David Happy Williams

Background and career

David Larry Williams was born in Trinidad. His father, John "Buddy" Williams, was a bass player and one of Trinidad's best-known bandleaders of the 1940s and 1950s. David started playing music at the age of five, initially on piano, then violin and steelpan. At the age of 12, he began playing bass in earnest. When his sister went to London on scholarship to study piano, David joined her there in 1962, studying bass for a year at the London College of Music. He recalls, "I started getting offers and gigs, I was working in nightclubs, you know, wherever I could play, pubs, it didn't matter, and I had this desire, this thing to just get out there and play."

Williams went to New York in 1969 on what was intended to be a two-week visit but decided to stay on when he was offered work after sitting in on a gig with Grachan Moncur in place of Jimmy Garrison. Following leads from Ron Carter, Williams began working with Gap and Chuck Mangione, and then went to Washington, DC, where he became Roberta Flack's bass player for two years, also worked with Donny Hathaway during that time.

His first album as a leader, Soul is Free, was released in 1979; one of the compositions from it, "Out of the Sheets, Into the Streets", was used in the 1983 Eddie Murphy film Trading Places.

In 1982 he became a member of the Cedar Walton Trio alongside Billy Higgins (whom Williams first met around 1973), on the death of Sam Jones, for whom he had occasionally subbed. They became "One of the most regarded trios in contemporary acoustic Jazz".

In recent years, Williams has also written and recorded music inspired by the Trinidadian steelpan and calypso, notably the "pan jazz" album Reid, Wright and be Happy (2003), alongside Ron Reid and Orville Wright.

As leader

As sideman

With Cedar Walton

With Slide Hampton

With Billy Higgins

With Elvin Jones

With Sam Jones

With David Fathead Newman

With Kenny Barron

With Larry Willis

With Abdullah Ibrahim

With Voices of East Harlem

With Art Pepper

With Michael Carvin

With Freddy Cole

With Jackie McLean

With Frank Morgan

With Freddie Hubbard

With Roberta Flack

With James Moody, Clark Terry, Elvin Jones

With Donald Byrd and the Blackbyrds

With David Benoit

With Herb Alpert & Hugh Masekela

With Billy Higgins

With Clifford Jordan Big Band

With George Cables

With Jermaine Jackson

With Joyce

With Vanessa Rubin

With Steve Grossman Love is The Thing (Red, 1986)

With Liberace

With Dave Pike

With Sam Jones

With Charles Davis

With Louis Hayes

With Duke Jordan

With David Lasley

With Charles McPherson

With Terumasa Hino

With Sonny Fortune

With Janis Siegel

With Ernest Ranglin

With David Hazeltine

With One for All