David Larry Williams[3] was born in Woodbrook, Port of Spain, Trinidad.[4] His father, John "Buddy" Williams,[5] was a bass player and one of Trinidad's best-known bandleaders of the 1940s and 1950s.[6][2][7] David started playing music at the age of five, initially on piano, then violin and steelpan.[2] He attended Tranquillity Boys School, Port of Spain,[4] and at the age of 12 began playing bass in earnest. As a teenager, he played pan in the Invaders steelband.[4][8] When his sister went to London on scholarship to study piano, David joined her there in 1962,[9] studying bass for a year at the London College of Music.[2] 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."[9]
Williams went to New York City 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.[10] 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 working with Donny Hathaway during that time.[2]
Williams' 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.[2][11][12]
In 1982 Williams became a member of the Cedar Walton Trio alongside Billy Higgins (whom Williams first met around 1973),[13] on the death of Sam Jones, for whom he had occasionally subbed.[2] They became, in the words of Jazz Journal: "One of the most regarded trios in contemporary acoustic Jazz".[14]
In more recent years, Williams has also written and recorded music inspired by Trinidadian steelpan and calypso, notably the "pan jazz" album Reid, Wright and be Happy (2003), alongside Ron Reid and Orville Wright.[15]
