Williams 1980 Album Remastered for Release

Tony Williams in a performance at the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society in Half Moon Bay on November 16, 1986 (photograph by Brianmcmillan, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

One week from today M.I.G. Music GmbH, based in Hanover, Germany, will release a rediscovered and remastered version of an album recorded by jazz drummer Tony Williams in 1980. The title of the album was Play or Die, and Williams led a trio whose other members were Patrick O’Hearn on bass and Tom Grant on a variety of keyboards that allowed him to work with electronic sonorities. One of those tracks, “There Comes a Time,” dates back to a 1971 Verve album of a sextet performance at a studio in New York where Williams was joined by two other percussionists. To the best of my knowledge, the preceding four tracks, “The Big Man,” “Beach Ball Tango, “Jam Tune,” and “Para Oriente,” were original recordings. As can usually be expected, Amazon.com (through the above hyperlink) is currently processing pre-orders for this album.

Williams is probably still best known as a member of trumpeter Miles Davis’ second quintet, which he formed in 1963 and led to series of adventurous recording sessions between 1965 and 1968. The other three members of the quintet were Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, and Ron Carter on bass. After that quintet disbanded, Williams’ interests shifted over to fusion; and I have to confess that, when I first encountered one of his later albums, I could have sworn that I was listening to a different drummer.

Over the course of the decades, however, I have become more adjusted to the hard-driving tracks from sessions that Williams led. Mind you, I would not make a steady diet out of those listening experiences; but they are definitely good for blowing away any cobwebs that may have formed as a result of listening to less “aggressive” performances. However, while there is much to draw the listener to Williams’ intensity on this album’s five tracks, I was particularly impressed with Grant’s work. Unless I am mistaken, he covered a wide range of sonorities probably by working with multiple keyboards (most likely all electronic) at the same time. So the reissue of Play or Die is likely to give any attentive listener an abundance of opportunities to explore some adventurous thematic invention going on in the foreground of Williams’ post-Miles drumming technique.