Bill Lee, bassist and composer of son Spike Lee’s films
NEW YORK>> Bill Lee, a jazz bassist and composer who scored the early films of his son Spike Lee, wrote folk- jazz operas, led an acclaimed ensemble of bassists and was a prolific sideman for Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and others, died Wednesday morning at his home in Brooklyn. He was 94. Spike Lee confirmed the death.
Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 albums, Bill Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied 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.
Lee wrote the soundtracks for Spike Lee’s first four feature films, a musical challenge that called for capturing the independence of a romantic Black woman in “She’s Gotta Have It” ( 1986), a satirical look at life at a Black college in “School Daze” ( 1988), racial violence in “Do the Right Thing” ( 1989) and the poignant 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, had roles in all four. Bill Lee also scored an early Spike Lee short, “Joe’s BedStuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” the first student film to be showcased at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/ New Films Festival, in 1983.
The feature films won largely positive reviews and reaped sizable profits. Bill and Spike Lee had a fallingout in the early 1990s, over family matters, money and other issues that ended their collaboration. Later Spike Lee films — he has directed more than 30, appearing in many of them himself — were scored by trumpet er Terence Blanchard.
Born into an Alabama family of musicians and educators who instilled a passion for music in him and his siblings, Bill Lee learned drums, piano and flute early on. He attended segregated smalltown public schools and studied music at historically Black Morehouse College in Atlanta.
Inspired in his early 20s by listening to the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, Lee mastered the double bass, the largest and lowestpitched stringed instrument, and performed with small jazz groups in Atlanta and Chicago before migrating to New York City in 1959.
Over the next decade,
Lee, who favored a battered straw hat and often recited his own poetry between numbers, performed often in piano- bass duos and pianobass- drums trios in smoky clubs that served soul food with jazz, many on the western edge of Greenwich Village.
In the 1970s, when the electric bass became an instrument of choice in many jazz ensembles because its thumping tones suited the commercial sounds of jazzrock fusion, Lee, an acoustic bass purist, refused to go along and lost work as a result. “Some things you just can’t live with,” he told The Boston Globe in 1992. “Just thinking about doing it, my gut reaction hit me so hard in the stomach. I knew I could never live with myself.”
Spike Lee explored the problem of commercialism, with its racial implications, in “Mo’ Better Blues,” which starred Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who fights exploitation by white club owners.
Despite other differences, Bill and Spike Lee agreed about integrity. “Everything I know about jazz I got from my father,” Spike Lee told the Times in 1990. “I saw his integrity, how he was not going to play just any kind of music, no matter how much money he could make.”