Onstage at Smoke in late January, the all-star septet the Cookers were surging into high gear. The catalyst: their drummer, Billy Hart, who stirred up rhythmic eddies and punched out stinging cymbal accents while fixing the saxophonist Azar Lawrence with an eager, heat-of-battle grin.
On “Just,” a new album by Hart’s own long-running quartet, out Friday, he reveals some of that intensity in a more understated guise, playing alongside vanguard musicians a quarter century or more younger — the saxophonist Mark Turner, the pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Ben Street — and pulling off what has become, across his six-decade-plus career, a trademark Billy Hart feat: sounding effortlessly and perpetually contemporary.
“He’s a continual, consummate student of the music,” Turner said of Hart, 84, in a phone interview. While Hart’s style draws on the many eras in which he has been active, he continued, “he hasn’t changed his language into something that is based in a period.”
The bassist Buster Williams has worked with Hart since the early ’60s, first meeting him on a gig with the vocalist Betty Carter and later aligning with him in many other contexts, including the Mwandishi band, Herbie Hancock’s trailblazing electric-jazz sextet of the early ’70s. “He’s got that fresh understanding of things,” Williams said in a phone interview. “His vision is always looking forward.”
Outside the jazz world, Hart is largely unknown. But within the genre — where peers and fans refer to him as Jabali, or “rock,” one of the Swahili monikers bestowed on the members of the Mwandishi band by their associate James Mtume — his esteem is near-universal, a status reflected in a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master designation and his staggeringly broad discography, encompassing more than 600 albums.
Most of these are sideman appearances, some alongside major names such as Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Pharoah Sanders, Wayne Shorter and McCoy Tyner. But his catalog as a leader is robust, stretching back to 1977, when he channeled his love of the avant-garde into “Enchance,” recorded during the same period when he was playing far more accessible material with Getz. A tour of Hart’s recorded legacy — early ’60s work with the soul-jazz organ great Jimmy Smith; the alternately funky and free-form Mwandishi sessions; the incendiary post-bop of the collective band Quest; and the moody and probing sounds of his current quartet, intact for more than 20 years — doubles as a vivid portrait of the evolution of modern jazz.
Could the young Billy Hart, growing up in Washington, D.C., have envisioned such a long and thriving career? “Of course not,” he said with an incredulous laugh on a Saturday afternoon in January, sitting on a couch in the basement of his Montclair, N.J. home. He wore jeans and a blue sweater, and was surrounded by shelves filled with books, LPs, cassettes and CDs, with his drums set up steps away. In conversation, he falls into an almost reflexive habit of downplaying the scope of his achievements, which also includes decades of teaching at institutions including Oberlin and the New England Conservatory.
“However I started playing, I’m still doing it,” he said. “I’m still doing exactly what I did, what — 60 years ago?”
Hart got his start in drum and bugle corps and played in a doo-wop group. But a pair of Charlie Parker 78s, passed to him by Buck Hill, a local saxophonist, reoriented him toward jazz. (In “Oceans of Time,” an illuminating memoir penned with Iverson and due out this summer, Hart recounts that epiphanic exposure to Parker: “There was no contest, no argument, nothing. This was it.”)
After paying his dues in D.C.’s clubs, he toured with the pianist-singer Shirley Horn, who would remain a friend and collaborator. Steady gigs with Smith and the guitarist Wes Montgomery followed, giving Hart a firm grounding in the bedrock of mainstream jazz.
Steve Jordan, the widely traveled drummer who now plays with the Rolling Stones, has known and admired Hart since high school. In a phone interview, he praised Hart’s 1964 Newport Jazz Festival appearance with Smith as “some of the best trio playing, of any kind of trio, ever.”
“The way that he played, how he complemented Jimmy Smith — not only with his dynamics, but the groove — was so intense,” Jordan said.
While Hart has always minded the rhythmic imperatives of the music, his appreciation of what he prefers to call American classical music is a holistic one. In Montclair, the conversation gradually made its way to John Coltrane, whom Hart considers “my prime inspiration.” The two never played together, but they chatted on a few occasions during a period when, Hart estimates, he saw the saxophonist’s epochal ’60s quartet “at least 50 times.” Once, Coltrane called and asked him to sit in as a second drummer for a performance in D.C.; not having his kit on hand and not feeling up to the task, Hart declined. His later work with Sanders, Coltrane’s close collaborator, was, Hart said, “me getting a second chance to play with John.”
Hart requested to hear one of his favorite Coltrane recordings, a 1965 live version of “I Want to Talk About You,” the Billy Eckstine ballad, released only as a bootleg. As it played, he moved his arms like a conductor, delineating the song form (“So here we go again to the top…”) and singing the lyrics to “Misty,” an Erroll Garner and Johnny Burke standard with similar chords. As Coltrane unleashed his trademark impassioned cries, Hart smiled and said, “It’s like an opera singer.” He credited his paternal grandmother, a concert pianist who accompanied the pioneering Black contralto Marian Anderson, with developing his ear.
“I can’t find middle C on the piano,” he said with a laugh, “but, you see, I can hear.”
A prolific composer with a strong, exacting melodic sense, Hart conveys his ideas to his collaborators orally. According to Williams, the drummer is “always singing something.
“He’s always got musical ideas in his head,” he added.
Also in his head, as detailed in “Oceans of Time,” is a kind of Rosetta stone of drumming: how the Afro-Cuban clave rhythm informed what became the rock ’n’ roll backbeat; how lesser-known players such as Edgar Bateman and Donald Bailey did as much to advance modern jazz percussion as the more famous Elvin Jones; how he learned, through the Brazilian bossa nova great João Gilberto, to “play like the rain.”
Iverson has treasured such lore ever since meeting Hart in the late ’90s at a rehearsal led by the trombonist Christophe Schweizer. “I just always felt Billy Hart was telling me secrets,” he said in a video interview. “If you can get past the first line of defense,” he added, “and actually have a conversation with Billy Hart, he will look you in the eye and tell you some truths to the music that it’s very hard to learn in any other way.”
At home, Hart gamely spoke for several hours and sat with a satisfied smile as he listened back to some of his favorite original pieces, including two versions of the dramatic “Téulé’s Redemption,” recorded close to 30 years apart. But when it was all over, he seemed perplexed as to why he was worthy of any kind of spotlight. “There’s got to be some other drummers of my age that you should deal with,” he said.
Then he started naming off younger drummers he admires, like Brian Blade, Eric Harland, Justin Brown and Justin Tyson, and speculating about the skill set of what he called “the drummer of the future.”
The way he downplayed his own achievement in favor of a more evolutionary view exemplified another point made by his old friend Buster Williams. Hart, he noted admiringly, “will be young until the day he dies.”
