Willie Jones III grew up inside the Los Angeles jazz scene rather than discovering it. His father, Willie Jones II (1932 to 2011), had moved west from Jacksonville in 1961 to work as a pianist, composer and arranger, serving as music director for the Platters and coaching singers including Ann-Margret. By his son's account he knew every musician in town, which is how a boy who had decided at seven that he wanted to play jazz ended up at the World Stage, the Leimert Park performance space and workshop co-founded by poet Kamau Daaood and drummer Billy Higgins. Jones has described getting excited just watching Higgins set up his drums. The apprenticeship was informal and it was decisive: Higgins became a mentor, and he produced the first record Jones ever made.

That record was 43rd & Degnan (World Stage Records, 1991), the debut of Black/Note, a young Los Angeles hard-bop band Jones co-founded with bassist Mark Shelby, alto saxophonist James Mahone and trumpeter Richard Grant. Wikipedia's article on Jones dates the group's formation to 1990 and its article on the band to 1991; 1991 fits the evidence better, since that is the year the band took first prize at the John Coltrane Young Artist Competition and the year the album appeared. Black/Note recorded four albums in five years and moved up the label ladder fast: L.A. Underground for the Italian label Red Record (recorded March 31, 1993 at Sonora Studio), Jungle Music for Columbia in 1994 with Jones and Shelby co-producing, and Nothin' But the Swing for Impulse! in 1996, cut over three days at Ocean Way in Hollywood with guest trumpeter Nicholas Payton and pianist Greg Kurstin in the band. In parallel Jones entered the California Institute of the Arts in 1991 on a full scholarship and took drum lessons from Albert "Tootie" Heath, whose first instruction to him was to play something and then say something. In 1992 he reached the semifinals of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Drum Competition.

The band jobs came before the move east. Jones worked with Milt Jackson in 1994 and toured with trumpeter Arturo Sandoval from 1994 to 1998, a stretch that put him on Sandoval's Hot House (N2K Encoded Music, May 19, 1998), an album that won a Grammy and whose guest list ran to Tito Puente, Michael Brecker and Patti Austin. He relocated to New York in 1997. Within a year he was Horace Silver's drummer, recording Jazz... Has... A Sense of Humor at Avatar Studios on December 17 and 18, 1998 in a quartet with Ryan Kisor on trumpet, and in 1998 he joined Roy Hargrove's quintet, where he stayed until 2006. The Hargrove association is the one that defined his twenties and thirties. It produced Roy Hargrove with Strings: Moment to Moment (Verve, May 23, 2000) and Nothing Serious (2006), and it extended into Hargrove's funk and soul project the RH Factor, where Jones was one of two drummers on Hard Groove (Verve, May 20, 2003).

In July 2002 he took the drum chair in the touring edition of Directions in Music, the Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker and Roy Hargrove band assembled to mark the Miles Davis and John Coltrane anniversaries. He was not on the group's Grammy-winning album, Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall, which was recorded in October 2001 with Brian Blade on drums and John Patitucci on bass. The 2002 European touring band replaced both: George Mraz on bass, Jones on drums, Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker and Hargrove unchanged. Unofficial recordings from the Barbican Hall on July 9 and the Molde Jazz Festival on July 17 preserve the lineup. By then he had already become one of New York's most-called mainstream drummers, a role documented across a run of Criss Cross dates for Kisor, Jim Rotondi, Jesse van Ruller, Peter Beets and Grant Stewart, and on Chiaroscuro's Voyage, cut aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 between October 28 and November 4, 2000 by Phil Woods with the Bill Charlap Trio, Peter Washington on bass and Hargrove as guest.

In 2000 he founded WJ3 Records, and the label rather than any single album is the through-line of his second act. He described it in 2017 as a self-investment: not profitable, not lossmaking, and something he had got better at with each project. The catalog runs from WJ31001 to WJ31032 across a quarter century, and about a third of it is his own. Vol. 1...Straight Swingin' (2000) assembled sessions cut in 1996 and 1999 with Eric Reed and Billy Childs sharing the piano chair; Vol. 2....Don't Knock the Swing (2003) brought in Hargrove, trombonist Steve Davis and tenor saxophonist Greg Tardy; Volume III (recorded September 2005, issued November 21, 2006) put his father at the piano on a record led by his son. The Next Phase (recorded October and December 2009, issued July 20, 2010) added Warren Wolf's vibraphone and two singers. In January 2012 his sextet with Reed, Davis, Jeremy Pelt, Stacy Dillard and Dezron Douglas played a night of Max Roach compositions at Dizzy's Club, released in 2013 as Plays the Max Roach Songbook. Groundwork (2015) and My Point Is... (2017) both used Buster Williams and Eddie Henderson, and Fallen Heroes, recorded at Van Gelder Studio on January 21 and August 29, 2020 and issued May 21, 2021, was a memorial record built around George Cables, Isaiah J. Thompson, Gerald Cannon and two alto saxophonists. The rest of the catalog belongs to other people: Eric Reed has four albums on it, Gregory Tardy four, Jacques Lesure three, Wycliffe Gordon and Cyrus Chestnut and Justin Robinson and Ralph Moore among the others. Jones produced most of them.

The sideman work kept widening. He recorded with Hank Jones and George Mraz at Prague Castle on July 14, 2009, spent five years in Cedar Walton's trio, joined the Monty Alexander trio with Hassan Shakur for Love Me Tender at Avatar Studios in September 2010, and worked with Houston Person, Ernestine Anderson, Russell Malone, Steve Turre, Roberta Gambarini and Tom Scott. On March 31, 2009 Posi-Tone released guitarist Yotam Silberstein's Next Page, with Jones on drums, Sam Yahel on organ and Chris Cheek on tenor. He appeared on the Motherless Brooklyn soundtrack in 2019, played Kenny Barron's trio through the summer of 2022 with bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa, and produced Roy Hargrove's posthumous The Love Suite: In Mahogany, a 1993 Alice Tully Hall recording that Blue Engine Records finally issued in October 2023 with Gregory Hutchinson in the drum chair. He has taught jazz percussion at Northwestern University since 2009 and drums at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, and he has been named in DownBeat's Critics Poll in the Rising Star Drums and Rising Star Producer categories consistently since 2015.

Jones plays time as a foreground element and almost nothing else as one. Russell Malone put it bluntly in 2017: some drummers cannot get through two bars without doing something cute, and with Jones the time and the groove are never an afterthought. The New York Times has called him an astute hard-bop drummer, which is accurate as far as it goes and undersells the range, since the same player covers a Hammond-and-tenor blowing session, a string-orchestra ballad date, a funk band with two drummers and a Max Roach repertory program without changing his fundamental approach. The lineage he names is Philly Joe Jones and Art Blakey for vocabulary and Billy Higgins for the attitude behind it, and Higgins is audible in the way Jones keeps the ride cymbal buoyant rather than heavy. Tootie Heath's lesson at CalArts, that playing well is not the same as saying something, shows up in how sparingly he solos on his own records: on the leader albums he tends to give the space to the horns and take the bandstand back through the arrangements, most of which he commissions or writes rather than plays over. The production work is continuous with the playing. What WJ3 releases is, almost without exception, acoustic straight-ahead jazz by musicians in their working bands, recorded quickly and mixed dry, and the label's consistency of sound over 32 releases is its own argument.