Tony Williams Biography

When Tony Williams swings, the world listens. An entire generation of drummers -- including elite kickers like Dennis Chambers, Simon Phillips, Steve Smith and Vinnie Colaiuta, to name but a few -- have publicly acknowledged their debt to this consummate master of his art. As an integral member of some of the music's most influential ensembles, Tony's fierce attack and uncompromising musical intellect have helped define the parameters of modern Jazz. A prodigy who has fully delivered his promise, Tony's powerful style honed on the bandstands of the masters has impacted the elemental nature of the Jazz rhythm section.

Born December 12, 1945 in Chicago, Tony Williams moved to Boston with his family while still a toddler. His father, a saxophone-playing postal worker, turned his pot-banging son Tony onto a Slingerland Radio King drum set at the age of 8. After studying with percussion guru Alan Dawson, Tony Williams was tapped to record with saxophonist Sam Rivers and the Boston Improvisational Ensemble. From the start, the precocious drummer was acclaimed an innovator on his instrument, recruited to New York with alto saxophonist Jackie McLean when he was only 16. Tony Williams' playing with McLean led to the ultimate Jazz accolade, an invitation to join the Miles Davis Quartet. Describing Williams as "the type of drummer who only comes along every thirty years," trumpeter Miles Davis, then at the height of his artistic and commercial success, teamed Williams with bassist Ron Carter and keyboardist Herbie Hancock, forming what was to be called "the greatest rhythm section of all time." First assembled for the 1963 quintet album "Seven Steps to Heaven," it was during this collaboration that the drummer provided the rhythmic backbone for thirteen of Miles Davis' most influential classic recordings, among them, "Nefertiti," "Miles Smiles" "My Funny Valentine," and the groundbreaking "In a Silent Way."

By the late 1960s, Williams was opening stylistic doors with his own powerful rock trio, "Tony Williams Lifetime," featuring guitar great John McLaughlin, organist Larry Young and bassist Jack Bruce. Inspired by an amalgam of sources from guitarist Jimi Hendrix to the organ trios of Jimmy Smith, Williams' forceful, take-no-prisoners style of play behind the set was to inspire the development of what was to be known as Jazz/rock fusion. "I got into Jimi Hendrix and Cream back then," Williams told a reporter in 1992, "and that was some of the stuff that infuenced me when I decided to leave Miles in 1969. I wanted to create a different atmosphere than I had been in, so I said, 'What better way than to go electric?'" Lifetime's elements -- free improvisation using rock rhythms and complex modal improvisation in an electronic setting -- were soon to be adapted by fusion's foremost exponents: John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea's Return to Forever, and the trio, Weather Report.

In 1975, Tony Williams formed "The New Tony Williams Lifetime," recording three albums for Columbia with Alan Holdsworth, Allen Pasqua and Tony Newton, receiving a 1979 Grammy nomination. Moving from New York to San Francisco in 1977, throughout the next decades Tony Williams was to reach out to a variety of settings including teaching and composing while playing his signature yellow kit with his own groups and the top innovators in Jazz. Williams recorded with the Gil Evans orchestra, his composition, "There Comes a Time," becoming the album's title track. As a member of the highly-touted 1992 "Tribute to Miles Davis" tour, Tony Williams was re-united with Miles Davis Quintet members Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and saxophonist Wayne Shorter. "The Tribute to Miles Davis" won a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Record in 1994. With lightning-speed cymbal work, rhythmic rings and loop-de- loops, the Blue Note recordings "Story of Neptune" and "Tokyo Live" presented Williams in a hard-driving, hard-bop quintet.

An unabashed exponent of the drummers' art, Williams is no apologist for his potent physicality. "Drums are supposed to be played loud, they're supposed to be played soft, and they're supposed to be played medium. The volume and dynamics are part of the vocabulary of the drums." Not only a significant factor in the increasing solo prominence of drummers in modern ensembles, Williams has also enhanced the polyrhythmic complexity of the drummer's role. Developing from influences like Max Roach, Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones, Williams trained each of his limbs to act as an independent unit, carrying a powerful pulse to the beat of varying and often complex time signatures. Remarkably, his music retains the steady backbeat while providing stylistic innovation and exploration.

In the early '80, Tony Williams' studies in classical composition with the University of California at Berkeley's Dr. Robert Greenberg and later David Sheinfeld, Ollie Wilson and Anthony Kelley led to Williams' development as a composer. In 1990, Williams was commissioned to write a piece for string quartet, piano and drums which was performed in San Francisco at the Herbst Theatre. With Herbie Hancock on piano and the Kronos Quartet as the string quartet, Rituals: Music for String Quartet, Piano, Drums and Cymbals was a highly- acclaimed compositional debut, a night Williams described as "the biggest night of my career." In 1995, he received the Arthur M. Solkat Board of Directors Award from Bay Area Music Magazine.

"I just think Tony hears things differently from most people," pianist and quintet member Mulgrew Miller has said of of Tony Williams' creative explorations. "It's clear that from the age of 18, he's been an independent thinker." Williams would affirm this notion, telling an interviewer in 1992, "I feel like an eternal student. I'm always trying to learn something new, and it's a great feeling."

Most exciting about Williams' playing is his dynamic, original style on the drum throne and an intensity few performers approach. Often referred to as a "Drummer's Drummer," Williams' drum licks are transcribed and studied as part of a developing percussion canon. With a 1994 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Record, named to the Modern Drummer Magazine Hall of Fame, and numerous "Drummer of the Year" awards from magazines such as Downbeat, Modern Drummer and Musician Magazine. Williams has described the nature of music as "the spirit that touches people." Capturing that essence, time has not diminished his power, or his passion.