The great bassist Charles “Buster” Williams turns 81 today. For the occasion, I’ve uploaded a feature piece that I wrote about him in 2021 and a liner note for the 2004 album Griot Liberté.
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Buster Williams: Ready for His Close-Up, Jazz Times, 2021
“My music always expresses the way I see things from day to day—how my perceptions change, what’s meaningful or less meaningful,” bassist Buster Williams told me in 2004, when I wrote the liner notes for Griot Liberté (HighNote). That album, his last as a leader until 2018’s Audacity (Smoke Sessions), featured his working group of the time (Stefon Harris, vibes; George Colligan, piano; Lenny White, drums), navigating six Williams originals with aphoristic titles like “The Wind of an Immortal Soul” and “The Triumphant Dance of the Butterfly.”
“The griot is a storyteller who liberates the soul and the spirit,” Williams elaborated. “To be liberated is to be able to go to sleep instantly at night because your day has been fulfilled with victory. The real victory is how we defeat our own devils—our limitations. That’s liberty. That’s freedom. And what am I? I’m the storyteller.”
Williams animates that credo throughout the 90 minutes of Bass to Infinity, Adam Kahan’s nuanced, intimate documentary portrait of an artist for whom the nostrum “played with everyone” is an apropos descriptor. (The film was commercially released in March; go to busterwilliamsmovie.com for more details.) A practiced raconteur, Williams spins a cohort of compelling tales, delivering oft-told episodes with authority and deliberation, as though telling them for the first time. Those qualities also suffuse his orotund, mellow instrumental voice, which we hear in several passages of unaccompanied invention; in duo encounters (and conversations) with old friends Benny Golson, Larry Willis, Rufus Reid, and Carmen Lundy; and in an impromptu trio vignette with White and Kenny Barron, Williams’ partner in Sphere from 1982 until well into the ’90s and in Ron Carter’s two-bass quartet from 1977-80.
Herbie Hancock—in whose pathbreaking Mwandishi band Williams played between 1970 and 1973 after they’d established a rapport during a five-week run with Miles Davis in the spring of 1967—recounts the occasion when Williams introduced him to Nichiren Buddhism. The camera homes in as Williams strokes tuned bells and chants namu myoho renge kyo during devotionals at his personal shrine. We eavesdrop as Williams, his wife, and four sisters converse around the kitchen table about their upbringing and family history.
Montaged into the narrative are personal photographs and archival footage of Williams playing behind Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan, and Nancy Wilson, his primary employers between 1962 and 1968. And three well-wrought animation sequences offer visual context for Williams’ amusing recollections of his tenure with saxophone titans Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, who hired him soon after he graduated from Camden (N.J.) High School in the summer of 1960 and retained his services for the next year-and-change.
The film’s back story dates to early 2015. During a between-set break at Smoke Jazz Club on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Kahan—who had recently wrapped The Case of the Three Sided Dream, a powerful bio-doc on Rahsaan Roland Kirk—approached Williams with a proposal that he participate in a documentary portraying the face of the bass through depictions of several master practitioners.
Williams declined. “I gave [Kahan] an alternate proposition,” he recalls via Zoom from the music room in his New Jersey home. “I said, ‘If you want to do a documentary on me, I’d be happy to do it.’ Now, all kinds of people come up to you on intermission and say all kinds of things. I had no idea whether it would pan out, but I had nothing to lose—if he wants to do this … okay, fine. Adam was a little surprised. But he agreed. He needed to find more information about me; meanwhile, I Googled him and found his film on Rahsaan, which I liked. Then he phoned and said he’d like to do the film. That was a good start.”
Initially, Williams thought that Kahan’s use of animation in Three Sided Dream “diminished its seriousness and quality.” Kahan asked him not to pre-judge. “That story about Ammons and Stitt was so important, and I didn’t know how else I was going to show it,” Kahan says. Accessing the flexible aesthetics that have served him so well throughout his 60-year career as a first-call sideman and bandleader, Williams came around. “When I saw [the final cut of Bass to Infinity], the animation is what I liked best,” he says. “At the premiere, I told the animator [Matt Smithson] that he caught the real essence of my experience out there on the road, for the first time.”
The first animation episode in Bass to Infinity concerns a Friday evening in the summer of 1960 when Charles Anthony Williams, Sr., a respected Philadelphia-area bassist who held multiple day jobs to support his five children, got a call from fellow Camdenite Nelson Boyd, the dedicatee of Miles Davis’ “Half Nelson,” whose c.v. included consequential work with Charlie Parker, Tadd Dameron, and Dizzy Gillespie. Boyd needed a weekend sub to play bass with Ammons and Stitt in Philly at the Showboat, a basement club on the corner of Broad and Lombard. Mr. Williams had a conflicting gig. He recommended his son. Boyd asked, “Is he ready?” “Damn right.” He called Buster at his girlfriend’s house, awaiting her preparations for their date: “Come home and put your suit on—you’ve got a gig.” He hung up. Williams obeyed.
“I love how they told that story,” Williams says. “I’m sliding down a pole, jumping into my gig suit and tie and white shirt. I had one navy-blue gabardine suit. After wearing it for a while at different gigs, it turned purple where the bass rubbed against it. I had a slim-jim black tie. It had become so saturated with sweat that you didn’t dare try to untie it, so I loosened it enough to get the knot over my head.
“I was like, ‘Pinch me, am I dreaming?’ Then I drove to Philly for the gig, got set up, and waited in the hotel lobby for my heroes to appear and for the gig to start.”
Without benefit of soundcheck or rehearsal, Williams traversed the trial by fire with flying colors, holding his own through, among other numbers, a breakneck “Strike Up the Band,” “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “Autumn Leaves,” and a blues in D-flat. He’s clear that his preparedness stemmed directly from his father’s intense ministrations. “Sometimes he took gigs as a drummer, and when I was 15, he started bringing me as the bass player,” Williams says. “I got a lot of training that way. He was very strict; sometimes I’d be working something out between tunes, and he’d hit my strings and say, ‘No practicing on the bandstand.’ He set up one of his basses for me, which I think had cost him a bit more than $200. Every time I had a gig—which paid $5, $10, maybe $15—I had to give him $2, until I’d paid him off.”
At 16, Williams—a Paul Chambers acolyte who’d imbibed, through his father, bass lineage from the 1930s onward—started practicing regularly with pianist Sam Dockery, a name familiar to hard-bop partisans for his several years with the Jackie McLean/Bill Hardman/Johnny Griffin editions of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. “I’d go across town on the bus with my bass to play with Sam all day long at his house,” Williams remembers. “Every morning he’d get up and put on a white shirt, tie, and suit. I can’t tell you how much I learned about harmony from playing with Sam.” Some nights, Dockery drove to Philadelphia to play in Jimmy Heath’s quartet, then propelled by drummer Lex Humphries. “I wanted to be on that scene,” Williams says. “That to me was the description of ‘making it.’”
Williams got word that Heath’s bassist, also from Camden, had jumped ship. He strategized. His father had been running a Monday-night jam session at a nearby club; Williams invited local-hero alto saxophonist Sam Reed to play. “I knew Sam was my stepping stone for getting into the jazz community in Philadelphia,” he states. “I was never one to go out and hang and talk a bunch of ‘splib-blop.’ I wanted to keep my mouth shut and let my music speak for me.” Reed promptly called Williams for a Wednesday-night ballroom gig opening for Heath. “On the bandstand I noticed that the curtain was open and Jimmy was peeking out, looking at me,” Williams says. “Two days later he called me to join his band at the Sahara Club. We worked there three, four nights a week. Jimmy’s influence on me was unlimited.”
“Buster was playing his ass off,” says Kenny Barron, a contemporaneous teen phenom then making his name around Philly. “He plays primarily in the bottom, which gives me something to hold onto as a pianist, and his sound is very deep. Also, he was reliable, which was very important. To me, he and Arthur Harper were the two best players in Philadelphia at the time.”
“During those days, you could tell the bass players who came out of Philly by their feel, which we used to call ‘the hump,’” Williams notes. His entrance into the Philadelphia scene coincided with the departure to New York City of such slightly older eminences as Jymie Merritt, Reggie Workman, and Jimmy Garrison, all deep swingers who would expand their scope to suit the “freedom principle” as the 1960s progressed.
Williams mirrored that progression. He conscientiously played in the traditional style for Betty Carter (who expressed intense displeasure when he gave notice), Vaughan (who, on a 1963 sojourn to Europe, bought him the Boosey & Hawkes bass that he still uses), and Wilson (who moved him to Los Angeles between 1965 and 1968). His commitment to Wilson, strengthened by the fact that she was a steady employer, led him to turn down a job offer from Miles Davis after a five-week West Coast run (Ron Carter was exploring opportunities in the New York studios) during which he displayed his skills at “playing free within the form.” After returning to New York, he eschewed gigs with Art Blakey and Herbie Mann to join Hancock’s nascent Mwandishi band, where, over the course of three years, “I could really express my melodic self because of all the colors and textures from Herbie.
“Joining Miles was entering a ready-made family that created a niche that spread through the whole genre,” Williams adds, noting that encounters with outcat Philadelphia drummer Edgar Bateman prepared him for interacting with Tony Williams. “Now I’m stepping in for one of the family members, and they’re not making any concessions because I’m new or haven’t had a rehearsal. That spoke to their confidence in me. They knew that Miles hired me and he knew what he was doing. Plus, we’d met in 1963 at the festival in Juan-les-Pins, when Sarah and Miles were both playing the week and we stayed at the same hotel.
“It enhanced my viewpoint and perception, and it was in keeping with what I wanted to do. I’d never felt such freedom before—such freedom to be free. Miles was kind to me. He bolstered my confidence. Every intermission he’d take me aside and we’d talk. I think on the third night I got up the nerve to ask him, ‘Miles, am I really doing what you want me to do?’ I wanted to know if I could make some detours or veer off a bit or, because of what everybody else is doing, do I need to stay and toe the line? Miles got this glitter in his eye. He smiled. He said: ‘Buster, when they play fast, then you play slow. And when they play slow, you play fast.’ That said loads to me.”
“I remember the first time I heard Buster play that gigantic Hawkes bass unamplified,” fellow Philly bassist Christian McBride recalls. “It almost broke down the walls in the place. On the one hand, when you plug that bass in and the natural sound of that instrument gets changed, a part of you wonders, ‘Why would you want to change that gorgeous sound?’ But he worked hard to develop a recognizable, personal, effective sound through his amplifier, through his pickup, through his strings.”
“Usually when you hear Buster on a record, you know it’s him,” says George Colligan, who—along with Eric Reed and Patrice Rushen—has been Williams’ pianist of choice for the past two decades. “His sound touches on the amplified context of the ’70s and ’80s, with a distinct sustain, but he also leans to a classic bass sound. His rhythmic approach is unique, with an organic quarter-note feel that’s filled with humanity. Of course, his soloing is singular, and he’s very advanced harmonically, so when he accompanies you won’t hear just roots and chord tones. His lines are like a solo, but it enhances the music. It makes it go in different directions.”
“As the music got more experimental in the ’60s and throughout the ’70s, Buster was right there with that abstraction, but he also kept his ground with grits-and-gravy swinging,” McBride adds. “If Buster did nothing else in his career, you could just use his work in Mwandishi—the band swung, was funky, was acoustic, was electric, was spiritual, was socially conscious—to show what an advanced yet rooted musician he was.”
All the aforementioned flavors infuse Williams’ first recordings as a bandleader. On Pinnacle (1975), Crystal Reflections (1976), and Heartbeat (1978), he documents 10 original pieces (augmenting the five he’d recorded during his West Coast stay on three albums by the Jazz Crusaders). Each date bears out McBride’s observation that Williams gleaned “a classic, timeless sense of melody” from his years backing up star singers. McBride continues: “Melody can often be overlooked in the jazz world, but Buster never did, either in his playing or in his composing.”
On the first two dates—whose collective personnel includes Roy Ayers, Woody Shaw, Sonny Fortune, Earl Turbinton, Onaje Allan Gumbs, Jimmy Rowles, Kenny Barron, Ben Riley, and Billy Hart—the ambience code-switches from trippy backbeats to fierce swinging to Great American Songbook reflection. On Heartbeat Williams leads Barron and Riley for two trio cuts; Gayle and Pat Dixon enhance two other pieces with (respectively) violin and cello, springboarding on the leader’s association with Ron Carter’s quartet.
“Ron would tell me that we try to create problems for ourselves in the midst of a performance, and solve the problem at the same time,” Williams says of that five-year, three-album association. “If you don’t create problems, you don’t have one to solve, and if you don’t solve problems you aren’t learning something new.”
Williams’ bandmates on Audacity testify that he practices this dictum on the bandstand. “Buster’s book is difficult to play,” Lenny White says. “His tunes don’t have standard movement because of the notes he hears, but they’re beautiful. His music isn’t just regular straight-ahead 4/4 jazz. We’ve created a mutual trust over the years, and to trust someone else is the highest dynamic you can have. I’m willing to take a chance and he’s willing to follow—and vice versa.”
“His tunes are harmonically challenging; you have to study the band if you want to get on his gig,” Colligan cosigns. “But like a lot of the older cats, he’d rather you figure out how to do it from listening to them and letting the music grow organically—to communicate non-verbally with like-minded people.”
On Audacity, Williams expressed that trust by including a tune from each band member (White, Colligan, and saxophonist Steve Wilson), in addition to four previously unrecorded originals from his 60-composition corpus. “I like things that are scripted and things that are not scripted,” he says. “A lot depends on who you’re playing with and how long you’ve been playing together. For example, what we did with Mwandishi, you can’t get up on the bandstand and do that with just anybody. It becomes what it is without you even knowing it. When I can get my band working again after this pandemic, it’s going to be something even more exciting.”
While waiting for the world to reopen, Williams is “making a living on Zoom four or five hours a day, sometimes even more,” giving classes at the New School and Manhattan School of Music, and to various private students. Between sessions, he practices. “I struggle with being deliberate and focused enough not to miss those opportunities,” he says on our Zoom call, before pointing to a piano to his left. “I jump on my bass and play some, then work on a piece on the piano, then come back to the computer and enter it into Sibelius to hear what it sounds like and make sure I’m writing down everything I’ve done, or else I’ll forget it.”
At 78, Williams’ quotidian discipline, his ethos of a self-imposed “sense of responsibility that I must fulfill,” perhaps accounts for—as McBride describes it—“the sheer physicality” of his bass playing. “Only a few people have the fountain of youth thing happening,” McBride says. “Ron Carter still sounds the way he sounded 40 years ago. Buster is like that. He hasn’t lost a thing. Nobody sounds like him or feels like him or writes like him. He’s a special musician, all across the board.”
Colligan and White both believe that Williams has received insufficient recognition for his talents. To these ears, Williams implies that he agrees when he explains why he told Kahan that he’d participate in the documentary only if he were the sole subject.
“I was ready to be approached,” he says. “I was ready to be documented. I was ready to be the focus of attention. I felt that it was due. It wasn’t something that I would necessarily express, because I don’t have that kind of hubris. But when he expressed this interest, it just snapped: ‘Okay, this is the time.’ What I was feeling inside was being matched.
“I can’t say that I feel undervalued as much as I feel it’s all a matter of time. I hear people talk about ‘unsung heroes’ or ‘being underrated.’ I don’t think I’m underrated. Whatever rating I get, I deserve. Those who like what I do, I strive to be worthy of it. Those who would like me to do better … well, I’ve got no problem with that too, because that’s my own personal quest. I know I’m valuable. And I know I have something to say, and I am always striving to perfect what I say. But I think that whatever one is due will be done.”
[–30–]
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Buster Williams, “Griot Liberté” (Liner Notes):
“I don’t like a CD or album that contains all good songs or performances, but with no connection between them,” says bassist Buster Williams.
Based on those criteria, Williams ought to favor his most recent album, Griot Liberté, for a compelling back story links the eight originals and a standard that comprise it. Although the term was on Williams’ mind as far back as 2000, when he was in the process of conceiving the music for Houdini [Sirocco], a trio album with pianist Geri Allen and drummer Lenny White, the music didn’t come to fruition at the time.
“My music, whether I like it or not, always expresses what’s going on in my life—the way I see things from day to day, how my perceptions change, what’s meaningful and less meaningful,” Williams says. “Last December, my wife went into the hospital, and her illness allowed me to see the meaning of things. When she came out of intensive care, one of the first things she said is that she saw the Phoenix rise from the ashes. It was like she had been reborn. She told everyone how her campaign has been to reinvent herself, and she felt like a caterpillar that had turned into a butterfly. All of this fit with the concept I was feeling with ‘griot liberté.’
“The griot is this storyteller that liberates the soul and the spirit. To be liberated is to express yourself as you see it, to have no qualms, to be able to lay your head down on your pillow at night and go to sleep instantly because your day has been fulfilled with victory. The real victory we seek is how to defeat our own devils—our own limitations. That’s what my wife presented to me, and ‘griot liberté’ came alive. Liberty. Freedom. And what am I? Yeah, I’m the storyteller! When she came home, I said, ‘She’s okay; I can focus on this music,’ and it started to come out.”
At 61, Williams has told vivid stories in notes and tones for more than four decades. A professional since 1959, when he worked around Philadelphia in a Jimmy Heath-led quartet with drum legend Specs Wright and pianist Sam Dockery, he went on the road with Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt at 18, and never looked back. “I was always the youngest guy in the band,” he jokes. “It’s only now that I’m the old guy.” He sidemanned with a who’s-who of modern jazz—Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan, Dakota Staton, Betty Carter, the Jazz Crusaders, Miles Davis, Herbie Mann, Art Blakey, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, Ron Carter, Kenny Barron, and Cedar Walton, to name a few—and co-founded the collective quartet Sphere. He’s also led a dozen or so dates of his own.
“Those jobs all are my invaluable treasures,” he says. “They shaped me, set me up for what I’m trying to do now. It would be hard to say which was my most important or most prized gig, because each person gave me something new and different.”
Through such experiences, Williams internalized the overarching importance of ensemble imperatives and a tabula rasa approach to nightly performance
“I want the band to have a great collective sound,” he remarks. “I’m not looking to stand out. I’m looking for interaction, to have each person throw something into the pot and make something that could not otherwise exist. I’m always looking for things to sound different and take on the nuances of the new moment. I don’t want new personnel to be influenced by what was done before. What happened yesterday, I don’t even want to hear that again. When I played with Miles, the most amazing thing to me was that, night after night, we had to find something totally different to play on the same songs. I never had a rehearsal with Miles. The same thing with Herbie Hancock. Today is a new day, and you’ve experienced new things today, so why should the music be the same as last night?
“As a bass player, I have a responsibility for holding things together rhythmically and harmonically. My vantage point is unlike anyone else. So when I decided to be a bandleader, it wasn’t difficult in terms of concept and vision. Betty Carter really encouraged me. She told me, ‘You want to lead a band? Just make sure it swings.’ I never forgot that. But the difficulty—even as successful as I was as a sideman—was in establishing myself with clubowners or entrepreneurs. There’s always that question, ‘Well, who’s in the front line?’ One reason why Ron Carter created a band in which he played piccolo bass was so he could be the front line. In that regard, I feel more of a blend with vibes than I do with saxophone or trumpet. The vibes are lush and romantic and sensitive. I want to express a certain softness in my music, and vibes allow me to do that.”
Williams’s past vibraphone partners include Roy Ayres, Bobby Hutcherson and Steve Nelson. Griot Liberté is Williams’ third recording with 32-year-old mallet master Stefon Harris, whom he hired for a job at Manhattan’s Sweet Basil in 1996 on the recommendation of trombonist Steve Turre. “Stefon is like a sponge that is ready, willing and able to absorb information, and he knows how to distil it and turn it into his own invention,” Williams says. “He’s still finding his way. But he’s matured beautifully, and he never goes for flash in sacrifice of substance. The openness he brings to the bandstand is remarkable.”
Ubiquitous on the New York scene since he relocated from Washington, D.C., in 1995, pianist George Colligan makes his recorded debut with Williams. He receives similar praise from the maestro. “George played with me in a trio when he was living in Washington. Like Stefon, he’s wide-open and has brilliant ears. The way I want to play, you’ve got to have ears. If you’re not listening, you won’t know where you are.”
Williams’ drummer of choice since 1996 is Lenny White, a generational peer. They lock in with such smooth synchronicity that a listener could overlook how much content they play. “Lenny makes everything effortless,” Williams enthuses. “For one thing, he gets such a pristine ride cymbal beat. If Lenny never played anything else and just played the ride cymbal, I’d be satisfied. You’d be surprised how many drummers don’t really give the ride cymbal its importance—especially some of the new drummers today. See, one of the reasons I have a band is so that I can play the way I want. What I do from the first note is my concept of what I think a band should be. It’s not something I’ve necessarily spent a lot of time thinking about. I know what I’m looking for, but at the same time, nothing is preconceived. Lenny allows me to really be myself.”
On “Nomads,” which opens the recital, White propels affirmative solos by Harris and Colligan with his own version of the loose 6/8 feel against the four that Elvin Jones made famous when he and Williams were still apprenticing. Think of the lyric Williams wrote when he composed it in the early ‘90s: “In the dark of night, traveling o’er the desert sands, on their way to some distant land, never knowing where they’re going, looking for a home, all their fortune lost, tattered clothes and broken hearts, still they live to rebuild their dream, hoping that the gods lead them to their home. Passion burning bright, never giving in to pain, nothing left but their struggles gained. Soon the dawn will come, a new land they’ll call their own…”
“Related to One” is a challenging 12-bar blues in two keys, with “an 8-bar section before the blues begins that’s based on the relative minor to the major key that the blues will be in.” Williams has built walking basslines on thousands of blues forms over the years, and spurs his partners to blow concise, down-home solos; he wraps with a few authoritative solo choruses that channel his “Blues Up and Down” days with Stitt and Ammons.
Over White’s rolling beat, Harris swings the melody on the opening section of “The Triumphant Dance Of The Butterfly,” before stating a lyric ballad section. “I wrote the ballad section first,” Williams says. “When I wrote the melody, I heard a lyric that went, ‘Why should I try to convince you, when I know that you don’t really care?’ It became a joke between us! When my wife came out of the hospital, I worked on the song again, and this other stuff came out. It sounded to me like the triumphant dance of the caterpillar turning into the butterfly.” Keep that image before you as you listen to Williams’ resonant, well-wrought solo and beautiful bassline, springboarding Harris and Colligan into concise, to-the-point testimonials.
The overtones Harris elicits when stating the theme of “The Wind Of An Immortal Soul”—based on a sequence of chords that share a bass pedal—evokes the aura of Bobby Hutcherson. “Each chord is structured differently, so that each bar creates a different harmony, a different sound, a different emotion, a different description,” says Williams. “In Greek mythology, immortal souls took on the wind as their body. The wind travels anywhere. It has no barriers. It can take the shape of anything it wants.” Before stating his own unfettered declamation, Williams follows that principle in supporting Colligan and Harris through cogent, ascendant solos.
Williams plays a ravishing solo on “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” a song he grew intimate with during his tenure with Betty Carter. “I reharmonized it, which fit the concept,” he says. “Every day I’d see my wife in the hospital, and then have to say goodbye.”
“Joined At The Hip” is a straightahead form with a Bobby Hutcherson feel on which Harris imprints his own stamp. The changes, Williams notes, are very difficult. “It wasn’t contrived, it just came out that way,” he says. “The title is self-explanatory. When you’re joined at the hip, that’s it forever. Can’t do anything about that.”
Williams’ majestic solo piccolo bass variation on “Concerto de Aranjuez” is dedicated to the late Pascual Olivera, a good friend. “Pascual was a great flamenco dancer,” Williams eulogizes. “He had fourth stage cancer, had 14 chemo treatments, and totally destroyed all the cancer. But a year later, it came back. When he overcame the cancer, he and his wife Angela went on tour and did their victory dance to ‘Concerto de Aranjuez.’”
Griot Liberté concludes with “The Ninth Wave.” “There’s a 9-10-foot painting by a Russian painter in the Fuji Art Museum in Japan of three or four sailors floating on the mast portion of a ship that has been destroyed by the ocean’s waves,” Williams says. “They’re facing this gigantic wave, and the sun is behind it. If they can overcome this wave, they can be victorious. So this last piece is very serene and calming. It describes to me the feeling of ease and calmness after going through the ninth wave, when all your senses are vibrating at the highest level. You’ve survived, you’ve accomplished what you went after, and you’re seeing something that’s even more vivid than what you had envisioned, it’s like a prayer of thanks.”
It’s a fitting end to an album on which the creative juices were flowing. “For me it’s an ongoing challenge to work outside the box and avoid the barriers that the studio presents,” Williams says. “I don’t know if I could maintain the creative level if it were not for the stress.” Told it sounds stress-free and spontaneous, he responds with an old-school dictum of comportment in the performing arts. “My father told me a long time ago, ‘Never let them see you sweat.’ That’s professionalism.”
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