Some 206 Zulu readers will be familiar with our Always Remembered series, a tradition we carry each year where we take time to hold space for people within Hip Hop and its peripheral communities who passed on over the course of the preceding year. In the past, this remembrance has taken the form of an annual video episode of our Meeting of the Minds podcast. For 2024, we’ll be sharing these memories in a different way.
Over the course of this year, we’ll be sharing a written commemoration of some of these influential members of our greater community, one at a time. We know that the act of remembrance is a tremendous power we have to keep our predecessors and ancestors alive through our collective voice. In that grain, keep posted for our ongoing series of brief stories looking into the lives of some of the fascinating people that transcended their physical frames in the course of 2023. And if any of these individuals have impacted you in any way, remember, your retelling of these stories will keep them alive in perpetuity. This is Always Remembered…
Bill Lee
William James Edwards Lee III aka Bill Lee was known for many things in his long life. He was a jazz bassist who played his double bass with an eclectic host of pivotal figures in music history not often found on the same list. He collaborated with artists whose names have become iconic in genres ranging from jazz and soul to rock and folk music. Some of those names include Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Harry Belafonte, Aretha Franklin, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. He’s also known for the work that he did with his son, the filmmaker Spike Lee. Bill died in his home in Brooklyn on May 24, 2023 at the age of 94.
Over the course of his life, Bill Lee worked extensively with his son, beginning with Spike Lee’s film-school thesis project, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. He would go on to write the soundtracks for Spike Lee’s first four feature films, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), and the story of hardships in the life of a jazz musician in Mo’ Better Blues (1990).
In an interview once, Spike said about his father, “I saw his integrity, how he was not going to play just any kind of music, no matter how much money he could make.”
We remember Bill Lee not only for his own accomplishments and innovations in the music he wrote and performed, but he also provides a contemplation on how we regard the parents of famous artists. A son of two musicians himself, he along with his wife Jacquelyn Lee who died of cancer at the early age of 41, passed the love of the arts along to their children. Along with finding joy in art, he held a line which represents a precedent for music to mean more than financial profit or public accolades. The act of keeping art and freedom alive through generations of a family line is an incredible accomplishment in itself. Doing so in a way that passes values along with the art is a potential gift to the future. As we inherit that world, we remember Bill Lee.