Film: Tony Williams In Africa

A tip from my friend George Korval sent me to the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem last week for a screening of Tony Williams in Africa (1973, directed by Willie Ruff), the 38-minute documentary about Williams’s trip to the African nations of Senegal and Gambia with bassist and educator Willie Ruff in 1972.

The specialness of the film is highlighted by its rarity, as it’s not streaming in any form on any platform. I feel so lucky to have seen it at all, but especially in a crowded theater, in the dark, on a big screen, with no distractions¹.

Thank you Maysles Documentary Center of Harlem!

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IMDB image for the film.

Tony Williams in Africa is hugely important, helping us connect the dots in both Williams’ life specifically and in jazz generally. It’s also a great documentary— I hope it gets some sort of wide release.

On Letterboxd, the Yale Film Archive account provides the necessary background:

[Bassist] Willie Ruff, born in Sheffield, Alabama, in 1931, attended the Yale School of Music as an undergraduate (1953) and graduate student (1954), and returned to Yale to teach in 1971. Ruff taught, performed as half of the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, and made films about the history of music around the world, before retiring in 2017. His film collection is part of the Yale Film Archive.

Ruff’s film about the American jazz drummer Tony Williams traveling to Senegal features Super 8mm footage of Williams and African drummers, as well as a framing section with Ruff, Williams, and pianist Dwike Mitchell presenting the footage on 16mm to local children.

As Ruff wrote later, “[i]t took me about a year to finish it, mainly for teaching purposes, and I began using it almost immediately in classes at Yale. Tony saw it then and declared it to probably be the best work of his life. The fact is, he didn’t understand what I was really after during the entire grueling enterprise, until he saw it on the Moviola, and I am told that he never stopped talking about it for the rest of his short life [as] one of his finest musical accomplishments.

For me, it was special in every way, for I had wanted to make a film about the talking drum, and its legal removal in all the slave-holding states in America.

I had to shoot it myself on Super 8 because my grant from the NEA was so small I couldn’t afford to fly a 16mm camera crew to Africa.”

Ruff donated the only existing 16mm print of the film to the Yale Film Archive in 2017, along with the original, unedited Super 8mm rolls that he shot in Senegal.

A public screening at Yale of the original print in March, 2020, led to a hybrid analog/digital preservation project, supported by the National Film Preservation Foundation, to safeguard the film and create new screening prints and digital files.

Ruff was right. Here’s Tony hinting at what the trip meant to Bill Milkowski:

Gambia is a little sliver of a country in Africa that I traveled through in 1972.

I went there to do a film for Willie Ruff, a bass player who used to be part of a duo from the'60s called the Mitchell/Ruff duo—Dwight [sic]² Mitchell and Willie Ruff. By the time I met him, Willie was teaching at one of the universities on the East Coast. He wanted to take me and Dwight [sic] Mitchell to Africa to do a documentary film about taking a modern drummer back to old Africa and having him meet an old world drummer.

We flew from New York to Senegal, stayed there for a bunch of days, then drove down to Southern Senegal. And to get there you have to drive through Gambia.

-Tony Williams to Bill Milkowski, Modern Drummer, August 1997

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Like Ruff said, the budget was small. This meant that the audio and video were recorded separately, and aren’t synchronized for the film. No matter— the music tells one story, the visuals explain the story. The message of Ruff’s film is so clear that this becomes a minor detail.

After an introduction and framing from Willie Ruff and a few choice comments from Tony, the film is built around four performances. First is Williams performing with a single master Senegalese drummer. As Williams says in voice over, “We didn’t speak, since we weren’t specifically introduced, but we didn’t need to.”

Tony and the (unnamed) master drummer are set up outdoors, and like a parade in New Orleans, it’s a special but not uncommon occasion. The attendees, women and men, from toddlers to seniors, in beautiful colors, stand in a circle, taking it in, enjoying themselves and participating.

As Tony and the unnamed but unforgettable master drummer exchange ideas, an incredible heat is worked up, spurring women and men of all ages to step into the circle, dance a few steps, and move on. While most of the screen time is devoted to intercuts between Tony, the dancers, and the Senegalese master, Ruff includes a shot of a man holding a toddler on his lap, smiling infectiously. I was elated. His smile spoke for us all.

Tony, at an early version of his big yellow kit, is playing his stuff, the explosive mix of swing, groove, and chops that we’ve known and loved for decades, but in this context, it means something else entirely— a celebration of the drum and invitation to participate, surely what it always was for Tony.

In the next sequence, Tony plays solo in a clearing as the sun rises, dramatic and powerful. It’s a jarring juxtaposition between the natural setting and Tony’s stage clothes and ’72 Gretsch kit, but this is undoubtedly Ruff’s point. Hearing and seeing Tony in this context feels like a homecoming. We get it.

The third scenario gave us the stills used in the movie posters, Tony with bass, snare, and cymbal³, in a white button-tee and red pants, playing with a group of drummers and dancers. I was dancing in my seat— I heard Tony’s singular vocabulary as a natural variation on West African/Senegalese drumming. The pure Africanness of his music came shining through⁴.

Finally, the climax of the film, a moment of grandeur. Tony, in a voice over, describes the island of Goree, “20 minutes by ferry from the city of Dakar”, a major staging point for the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic. Williams and Ruff visit a huge and mournful slave house, called by French slave traders “La Maison Goree”⁵, a stone structure and vast, tragic waiting area, with parts assigned to different groups of soon-to-be-enslaved people.

Tony’s drums are set up in a part of the house nearest the water. Shirtless and warrior-like, a natural movie star and young virtuoso, Williams emerges from the dark, plays an emotional and explosive drum solo, and then abruptly goes back the way he came. In silhouette, Ruff’s camera follows him as Tony walks out to the ocean, sits on some rocks, and dips his feet in the water.

We then hear Williams in a voice over, speaking shyly and from the heart. He feels good, he feels the spirits, and wants to tell his ancestors that “it was not in vain”, that their rhythm and their drums are taking over the world, that African rhythm is now the world’s rhythm. Still in voice over, he goes further on the spiritual power of the drum, and describes the drum as a symbol of rebirth, a powerful and eerie moment. I had chills, I think most of us did.

This must be what Ron Carter meant when he said that Tony was not loud, but powerful: that Tony’s playing was ultimately an expression of the spiritual power of the drums, the way rhythm and drumming can animate and shape a life. This was made abundantly and powerfully clear last Thursday at the Maysles, as Ruff’s film closed and Williams’s music reverberated in our hearts and minds. What Tony did was what all the consecrated masters did.

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Tony Williams in Africa was proceeded by Ben Webster In Europe, a 30-minute documentary that shows Webster at home in Holland, his close friendship with his landlady, on the road, in rehearsal with Don Byas and a European rhythm section, cooking, playing along with records, and playing pool. Ben Webster In Europe must have been a source for Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘Round Midnight— some of the shots of Webster are so close to how Tavernier framed Dexter Gordon. It’s entirely delightful and moving, stunning and powerful to see Ben Webster move and talk, to recognize him as a real person.

And it was followed by a film of Bud Powell. Bud Powell! An embarrassment of riches on screen at Harlem last Thursday. We see Bud mostly taking a walk around an industrial park in Copenhagen, with a few shots of him playing “Oblivion” at a club. It’s short, just about 10 minutes, but seen as intended, on a screen with an audience in a dark room, it hit me so hard. Like Powell’s music, the film is a combination of sadness and joy that gets right under your skin.

Finally there was a few words and solo trumpet from Arkestra member Heru Shabaka-Ra, a fitting and solemn ending to the evening. Jazz goes on and on and on…

1. Alfredas Cinemas in Brooklyn has a preview on their Instagram, and you can see some stills online, but by the standards of 2025, this is a rare document.

2. The pianist in that group is Dwike, not Dwight, Mitchell.

3. I note the lack of hi-hat. Cymbal, bass, snare, is the absolutely original drumset minus the traps.

4. Bassist and vocalist Jack Bruce, who played in Tony’s 1970 version of Lifetime, once tried to get at the heart of what made Williams so special in a promo video he made with drummer Cindy Blackman. With eyes shining and real affection in his voice, Bruce says that when he played with Tony, he felt connected to the source, all the way back to Baby Dodds. Tony Williams in Africa is Tony at the mouth of the river, back there at the cause of it all.

5. The title of a Williams tune, recorded first with Herbie and Ron in 1981, which I linked to, then retitled “Ancient Eyes” and recorded by his quintet in 1986 and 1992.