Second Annual Tony Williams Playlist

Tony Williams on Blue Note, 1963-1965

Tony Williams died in February 1997 at age 51. Yesterday, December 12, 2025, would have been the drummer/composers 80th birthday.

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In January 1964, Tony Williams, 18 years old, sat for a panel discussion with Cozy Cole, Art Blakey, and Mel Lewis, hosted by Ira Gitler. Soft-spoken and appropriately deferential to his elders, Williams exudes an unmistakable confidence and charisma, even in the presence of Art Blakey and Mel Lewis, both famously huge personalities.

Sharing his own experiences and views, freely agreeing on some things (big bands make drummers strong; jazz must swing) and disagreeing on others (Williams is agnostic on the feathered bass drum and hi-hat handclap), Tony is right where he belongs.

When the topic turns to the contemporary scene, Tony swings the discussion in another direction by bringing up the European avant-garde. Williams praises Karlheinz Stockhausen’s percussion music, and speaks of bringing Stockhausen-inspired rhythms and sound into his own playing.

The image of 18 year-old Tony Williams telling Cole, Blakey, and Lewis about Karlheinz Stockhausen on a winter day is indelible, for it’s a visual representation of the scene from which Tony emerged and summarizes Tony Williams in 1964. Williams was both firmly embedded in the music and determined to extend it, trusting his own ears to do so.

Many thanks to Lewis Porter for bringing us the Cole, Blakey, Lewis, Williams panel discussion, which we can hear on his Substack!

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Tony Williams and Miles Davis is one of the great partnerships in the music, but Williams participated in fourteen sessions (twelve as a sideman with various leaders, two under his own name) for Blue Note, from February 1963 to August 1965, away from Miles Davis.

This part of Tony’s legacy feels uniquely contemporary, for it’s here that his blending of free improvisation, informed by modern composition, grounded in communal jazz wisdom, can be heard most clearly, showing how Williams and his cohort truly set the stage for much of what’s heard today. We are so lucky to have this music!

Playlist is here, tunes and comments below:

• Jackie McLean, “Vertigo”, from Vertigo (Blue Note, recorded February 11, 1963. This McLean date is the first session in Tony’s discography¹, and the first recording of Tony and Herbie Hancock. McLean understands both Herbie and Tony perfectly, and Williams’s voice and conception is fully-formed, right at the beginning. Everything we know and love about him is right here; it would all just deepen and improve.

• Herbie Hancock, “And What If I Don’t” from My Point of View, recorded March 19, 1963. Marvelous to hear Tony’s beat, urgent and dancing and just a little ahead, emerge with Grant Green, Donald Byrd, and Hank Mobley.

• Kenny Dorham, “Straight Ahead”, from Una Mas, recorded April 1, 1963. Williams is more settled still, and this Dorham session is for some the ultimate Tony straight-ahead document. Soon, we’ll hear Williams mix his straight-ahead bag with his abiding interest in the avant-garde.

• Jackie McLean, “Ghost Town”, from One Step Beyond, recorded April 30, 1963. Tony, like a classical percussionist or studio drummer on a film score, barks on a choked cymbal and stutters out-of-time, enhancing the ghostly mood. Two weeks after this session, Williams was in the studio with Miles Davis².

• Grachan Moncur, “Evolution”, from Evolution, recorded November 21, 1963. Williams, playing only snare drum, picks up where he left off with the usual suspects (McLean, Moncur, and Hutcherson, plus Lee Morgan and Bob Cranshaw) in May, adjusting his density, volume, and envelope to respond to the soloists. “Evolution” strongly suggests further developments by Muhal Richard Abrams and the AACM.

• Eric Dolphy, “Straight Up and Down” from Out To Lunch, recorded February 25, 1964. Richard Davis and Tony Williams were both aware of Stockhausen, Messiaen, Stravinsky, and bring that awareness to Dolphy’s masterpiece, perhaps the ultimate Third Stream session.

• Andrew Hill, “Spectrum”, from Point of Departure, recorded March 21 1964. One month after Out To Lunch, Tony, Richard Davis, and Dolphy are back at Van Gelder’s helping Andrew Hill take his music to the next phase. Williams effortlessly melds his conception with Andrew’s, and enables the most involved piece Hill had yet attempted, the multi-movement “Spectrum”.

• Herbie Hancock, “The Egg”, from Empyrean Isles, recorded June 1964. I love Tony’s brush solo after Hancock’s unaccompanied fantasia, and how smoothly he transitions to sticks and back to the minimalist groove underpinning Hancock’s most abstract piece to date.

• Sam Rivers, “Luminous Monolith”, from Fuchsia Swing Song, recorded December 1964. Sam Rivers and pianist Jaki Byard mentored Tony in Boston, showing by example how to meld jazz folkways with an awareness of European composition, and Williams honored them by arranging this record date. Tony’s precision and unflappability grounds Byard and Rivers, and in Williams, the straight-ahead and the avant-garde are co-existing.

• Tony Williams, “Echo” from Spring, recorded August 1965. Spring was Williams final Sixties Blue Note session, a glorious date featuring Sam Rivers, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Gary Peacock. The solo drumset track, “Echo”, features some familiar Williams stuff tied together by the tiniest motif, a two-note theme that matches the word “echo”. Follow that echo, and the casual-sounding solo reveals its true nature: an improvised composition, the echoes of which are seemingly everywhere today.

1. Vertigo was tracked in February 1963, just two months after Tony’s 17th birthday, but not released until 1980.

2. The fantastic plosin.com website contains a wealth of Miles Davis info, and includes this information about Davis and Williams in the spring and summer of 1963:

This [live recording from the Jazz Villa] is the first extant live recording of Davis’ new working quintet. The new Miles Davis Quintet -- Davis, Coleman, Hancock, Carter, Williams -- went into Columbia’s 30th Street Studio on May 14, then hit the road: Bowdoin College, Brunswick ME (May 17 -- listed as the Miles Davis Sestet); Jazz Villa, St. Louis (May 27-June 4); Sutherland Hotel Lounge, Chicago (June 5-16); Jazz Temple, Cleveland (June 20-23 -- listed as the Miles Davis Sextet); Village Vanguard, New York (July 2-14).