# Bill Lee scored the early films of his son Spike Lee, wrote folk-jazz operas, dies at 94: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/06/02/bill-lee-scored-the-early-films-of-his-son-spike-lee-wrote-folk-jazz-operas-dies-at-94-video-photos/
- Published: 2023-06-02T00:02:34+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Bill Lee, bassist and composer of son Spike Lee’s films, dies at 94. He accompanied
a wide range of jazz and folk musicians and scored “She’s Gotta Have It,” “School
Daze” “Do the Right Thing” and “Mo’ Better Blues.”**

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 on 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 record albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied
a pantheon of music stars, including as well 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 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).

![In Memoriam: Bill Lee – No Treble](https://i0.wp.com/www.notreble.com/wp-content/
uploads/2023/05/Bill-Lee.jpeg?w=640&ssl=1)

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
Bed-Stuy 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 falling-out 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 the trumpeter 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 small-town 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,
Mr. Lee mastered the double bass, the largest and lowest-pitched stringed instrument,
and performed with small jazz groups in Atlanta and Chicago before migrating 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 numbers, performed often in piano-bass duos and piano-bass-
drums trios in smoky clubs that served soul food with jazz, many on the western 
edge of Greenwich Village, squeezed among meatpacking houses and trucking depots
on Manhattan’s Hudson River shoreline.

⌊The New York Bass Violin Choir: Bill Lee - Jazz da Gama⌉⌊The New York Bass Violin
Choir: Bill Lee - Jazz da Gama⌉

He recorded extensively on Strata-East Records, a musician-owned label, and founded
and directed the New York Bass Violin Choir, a troupe of seven basses, sometimes
accompanied by piano or saxophone. Critics lauded the ensemble for weaving an agile
harmony of pastel and harsh moods in performing Mr. Lee’s folk operas 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 drew
on the singing talents of Mr. Lee and his two sisters, Consuela Lee Moorehead, a
jazz pianist and music teacher at Hampton University in Virginia, and Grace Lee 
Mims, a librarian, whose voices lent grandiloquent color to the tales.

In a review of a performance by the Violin Choir at the Newport Jazz Festival in
1971, John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Lee served as bassist, singer
and narrator of his sketches of small-town life in Snow Hill, Ala., building both
his stories and his music from a rich vein of folk sources. His team of bassists,
bending over their unwieldy instruments, produced ensemble passages that were by
turns gorgeously warm and singing or so surprisingly light and airy that one suspected
a couple of flutes might be hiding among them.”

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 jazz-rock fusion,
Mr. 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,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io8Jw9BRRFY) which starred
Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who fights exploitation by white club owners.

“Musicians are low-priced slaves, whereas athletes and entertainers are high-priced
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 have an understanding only
of the music, not of the business, so they get treated any old way.”

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.”

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 arts school for Black students in Snow Hill
in 1893. By 1918, the Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute had 24 buildings
and 300 to 400 students pursuing academic subjects and vocational training. Mr. 
Edwards died a few years later, but the institute survived as a segregated public
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 married Susan Kaplan. They had one son, Arnold. Christopher died in
2013. Mr. Lee’s sister Consuela died at 83 in 2009, and his sister Grace Lee Mims
died at 89 in 2019.

![Bill Lee, jazz musician who worked with Bob Dylan and on son Spike Lee's early
movies, dies at 94 | Hollywood – Gulf News](https://i0.wp.com/imagevars.gulfnews.
com/2023/05/25/Bill-Lee_18851e5a489_large.jpg?resize=640%2C480&ssl=1)

In addition to Spike Lee, he is survived by his wife; his sons David, Cinque and
Arnold; his daughter, Joie; a brother, A. Clifton Lee; 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 lifestyles and their art. The neighborhood was the setting for “She’s Gotta
Have It.”

The Lee household, overlooking Fort Greene Park, all but banished television but
was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night, prompting
noise complaints from neighbors but spawning jazz artists who found their sounds
in the heart of Brooklyn.

During a 2008 interview with The Times at his home, Mr. Lee played 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,” the reporter Corey Kilgannon wrote. “His passages
move in interesting and unexpected places, but they resolve before long in a way
that is simple and sincere, earthy and somehow very satisfying.”

An earlier version of a picture caption with this obituary misstated the surname
of the pianist shown performing with Mr. Lee and the drummer Joe Hunt in the saxophonist
John Handy’s quartet. He is Don Friedman, not Freeman.

Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk and the winner of the
1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He joined The Times in May 1961 and
is also the co-author of two books.

Bill Lee in an undated portrait by his son David Lee, a photographer. Over six decades
his ebullient string bass could be heard in thousands of live performances and on
more than 250 record albums. 

![A black and white portrait of Mr. Lee sitting on a folding chair in a large room
at his home. His string bass is leaning against a bare plaster wall behind him. 
He wears an ivy cap, a light-colored pullover short-sleeve shirt and white pants.
An ornate hanging ceiling light fixture can be seen at upper left. ](https://i0.
wp.com/static01.nyt.com/images/2023/05/25/multimedia/24Lee-bill10-hmbf-print1/24Lee-
bill10-hmbf-articleLarge.jpg?resize=640%2C648&ssl=1)

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