John B. Williams, a veteran musician who played in house bands for both The Tonight Show and The Arsenio Hall Show, has been placed in hospice.
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On June 3, Williams’ wife, Jessica, told TMZ that her husband had recently fallen and required brain surgery for his injuries. She also told the outlet that Williams had dementia before the fall, but the accident “greatly accelerated its progression.”
The 85-year-old musician is now unable to walk or talk, and his health continues to decline. According to TMZ, one of his last conversations was with his daughter.
Pop culture aficionados may recall a 1991 clip of Will Smith on The Arsenio Hall Show joking about Williams’s bald head. The footage went viral in 2022, shortly after a joke about another bald head didn’t land so well for Smith at the Oscars…
That time in 1991 when Will Smith made fun of a bald man on the Arsenio Hall Show and said “awe these are jokes man c’mon”.#WillAndChris #WillSmithAssault #ChrisRock #WillSmith pic.twitter.com/LMUyjwj0d8
— ThePopPunkDad (@ThePopPunkDad) March 28, 2022
However, unlike Smith, Williams managed to take the joke in stride.
“I didn’t take it seriously,” Williams once told Rolling Stone about Smith poking fun at him. “He was a comedian; He was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; He was a rapper. I took it as a joke. I laughed it off.”
John B. Williams Worked with Legends Like Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong
According to his online bio, Williams was the house bassist for The Tonight Show for seven years during Johnny Carson’s tenure. However, he also made his mark on other classic TV shows, sharing bass duties with Robert Cranshaw on Sesame Street. From 1989 to 1993, he was a member of The Posse, the house band for The Arsenio Hall Show.
Williams played multiple instruments as a teenager before enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1960. After his service, he earned a spot in the Horace Silver Quintet, where the band’s leader introduced him to the bass. Williams went on to release several albums and play with legendary musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie.
In a 2014 interview with For Bass Players Only, Williams discussed his 2011 album Notes on Life, which he recorded with his wife.
“It was comprised of music and monologues I call ‘jazz theater,'” Williams told the outlet. “The idea came about during the years I spent doing the very popular Arsenio Hall Show, as a member of the ‘Posse’ studio band and also doing tongue-in-cheek poetry, which became a regular part of the show titled, ‘The John B. Williams Poetry Moment.'”
From there, Williams began performing in the theater and was “hooked,” he said.
Williams released his most recent album, African Queen (A Tribute To Horace Silver), in 2014.