and teacher Alberta Grace (Edwards) Lee. was born in Besides his sisters Consuela and Grace, he had four siblings: Clifton, Arnold Jr., Leonard and Clarence.
Their maternal grandfather, William J. Edwards, was an alumnus of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and founded a log cabin art school for black students in Snow Hill in 1893. By 1918, the Snow Hill Normal Industrial Institute had 24 buildings and 300 buildings. To 400 students undergoing academic or vocational training. Edwards died a few years later, but the institute continued as a segregated public school until it closed in 1973. Bill Lee graduated there in his mid-1940s.
Lee and his first wife, art teacher Jacqueline (Shelton) Lee, had five children: Shelton (Spike), Christopher, David, Joye and Cinque. After Jacqueline’s death in 1976, Lee married Susan Kaplan. They had one son named Arnold. Christopher passed away in 2013. Lee’s sister, Consuela, died in 2009 at the age of 83.
Besides Spike Lee, he has a wife. his sons David, Tink and Arnold; his daughter, Joey; Brother A. Clifton Lee. and two grandchildren.
After arriving in New York, Lee settled in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Fort Greene has become a magnet for black musicians and other creative artists who take pride in their lifestyle and art. This neighborhood was the setting for her “She’s Gotta Have It”.
In the Lee home, overlooking Fort Green Park, television was largely banned, but music was plentiful, often with late-night jam sessions, and neighbors complained of noise. A jazz artist was born to find their sound in the heart.
During an interview with The Times at his home in 2008, Lee played piano and double bass. “His music has complex bebop and hard bop harmonies, but also has a sincere, homely, churchy feel,” wrote reporter Cory Kilgannon. “His writings move to interesting, unexpected places, but eventually resolve in simple, sincere, naive, and somehow very satisfying ways.”
