Bill Lee, Jazz Bassist and Composer, Is Dead at 94

Bill Lee, a jazz bassist and composer who scored the early movies 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 dwelling in Brooklyn. He was 94.

Spike Lee confirmed the dying.

Over six a long time, in hundreds of stay performances and on greater than 250 report albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied a pantheon of music stars, together with as nicely 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 4 function movies, a musical problem that referred to as for capturing the independence of a romantic Black lady in “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), a satirical have a look at life at a Black school 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 components in all however “Do the Right Thing,” and Spike Lee’s sister, Joie, had roles in all 4. Bill Lee additionally scored an early Spike Lee quick, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” the primary scholar movie to be showcased at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films Festival, in 1983.

The function movies received largely optimistic evaluations and reaped sizable income. Bill and Spike Lee had a falling-out within the early Nineteen Nineties, over household issues, cash and different points, that ended their collaboration. Later Spike Lee movies — he has directed greater than 30, showing in lots of them himself — have been scored by the trumpeter Terence Blanchard.

Born into an Alabama household of musicians and educators who instilled a ardour for music in him and his siblings, Bill Lee discovered drums, piano and flute early on. He attended segregated small-town public faculties and studied music at traditionally Black Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Inspired in his early 20s by listening to the nice jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, Mr. Lee mastered the double bass, the biggest and lowest-pitched stringed instrument, and carried out with small jazz teams in Atlanta and Chicago earlier than migrating to New York City in 1959.

Over the following decade, Mr. Lee, who favored a battered straw hat and infrequently recited his personal poetry between numbers, carried out typically in piano-bass duos and piano-bass-drums trios in smoky golf equipment that served soul meals with jazz, many on the western fringe of Greenwich Village, squeezed amongst meatpacking homes and trucking depots on Manhattan’s Hudson River shoreline.

He recorded extensively on Strata-East Records, a musician-owned label, and based and directed the New York Bass Violin Choir, a troupe of seven basses, generally accompanied by piano or saxophone. Critics lauded the ensemble for weaving an agile concord of pastel and harsh moods in performing Mr. Lee’s people operas at Town Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival.

His quite a few operas, together with “One Mile East,” “The Depot” and “Baby Sweets,” have been based mostly on folks and occasions from his formative years within the South. They generally drew on the singing skills of Mr. Lee and his two sisters, Consuela Lee Moorehead, a jazz pianist and music trainer at Hampton University in Virginia, and Grace Lee Mims, a librarian, whose voices lent grandiloquent colour to the tales.

In a evaluation of a efficiency by the Violin Choir on 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 Nineteen Seventies, when the electrical bass turned an instrument of alternative in lots of jazz ensembles as a result of its thumping tones suited the business sounds of jazz-rock fusion, Mr. Lee, an acoustic bass purist, refused to go alongside and misplaced work in consequence. “Some things you just can’t live with,” he instructed 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 issue of commercialism, with its racial implications, in “Mo’ Better Blues,” which starred Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who fights exploitation by white membership homeowners.

“Musicians are low-priced slaves, whereas athletes and entertainers are high-priced slaves,” Spike Lee instructed The Times when the movie 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 different variations, Bill and Spike Lee agreed about integrity. “Everything I know about jazz I got from my father,” Spike Lee instructed 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 participant and band director at Florida A&M University, and Alberta Grace (Edwards) Lee, a classical live performance pianist and trainer. In addition to his sisters Consuela and Grace, he had 4 different siblings, Clifton, Arnold Jr., Leonard and Clarence.

Their maternal grandfather, William J. Edwards, a graduate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, based a log-cabin arts college for Black college students in Snow Hill in 1893. By 1918, the Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute had 24 buildings and 300 to 400 college students pursuing educational topics and vocational coaching. Mr. Edwards died just a few years later, however the institute survived as a segregated public college till 1973, when it closed. Bill Lee graduated from there within the mid-Nineteen Forties.

Mr. Lee and his first spouse, Jacquelyn (Shelton) Lee, an artwork trainer, had 5 youngsters: Shelton (Spike), Christopher, David, Joie and Cinque. After Jacquelyn’s dying 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.

In addition to Spike Lee, his survivors embody his spouse; 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 turned a magnet for Black musicians and different inventive artists who took delight of their existence and their artwork. The neighborhood was the setting for “She’s Gotta Have It.”

The Lee family, overlooking Fort Greene Park, all however banished tv however was awash in music, typically with jam periods that went late into the evening, prompting noise complaints from neighbors however spawning jazz artists who discovered their sounds within the coronary heart of Brooklyn.

During a 2008 interview with The Times at his dwelling, Mr. Lee performed 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.”