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Swing Beat: The Late, Great Tom Williams

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There’s no clever setup this column can concoct to describe Tom Williams, who died suddenly of a heart attack on Aug. 7. Nor should it try: Those who knew him are still processing the shock of the brilliant trumpeter’s death at age 61. To try to sum him up is to suggest that his absence in the DMV is somehow conceivable.

Even those two words—“brilliant trumpeter”—don’t do him justice, though they are correct. They’re just the starting point. Williams, the son of the late saxophonist Whit Williams, another legendary local, was a scholar of his instrument. He drew on all of its jazz grand masters; depending on who you asked, he sounded like Miles Davis, Woody Shaw, Freddie Hubbard, Clark Terry, or his personal favorite, Kenny Dorham. But these are wildly different stylists; to sound like all of them is, perhaps paradoxically, to be a complete individual.

“He mixed all these styles together and spit ’em out,” says Kenny Rittenhouse, a local trumpeter who was a friend and protégé of Williams. “He was my favorite trumpeter. Nobody sounded like him.”

Williams was also exceptional on the drums, the instrument he first fell in love with. Ten years ago, at a gig that has since passed into legend, Williams was playing trumpet in a pickup band drummer Ralph Peterson led at Bohemian Caverns. Peterson, who died in 2021, was also a gifted trumpeter, and when it came time to play his original song “Pinnacle,” the bandleader got up from behind the kit and grabbed a trumpet while Williams sat down at the traps. The performance lost not a hint of swing.

Williams was a lifelong Baltimorean; he traveled the world, garnered the respect of the New York jazz A-list, and had a considerable footprint in the District as a veteran of both the U.S. Army Blues and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. He had been scheduled to lead a band at Takoma Station on Aug. 19, but he remained best known in and around Charm City. 



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