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James Williams matches Rickey Woodard's intensity with eighteen choruses of piano on "The Tokyo Express" at approximately 244 BPM, an improvisation of comparable scope and power to the leader's preceding nineteen-chorus tenor solo. His hard-bop vocabulary and deep blues feeling over the 12-bar form in F create a solo that sustains creative interest across this extraordinary span, each chorus developing naturally from the last. As the second of three soloists, Williams's eighteen-chorus statement maintains the performance's relentless energy, his playing demonstrating that he is not merely an accompanist but a soloist of equal stature and invention.
James Williams was 40 to 41 years old at the time.
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