William Edward Saxton was born on June 28, 1946, at Harlem Hospital and grew up in the neighborhood he has never left. He picked up the clarinet at Frederick Douglass Junior High School. By his own account the horn that mattered came later and under strange circumstances: he has said he acquired his first saxophone during the Harlem riots of 1964, and he began working as a professional saxophonist the following year.

The next stretch of his life is unusual for a jazz biography, and he tells it himself rather than hiding it. Saxton was sentenced to five years at Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York and served roughly two. He found a band inside, learned from the musicians in it how to practice, worked through his scales, and made the discovery that anything he could sing he could also play. He completed his secondary schooling there. On release he formed a group called the Jazz Prophets with his friend the trumpeter Sinclair Acey, and the two of them went to Boston to audition for the New England Conservatory, which cost nothing to attend. Saxton studied clarinet, composition, and arrangement there and graduated in 1973. He was already recording before he finished: his earliest confirmed credit is Mongo Santamaria's Fuego (Vaya VS 18, 1973), where he plays alto and baritone saxophone and flute.

The 1970s put him in the New York rehearsal-band and loft economy. He recorded with Billy Gault on When Destiny Calls (SteepleChase SCS-1027) at an October 29, 1974 session, and with Roy Haynes in Rome on November 13, 1975 for Horo's Jazz a Confronto series. The relationship that shaped the decade was with Frank Foster. Saxton held a tenor chair in Foster's Loud Minority through the Denon sessions at Sound Ideas Studios in New York in November 1977 and November 1978 that produced Manhattan Fever, Bursting Out!, and Shiny Stockings, and he was in the band again for the Helsinki date of July 1978 issued as Frank Foster's Living Color, For All Intents and Purposes (Leo LEO 007), where he is credited on baritone. Acey was in the trumpet section for all of it. A shelved Loud Minority session from October 9 and 10, 1977 with Elvin Jones on drums finally appeared thirty years later as Well Water (Piadrum, 2007). In the same period Saxton joined Clark Terry's Big Bad Band, recorded live in Warsaw on April 9, 1978 and in Hilversum on September 6, 1979, and played on Bobby Watson's leader debut, Estimated Time of Arrival (Roulette SR 5009), cut at the Record Plant across mid and late 1977.

His name reached critics through Dannie Richmond. Eleven months after Charles Mingus's death, Richmond took a quartet into Barigozzi Studios in Milan on November 23 and 24, 1979 and cut Ode to Mingus (Soul Note SN 1005) with Saxton on tenor, Danny Mixon on piano, and Mike Richmond on bass. Soul Note's own notes for the album describe the three sidemen as Mingus Dynasty players who were touring Europe with Richmond at the time. The record contains no Mingus tunes, only Richmond originals and a ballad he sings, and it is the release most often cited as the point where Saxton first attracted attention.

Leader dates followed slowly, and always on small European labels. The drummer Alvin Queen hired him for Ashanti (Nilva NQ 3402), recorded at Minot Sound Studio in White Plains, New York on August 18, 1981 with Dusko Goykovich, James Spaulding, John Hicks, and Ray Drummond; Saxton wrote the opening track, "One for Booker." Three years later Queen produced Saxton's own debut at the same studio, Beneath the Surface (Nilva NQ 3408), cut on April 12 and 16, 1984 with Hicks, Drummond, and Queen. Hicks sits out three of the six tracks, so half the album is a piano-less trio. The program is a portrait of the company Saxton had been keeping: his own title tune, Foster's "Simone," Wilbur Ware's "Riff Raff," and Roland Kirk's "Ladies Blues." Divox gathered the two sessions onto a single co-billed CD in 1987, also called Ashanti.

From 1985 he was the tenor voice in the Errol Parker Tentet, appearing on the concert album Live at the Wollman Auditorium (Sahara 1014, recorded April 12, 1985) alongside Steve Coleman, Wallace Roney, Robin Eubanks, and Graham Haynes, and on Parker's later Sahara CDs recorded in 1991 and at Systems Two in Brooklyn in September 1994. He also worked in Charli Persip's Superband, credited as a guest soloist on In Case You Missed It (Soul Note SN 1079, recorded September 12 and 13, 1984). His own quartet became a touring unit in Germany, and both of its albums were made there: Live at the Henkelmann Jazz Club (Trion PSCD 9101), taped at the Jazzclub Henkelmann in Iserlohn in June 1991 with a German rhythm section, and Atymony (Jazzline JL 11136-2), cut at Hansahaus Studios in Bonn in 1994 with pianist Carlos McKinney, the young Israeli bassist Omer Avital, and drummer Noel Parris. Atymony remains his most recent leader album.

He kept working the organ-and-guitar side of the music through the 1990s, on Jimmy Ponder's Mean Streets, No Bridges (Muse, 1987), on Big John Patton's Blue Planet Man (Paddle Wheel KICJ 168, recorded April 12 and 13, 1993 with John Zorn also in the front line), and on Radam Schwartz's ORGAN-ized (Muse MCD 5497, recorded January 30, 1992). Dick Griffin used him on three records between 1979 and 1994. Bobby Watson brought him back for the big-band Tailor Made (Columbia, 1993). Since 2006 he has held a reed chair in the Charles Tolliver Big Band, on With Love (Blue Note, recorded June 2 and 3, 2006 at Bennett Studios) and Emperor March: Live at the Blue Note (Half Note 4539, recorded July 10 and 11, 2008), doubling tenor, soprano, clarinet, and flute. His own biographies add a long list of associations that never reached record: the Duke Ellington Orchestra and the Count Basie Orchestra, Randy Weston's African Rhythms, Jackie McLean, Pharoah Sanders, Bennie Maupin, Tito Puente, Carmen McRae, Nancy Wilson, and Barry Harris. He has toured for the State Department in West Africa, Europe, Japan, the Caribbean, and Russia, and has been honored at the White House during Black Music Month.

The thing he is now best known for is a building. Saxton stayed uptown when the rest of the scene went downtown during New York's fiscal collapse, saying that Harlem had always been there and would only get better. He founded a nonprofit, the Harlem Jazz Scene, and a Jazz Literacy Program for Youth built around teaching that African Americans originated the music. In 2006, after years of a standing Friday night at a Harlem pub called Nick's, he opened Bill's Place in the ground floor of a brownstone he had bought at 148 West 133rd Street, working with Sinclair Acey and with his wife, the author Theda Palmer Saxton. The address is the last surviving original speakeasy on the block that Prohibition-era Harlem called Swing Street and Jungle Alley, where Billie Holiday sang and Willie "The Lion" Smith led the house band. The room seats about thirty. Saxton plays two sets there with the Bill Saxton Harlem All-Stars every Friday and Saturday, sells out on word of mouth with no paid advertising, and has used the bandstand to bring up younger players including Camille Thurman, Camille Gainer Jones, and Lakecia Benjamin. He has written more than eighty compositions. In April 2024 the Jazz Journalists Association named him a Jazz Hero, and he was still running the room and playing it in 2026, past fifty years into the working life he started in 1965.

Saxton is a hard bop tenor player in the strictest sense of the term, with a broad, hot, blues-weighted sound and a phrase shape that comes out of the bebop line rather than around it; the reference points most often attached to him are John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, filtered through the section discipline he learned in the Foster, Terry, and Persip big bands. He has been open about refusing the fusion turn that most of his contemporaries took in the late 1970s, and about seeing fidelity to the tradition as an obligation rather than a taste, which is the same argument that keeps his club programming straight-ahead. That conservatism is not narrowness: the same player who cut a modal-leaning trio record for a Swiss label in 1984 also plays baritone on a Finnish avant-garde date, sits in an organ trio behind Jimmy Ponder, doubles clarinet and flute in Charles Tolliver's big band, and turns up on a Roy Ayers vibraphone record in 2011. As a composer he has more than eighty pieces to his name, of which "Beneath the Surface," "One for Booker," "One for Jaws," "Rain Song," and "Priorities" are the ones that circulated. Critically he has always been described as under-recognized: the Soul Note reissue notes for Ode to Mingus say plainly that he "remained fairly obscure" despite the quality of the playing, and the Jazz Journalists Association's 2024 Jazz Hero citation honored him as much for keeping a Harlem room open and mentoring the players who come through it as for the horn.