Tony Williams
b. 12 December 1945, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Williams was raised in Boston, Massachusetts, where his father, an amateur musician, encouraged him to to take up drums. Williams studied with Alan Dawson and was sitting in at local clubs before he entered his teens. At the age of 15, he was freelancing in and around Boston and had already earned the admiration of leading drummers, including Max Roach. In the early '60s he went to New York, where he played with Jackie McLean and in 1963 joined Miles Davis. With Davis, Williams's rhythm section colleagues were Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter and together they made a formidable team which is still widely admired and often cited as Davis’ greatest unit. During this period, both with Davis and on his many Blue Note recordings as leader, and sideman, Williams began reshaping modern jazz drumming, developing concepts created by some of his immediate predecessors such as Elvin Jones. Notably, Williams advanced the manner in which drummers could play freely yet retain a recognizable pulse. With Williams in a band, free jazz improvisers could dispense with time but were not entirely cut off from a basic rhythmic impulse. At the end of the '60s Williams left Davis to form a jazz-rock band with John McLaughlin. The band, named Lifetime, set the standards to which most subsequent bands in the genre aspired but, insofar as the drumming was concerned, few achieved their aim. After McLaughlin moved on, Williams continued to lead jazz-rock bands but gradually moved back into jazz circles. In the late '70s he was with Hancock again in the V.S.O.P. quintet and also recorded with Gil Evans and Wynton Marsalis. In the late '80s Williams was leading a band with a stable personnel that included saxophonist Billy Pierce and Mulgrew Miller.