Buster Williams

Among jazz’s most effective sidemen, Buster Williams offers flourished through many intervals of changing styles in jazz. Most widely known because the 1980s for his solid, dark firmness and highly processed technique within the acoustic bass, the jazz-rock era understood him as the cellular anchor of Herbie Hancock’s exploratory Mwandishi Sextet from 1969 to 1973, doubling on acoustic and electrical basses sometimes mounted on electronic effects products. Williams learned both double bass as well as the drums from his dad, but having been enormously impressed by Oscar Pettiford’s recordings, he eventually decided to focus on the bass. After learning theory and structure at Philadelphia’s Combs University of Music in 1959, Williams became a member of Jimmy Heath’s device the following yr and used Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt in 1960 and 1961, aswell as behind performers Dakota Staton (1961-1962), Betty Carter (1962-1963), Sarah Vaughan (1963), and Nancy Wilson (1964-1968). The gig with Wilson prompted a proceed to Los Angeles, where in fact the Jazz Crusaders utilized him for concert times and recordings from 1967 to 1969, and he also performed briefly with Kilometers Davis in 1967 as well as the Bobby Hutcherson/Harold Property quintet. Shifting to NY in 1969, Williams became a member of Hancock’s sextet, showing up on most of his Warner Bros. albums, aswell as The Prisoner (Blue Notice), Sextant (Columbia) and with trumpeter Eddie Henderson’s spinoff group on Capricorn and Blue Notice. More than a five-year period (1976-1981), Williams led several recording classes for Muse, Denon, and Buddah while carrying on to freelance before, during, and from then on period. In the ’80s, he was an associate of both Timeless All-Stars and Sphere, composing several compositions for the second option. Among the music artists for whom he offers played from your ’80s onward are Kenny Barron, Frank Morgan, Stanley Cowell, Steve Turre, Emily Remler, and Larry Coryell.