Anthony Tillmon Williams was born December 12, 1945, in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, of African, Portuguese, and Chinese descent. He began studying drums with the Boston teacher and Berklee-affiliated master Alan Dawson around age eleven, and by thirteen was already working professionally, drafted into saxophonist Sam Rivers's band. Jackie McLean hired him at sixteen, and by seventeen, in 1963, he had joined Miles Davis's quintet, later christened the "Second Great Quintet," alongside saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and bassist Ron Carter; both Shorter's and Carter's own careers are covered in full in Wayne Shorter's and Ron Carter's JazzProfiles.com profiles. Davis himself called Williams, in his autobiography, "the center that the group's sound revolved around" — a teenager driving one of the most harmonically adventurous rhythm sections in jazz history through polyrhythms and metric modulation that redefined what a drummer's role in an ensemble could be. Even while working nightly with Davis, Williams found time to appear on other landmark Blue Note sessions of the period, including Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch! and Andrew Hill's Point of Departure (both 1964), and to record two albums of his own: Life Time (1964), cut at nineteen with Sam Rivers, Herbie Hancock, and bassists Richard Davis and Gary Peacock, and Spring (recorded 1965, released 1966), with Wayne Shorter guesting alongside Rivers, Hancock, and Peacock. He stayed with Davis through the quintet's transition into early electric fusion, playing on 1969's In a Silent Way before leaving that year to lead a band of his own.

That band was The Tony Williams Lifetime, formed in 1969 with guitarist John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young — a trio built to fuse the harmonic freedom of the Davis years with the volume and backbeat of rock. Its debut, Emergency! (1969, Polydor), recorded at Olmsted Sound Studios in New York, is now widely cited as one of the first true jazz-fusion albums, though it was largely rejected by the jazz press at the time. Miles Davis, by contrast, was impressed enough that he reportedly asked to take over leadership of the group outright; Williams declined. The band continued through (Turn It Over) (1970, adding bassist and singer Jack Bruce of Cream) and Ego (1971, a leaner trio with Ron Carter on bass and cello and Ted Dunbar on guitar) before Williams retooled the concept again for The Old Bum's Rush (1973), a funk-inflected date closer to the fusion mainstream. In 1975 he assembled the New Tony Williams Lifetime — bassist Tony Newton, keyboardist Alan Pasqua, and a young British guitarist named Allan Holdsworth — for Believe It (1975) and Million Dollar Legs (1976), both on Columbia; Believe It in particular is now regarded as a high point of 1970s fusion, built on Holdsworth's legato lines and Williams's still-restless rhythmic sense. It was around this period that Williams briefly rehearsed, unrecorded, in a trio with Holdsworth and a young bassist named Jeff Berlin, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile.

In 1976, Williams reunited with his former Davis quintet-mates Hancock, Carter, and Shorter — with Freddie Hubbard standing in for Davis — for the touring and recording project V.S.O.P. He kept experimenting through the turn of the decade: The Joy of Flying (1979) gathered an eclectic guest list including George Benson, Stanley Clarke, and Cecil Taylor, and in 1979 he, McLaughlin, and bassist Jaco Pastorius performed together at the Havana Jazz Festival as Trio of Doom, a recording not issued until 2007, a decade after Williams's death. Play or Die (1980), cut in Stuttgart with keyboardist Tom Grant and bassist Patrick O'Hearn, closed out his most overtly rock-facing period.

Williams returned to acoustic jazz and to Blue Note in 1985 with Foreign Intrigue, assembling a new working quintet — trumpeter Wallace Roney, saxophonist Billy Pierce, pianist Mulgrew Miller, and a rotating bass chair (Ron Carter, Charnett Moffett, then Ira Coleman) — that would anchor most of his output for the next decade; Roney's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. The quintet's run produced Civilization (1987), Angel Street (1988), Native Heart (1990, which reached the top five of Billboard's jazz albums chart), The Story of Neptune (1992), and the live Tokyo Live (1993). In 1994 Williams rejoined Hancock, Shorter, Carter, and Roney for A Tribute to Miles, recorded the year after Davis's death; the album won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. His most ambitious late work, Wilderness (1996, Ark 21), paired his working band with a string orchestra and guest soloists Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker, and Stanley Clarke — a deliberate widening of the sonic canvas he had spent three decades pushing against. His final studio album, Young at Heart, was recorded with his working quintet in Tokyo in September 1996 and released that November on Sony Japan, just months before his death.

On February 20, 1997, Williams checked into Seton Medical Center in Daly City, California, with stomach pain and underwent what was described as routine gallbladder surgery. Complications followed, and three days later, on February 23, 1997, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 51. He was posthumously inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame later that same year, having already entered the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1986. As early as 1970, critic Robert Christgau had called him, simply, "probably the best drummer in the world" — a claim that decades of subsequent drummers citing him as a foundational influence have done little to dispute.

Williams's playing fused an encyclopedic command of jazz's timekeeping tradition — he cited Max Roach, Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, Roy Haynes, and Jimmy Cobb as formative influences — with a willingness to abandon strict timekeeping altogether, using polyrhythm and metric modulation to make the drum kit a co-equal melodic and harmonic voice rather than an accompanist's instrument. That approach, fully formed by his teens in the Davis quintet, made him one of the primary architects of what jazz criticism would later call "time, no changes": playing with pulse and freedom simultaneously rather than choosing between them. His early and total embrace of rock volume, backbeat, and electric instrumentation with Lifetime, years ahead of jazz-rock's commercial vogue, helped define an entire subgenre almost by accident — the jazz world initially recoiled from Emergency! before fusion caught up to it. His late-career reach toward orchestral scale on Wilderness suggests a restlessness that never really settled, even after he'd returned to the acoustic quintet format that closed out his career.