Irvin Williams was born on August 17, 1919, in Little Rock, Arkansas. He started on violin as a child, switched to clarinet at eleven — reportedly on his physician father’s advice, to strengthen his lungs during a bout of bronchitis — and eventually settled on the tenor saxophone, which he played professionally for the next eighty-plus years. He arrived in Minneapolis in 1942 with the U.S. Navy Band, stationed at the Naval Air Station outside the city. On his first weekend in town, he met bassist Oscar Pettiford, who introduced him to the local jazz scene. He never left.
I knew Irv Williams for decades — not intimately, but the way you know someone who has been present in the same world as you for forty years. I saw him at the Dakota. I saw him at the festivals. I sat in the audience more times than I can accurately count and heard what Jazz Police writer Tom Sirotnak called that tone — warm, mushy, slightly sentimental. According to Sirotnak, it was the greatest loss of Williams’ passing. I agree.
Irv Williams died on December 14, 2019, at age 100. His last regular happy hour gig at the Dakota concluded in late 2017, when he was 98 years old. For his 99th birthday in August 2018, he performed a 45-minute set there. He was arguably the longest continuously active jazz musician in American history, and perhaps the most beloved figure the Twin Cities scene has ever produced.
How Did He End Up in Minneapolis?
The Navy brought him here. The city kept him.
Williams had graduated from Dunbar High School in Little Rock in 1938, enlisted in the Navy, and came to Minnesota as a clarinet and saxophone player with the U.S. Navy Band. His first weekend in Minneapolis introduced him to the local scene via Oscar Pettiford. According to multiple accounts, he found a community that suited him — Black musicians working serious gigs, a viable scene for someone with his abilities, and the possibility of building a life outside the relentless competition of New York or Los Angeles.
He could have left at any point. Duke Ellington invited him to join permanently. Count Basie extended the same invitation. So did Louis Armstrong. Williams turned all three down. As he told MPR News, his reasoning was simple: “To be with my family as long as possible and to play music as long as possible — so that’s what I’m going to do.” He had nine children from two marriages. He chose Minneapolis.
This is perhaps the defining fact of his career — not what he played, but what he declined in order to play it here. Three of the most important bandleaders in jazz history, and he said no to all of them.
What He Did Before the Twin Cities
In his early career, Williams played in bands backing Ella Fitzgerald, Fletcher Henderson, Mary Lou Williams, and Billy Eckstine at major venues including the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. He recorded with Dinah Washington. He performed occasionally with Clark Terry, who he called a friend. By any national standard, he was working at the highest level.
According to the African American Registry, his warm tone and mastery of the jazz ballad earned him the nickname “Mr. Smooth.” According to jazz historian Jay Goetting — author of Joined at the Hip, the definitive account of the Twin Cities traditional jazz scene — the name specifically came from Bob Protzman at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It stuck because it was accurate. The way Williams described his approach to MPR News was characteristically plain: “I just use a lot of air and don’t breathe as much as other guys do. So it’s more seamless than otherwise.”
The Twin Cities Years
Williams spent the next approximately seventy-seven years playing in the Twin Cities. He taught music at St. Paul Central High School. When money was short — and with nine children, money was often short — he ran a dry-cleaning business on the side. He played the Flame Bar, where he reportedly often appeared back-to-back with Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, and Johnny Hodges. He played Freddie’s in Minneapolis, the Top of the Hilton in St. Paul, and eventually the Dakota Jazz Club, where he maintained a regular weekly happy hour residency that became one of the most enduring institutional fixtures in the local scene.
In 1984, the State of Minnesota declared Irv Williams Day — reportedly the first time a jazz musician had been so honored by the state. In 1990, his picture appeared on the “Celebrate Minnesota” official state map. In 1995, Arts Midwest named him a Jazz Master. In 2005, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the KBEM Winter Jazz Festival. In 2014, he was inducted into the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame — reportedly the first-ever inductee to the Minnesota Jazz Hall of Fame specifically. His saxophone was incorporated into the “Minnesota’s Greatest Generation” exhibit at the Minnesota History Center.
His final album, Pinnacle (2015), credited to the Irv Williams Trio with Billy Peterson on bass and Steve Blons on guitar, includes recorded conversation with Leigh Kamman — the broadcaster who hosted The Jazz Image on Minnesota Public Radio for thirty-four years and who Williams had known for decades. The two men’s careers ran in almost perfect parallel through the Twin Cities scene: Kamman behind the microphone, Williams in front of the bandstand, for most of the same years.
What He Chose and What It Cost
The cost of Williams’ choice — nine children over four decades of touring with Ellington or Basie — was national fame. He was perhaps the most locally beloved jazz musician in Minnesota history and largely unknown outside the state. The Star Tribune, in its obituary, described him as a musician who chose family over stardom. That framing is accurate as far as it goes. But it may understate what he built here.
A musician who stays in a mid-sized city for seventy-seven years, playing seriously, teaching in the public schools, showing up at the Dakota every week into his late nineties — that musician creates something that a touring star cannot. He creates continuity. He creates the kind of community knowledge that lives in the musicians who played alongside him, the students who heard him in school, the audiences who heard him at the Flame Bar in 1955 and then at the Dakota fifty years later and recognized the same tone.
The Twin Cities jazz scene is partly what it is because Irv Williams decided in 1942 that this was his city. The rest of the infrastructure — KBEM Jazz 88, the Jazz Society, the Dakota, the Artist’s Quarter — built the audience. Williams built the continuity. Those are different contributions, and both are essential.
Lowell Pickett, the Dakota’s founder, said it to the Star Tribune after Williams’ death: “He was one of those people that make this world a better place, in every conceivable way. His presence, his kindness, his music. We could use him for another hundred years.”
He was 100 years old. He had been playing saxophone professionally for approximately eighty-five of them. Minneapolis was lucky to have him, and perhaps even luckier that he chose to stay.
Irv Williams’ recordings — including Pinnacle (2015), his final album with Billy Peterson and Steve Blons — are available on streaming platforms. Jay Goetting’s Joined at the Hip documents the Twin Cities jazz scene that Williams helped build across eight decades. His saxophone is on permanent exhibit at the Minnesota History Center.
