Tony Williams

At every major moment in his career, Tony Williams set precedents for future jazz and progressive-rock subgenres with his sophisticated and inventive drumming. He was born in Chicago in 1945 but came of age in Boston, where he became a professional musician at the age of 13. His first serious hiring came at age 16, when an invitation to join Jackie McLean’s band brought him to New York City. There, Williams made his most indelible contributions to jazz with Miles Davis’ “Second Great Quintet” in the mid-’60s, alongside Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Herbie Hancock. The drummer also elevated Shorter and Hancock’s early Blue Note solo recordings with his impressionistic, metrically complex playing, and he appeared on defining releases by Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, and others—all before the age of 20. Shortly after playing on Miles Davis’ first electric recordings, Williams made a major career pivot by forming his own fusion band, The Tony Williams Lifetime, in 1969. Few early electric jazz records have more brazenly challenged the genre’s orthodoxy than the group’s debut, Emergency!, with its confrontational blown-out guitar and organ textures, psychedelic spoken word, and rock rhythms. Williams continued to collaborate on genre-defying jazz records in the ’70s, including efforts by Stan Getz, Michael Mantler, and Weather Report, and released two more Lifetime records. In the last two decades before his death in 1997 at age 51, the drummer worked with rock acts like Public Image Ltd. and avant-gardists like Derek Bailey while also continuing to play in more traditional jazz ensembles.