Willie Jones III

Willie Jones III is a Grammy winning jazz drummer, bandleader, and educator whose crisp, hard swinging style has anchored some of the music's leading groups. Born in 1968 in Los Angeles, the son of pianist and arranger Willie Jones, he studied at the California Institute of the Arts with the drummer Albert Tootie Heath and co-founded the band Black Note, which won the John Coltrane Young Artist Competition in 1991. He held the drum chair in the Roy Hargrove Quintet from 1998 to 2006 and has performed with Horace Silver, Cedar Walton, Hank Jones, and Herbie Hancock, as well as Wynton Marsalis at Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 2000 he founded the independent label WJ3 Records, on which he has issued numerous albums as a leader. Since 2010 he has served on the jazz faculty at Northwestern University.