This Jazz Giant Refuses to Blow His Own Horn : Jazz: Joe Williams’ low profile doesn’t keep many from believing that he’s the finest male singer in his field.

Joe Williams hasn’t had an “Unplugged” show yet on MTV. And he hasn’t made any recordings with Bono, added rap music to his act or done any reggae tunes, either.

A generation that has come to consider Tony Bennett a kind of hip elder uncle would probably not be able to pick Williams out of a crowd. And even some of his greatest fans still tend to think of him only as a blues shouter.

But Williams, a major jazz artist for four decades, has always been more than either a blues shouter or a transitory pop icon. Unlike Bennett, 69, whose management has aggressively marketed him to younger listeners, Williams has never been big on self-promotion or manufactured celebrity.

Yet, without high-powered media fanfare, and without having to spice up his music with pop styles of the moment, he remains head and shoulders above the crowd. Four decades after he burst onto the scene with his first big album, the 1955 hit “Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings,” he is arguably the finest male jazz singer in the world.

Tall and angular at 76, his chiseled good looks graced by a broad, warm smile, Williams’ rich, baritone moves with ease from shouting blues to elegant ballads. He is an artist, notes the Boston Globe, who “defies the odds by getting better as time passes,” and whom the Chicago Tribune accurately describes as “one of the wonders of jazz.”

Tonight at the Hollywood Bowl, his extraordinary career will be celebrated in “A Salute to Joe Williams,” featuring Nancy Wilson, Jon Hendricks, Dianne Reeves, Carmen Bradford, Harry (Sweets) Edison and the Count Basie Orchestra.

“And don’t forget Bill Henderson,” adds Williams with his rumbling laugh, referring to the veteran L.A.-based jazz and blues singer. “My old pal from Chicago better be there too.”

As he will. And, although Williams is delighted by the assemblage of young stars and older veterans, he undoubtedly will also place himself in front of the Basie ensemble long enough to offer a few practical pointers in both the rhythmic and the rhetorical subtleties of singing the blues.

Williams has reached his current position of prominence--which includes Grammy Awards, Down Beat poll awards, honorary doctorates, a recurring role on “The Cosby Show” (as Claire Huxtable’s father) and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame--without sacrificing any of the genuinely amiable, nice-guy qualities that have been present from the beginning.

His superb renditions of such now-classics as “Goin’ to Chicago,” “Everyday I Have the Blues” and “Alright, Okay, You Win” initially identified Williams as a blues singer. But he began to diversify as early as 1957 with “A Man Ain’t Supposed to Cry,” an album that showcased the dark, mellow timbre of his voice and the smooth subtlety of his approach to lyrics.

He recorded with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band in the ‘60s, and followed up with a continuous flow of albums, mixing blues and standards with hard swinging, up-tempo jazz tunes. His most recent recordings, for Telarc, include a gorgeous group of ballads orchestrated by Robert Farnon (“Here’s to Life,” itself a song that has become a signature item) and a collection of spirituals (“Feel the Spirit”).

Williams, a native of Chicago, actually started out, like so many other vocalists of his generation, as a band singer.

“I was singing popular music with orchestras that were playing for dancing in Chicago from around 1937 or ‘38,” he recalls. “And I did that until I left the Basie band in 1961, when the music business changed and it was no longer music for dancing, per se. We always did popular songs of the day, which were given to us by the publishers of the time--Harms, Fisher Music--and we did a lot of radio.

“Of course, we didn’t make any money. But we were doing something that I thought was very romantic, because in our own way, we were doing what Duke Ellington was doing, broadcasting from the Cotton Club in New York City, and what Frank Sinatra was doing with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey.”

By the time Williams joined Basie in the mid-’50s, most singers were working as single acts, and the big-band era appeared to be tapped out, on the verge of being replaced as the music of choice with young people by Elvis Presley and rock ‘n’ roll. But the brilliantly successful synthesis of the driving Basie rhythm section and roaring brass with Williams’ briskly articulated vocal lines and wittily erotic blues passages brought new life to the concept of singer-with-a-band.

Williams is still amused by the recollection that “the people in the record business seemed to feel that, because of those blues, I was a ‘jazz sex symbol’ with the Basie band.

“I never gave any kind of consideration to people thinking of me that way,” he says. “Some kind of sex object? Hmmmm.”

Arriving at that perspective wasn’t easy, however. When he began to perform professionally in the late ‘30s, African American male singers were restricted to working with black orchestras, their music often available only on “race” recordings.

“And that was the era of the male ballad singer,” Williams recalls. “Frank Sinatra, Jack Leonard, the Eberle brothers, Dick Haymes. Movies were always the next step for singers like that if they were what they called ‘photogenic.’ But aside from Herb Jeffries’ roles as the Bronze Buckaroo, it didn’t happen for the black man until Sidney Poitier.

“And there was a reason for that. You had to be romantic to do those roles. Well, if you’re romantic, you’re heroic, as well. And you can’t put down a people on the one hand and treat them as romantic heroes on the other, can you? How can you do that and still keep up the status quo?”

Clearly not very easily. And, as a result, such gifted romantic balladeers as Billy Eckstine, Al Hibbler and Johnny Hartman, among others, were nearly lost in the process.

It was not until breakthroughs by Nat (King) Cole, Johnny Mathis, Lou Rawls, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke that African American male singers started to reach the wider pop music audiences. But Williams, despite his solid reputation as a jazz and blues artist, and a busy schedule of recordings and live performances, has never managed the high-visibility celebrity that accrued over the years to Cole, Mathis, Rawls and more recently to Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson.

He seems, nonetheless, fully content with the cards he has been dealt, looking back on his career with characteristic moderation.

“There’ve been tough times, sure,” Williams says, “and I’ve had some of the same problems other artists have had. I understand a level playing field. You start out as a kid playing sports and learning fair play. The bursting of the bubble comes when you grow up and find out it’s all a bunch of malarkey, that it’s dog-eat-dog out there.

“But a friend of mine once said that hate is too important an emotion to waste on someone you don’t like. And I’ve tried desperately to get my psyche in shape to more or less fend off any of the feelings that are going to mar my life. And hate is certainly one of those. Defend yourself by all means, by any means possible. But I don’t have time to go around hating people.”

Williams does not hesitate, on the other hand, to speak up on issues that concern him, and he does so with reason and intelligence.

“What I do hate,” he adds, “is what we are becoming, or how we must appear to be becoming, as a nation. No matter what is proposed on one side, the other side says, ‘No, no, that’ll never work, we can’t have that.’

“I know it’s been said that we’ll have to be dragged, kicking and screaming into the 21st Century like a newborn baby, protesting all the way. But, I mean, they’re trying to do away with any progress that we’ve made in the last 30 years. I expect Lincoln’s party to re-propose slavery any day now. And the Supreme Court will back them up.”

Blithely grooving to his own drummer, Williams has survived decades of social changes, music styles and varying degrees of fame, without modifying who he is and what he does. Not quite a superstar, he is satisfied to be universally well-liked as a person and universally admired by his contemporaries. He spends about half his time touring, the balance relaxing in a comfortable home in Las Vegas with his wife, Jillean.

“I’m basically doing exactly what I want to do these days,” he says. “Oh sure, sometimes it’s ‘hit and run,’ as we say. You go in to a town, you rehearse, you get a bite to eat, you look around a little bit, you get some rest and then you go and do a concert that night. But it’s a full life . . . “