Past Events
October 12, 2006 - Buster Williams  

On October 12^th Buster Williams discussed his life and career with Christian McBride, renowned bassist and co-director of the Jazz Museum in Harlem, for the bi-weekly series Harlem Speaks.

His father, Charles Anthony “Cholly” Williams taught him piano and drums early on, but his son didn’t take his lessons seriously. But when his father played bass legend Oscar Pettiford’s solo version of “Star Dust” he was deeply moved by the interpretation and actually hearing Pettiford’s thumb slide up and down the neck of the instrument. Buster asked his father to teach him bass. He was 13 at the time. “He was like the Buddha. I had to ask him three times before he agreed.”

He recalled his mother, Gladys, singing the bridge to tunes that his father would sing at home, where Buster grew up in Camden, New Jersey with four sisters. His father began playing bass after raising a family, and took music very seriously, so he was a hard task master. A quick study, Buster began playing with local legends in New Jersey and Philadelphia, a hop and a skip from his hometown. He began performing at the age of 16 with Jimmy Heath’s band at the Sahara club.

Not long thereafter, his father put him down with a gig with Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons. “They were performing at the Douglass Hotel. I got there first, and positioned myself so I can see them when they came down the stairs. Soon I saw a man walk down the stairs wearing Italian shoes, a mustard-colored mohair suit, carrying two saxophones. He looked like a god. I stood up, at attention.”

“Who are you?” Stitt asked.

“Charles Williams.”

“So?”

“I’m the bass player.”

“You gonna make the gig?”

“I’ll try.”

“You gonna make the gig?”

“I’ll try, sir.”

“YOU GOING TO MAKE THE GIG?”

“Yes, sir!”

After the first set, Stitt and Ammons took Buster downstairs and asked him if he wanted to stay with the band. The recording “Boss Tenors” is an example of their time together, which totaled a year and a half. Thereafter he played bass with “the exciting” Dakota Staton, the first in a long line of vocalists with which he performed. From Betty Carter “I learned how to play slow and how to really swing”; from Sarah Vaughan “how to play in tune.”

He recalled coming to Harlem in the ’sixties, and going to a popular small restaurant, Cozy’s, and there meeting Lee Morgan and Hank Mobley, both of whom he began to gig with. “Harlem in those days had a flair; I loved it, it was wonderful.” For a time he lived on 139^th street, and says that “Everyone was sharp in those days. Even if you wore jeans, it had to have a crease in it!” After naming a long list of clubs popular then—Sugar Ray’s, Small’s Paradise, Count Basie’s, the Club Baron, and the Red Rooster—he told the attentive audience about performing with Nancy Wilson at the Apollo, where he had to lug his bass all the way to the dressing rooms at the top of the venue.

He also recounted how tough narcotics officers were in Philly; playing in the French Riviera with Vaughan, there meeting Miles Davis’s band, which included Herbie Hancock, George Coleman, Ron Carter and Tony Williams; his pride in being Ray Brown’s and Ron Carter’s first call replacement; Nancy Wilson moving him and his new wife to Los Angeles in 1965; days playing with his dream band: the Miles Davis Quintet, and conversations he had with Davis on cars and clothing; performing with the Jazz Crusaders and Hampton Hawes; taking Paul Chambers place with Jimmy Cobb and Wynton Kelly after Chamber’s death; and memories of his tenure with Mary Lou Williams.

He discovered Buddhism from one of his sisters, whom he asked do one of the Buddhists chants for some of his band mates. They thought it was swingin’. Not long after he began chanting he had a memorable experience with Herbie Hancock’s band. He started a gig off (the other band members were tired from hanging out all night and day from the previous evening), playing solo, with Billy Hart accompanying. “The ideas just flowed; the band and everyone from the back of the club came to the front and stared.” After the set Hancock pulled him to the back, and asked, “What was that? I’ve never heard you play like that!” Buster told him about the great results he and his sister were having from chanting, and Hancock began doing the same. (Hancock later introduced Wayne Shorter to the art of Buddhist meditation.)

Buster Williams ended the magical night, in which he brought to life jazz lore, the way he began it, by discussing his father’s legacy to him: “He was my mentor and my hero.”