Billy Hart in conversation with Ethan Iverson

"Let’s call it the jazz tradition--that huge world that is a sociological development demonstrated through music."

January 2006

The first 78 I had was Charlie Parker with strings playing “Just Friends” and “If I Should Lose You”.  Buck Hill gave me that record, and also the 78 that had “Star Eyes” on one side and “Au Privave” on the other.  From those two records, I fell in love with jazz.  I was fifteen or sixteen, and I think I was already playing some drums. 

They were the first records that came to me direct—I’m sure that my mother and father had stuff that I grew up hearing that was in there, but it didn’t mean anything (especially after television came in when I was about seven years old--those big console sets that you had to move the antenna to change the channel).

I can visualize myself at school, being so hooked on those records that I couldn’t even sit with other people in the lunchroom.   I couldn’t stop thinking about it, singing about it…it wasn’t like I took drum lessons or piano lessons, but it just took hold—I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Tootie Heath was close—I don’t know if it was in high school or in college…but for sure he did come by my room and make a physical thing outside the room [laughter] so that to avoid being embarrassed I had to excuse myself and go out into the hall and hang out!  I remember going with him to go buy some drum sticks one time, and being impressed with his rudimental skills. He also played me my first Ornette Coleman record.  In those days it seemed like was a lot older than me.   Ben Riley, Tootie Heath, and Louis Hayes were already playing gigs when I was in high school.   (My own age group seems more like Tony Williams, Al Foster, and Jack DeJohnette.)

You told me once that of all the drummers on the East Coast, Tootie and you were in the same bag.

No doubt that Tootie and I play similarly.  Tootie and Louis Hayes were my first mentors.  But it wasn’t like that they sat down and showed me anything, they were just the first guys that I had the chance to watch and imitate.  Tootie’s interest in Ornette was strange because he never played any of that kind of music (that I heard about).  He was playing with the Jazztet, and with Bobby Timmons. I remember him talking to me about playing with Timmons, and that Ron Carter was on the gig, and that he really enjoyed it—that it felt really good. This is before he went to Europe.  When he came back he played with Herbie Hancock’s sextet briefly and then he was in Yusef Lateef’s brilliant quartet with Kenny Barron and Bob Cunningham.   Oh, and before that, he had a very interesting connection with Cedar Walton when they both played with J.J. Johnson. 

Tootie has a flair for comedy—of all the people I know, Tootie is one of the funniest.  All the Heath brothers are humorous, but Tootie is outrageous.  He used to make up lyrics to all of Ornette’s tunes—that's how he would teach me that music, by singing his own lyrics to Ornette’s tunes, which were always funny, and may be one of the reasons I was so into Ornette.  Lou Hayes, obviously, didn’t or wouldn’t understand Tootie then! 

I do know that when I was coming up, there was more of an emphasis on finding your own sound.  I remember people talking about Clifford Jordan and Sonny Rollins in intimate conversation—discussing if Clifford was his own man yet. Guitarist Eddie McFadden told me: you can get it from other guys--or you can get from the source (by studying music from books, and learning it yourself).  The thing was to get your own sound--if not your own style, and least your own sound. 

When did you think you had your own style?

There is a video of a Tony Williams clinic that I am going to quote.  Tony says, “As far as I am concerned, I don’t have my own style.  I was always trying to play like Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones and, Max Roach---I wanted to play like they played, if they were me!"

[Laughter.]

If there was another word besides “academic”…Tony, for his age, seemed to me more thorough in the study of the jazz tradition of drumming than anybody I’ve ever come across.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t other guys.  But the more I learned, the more I realized that he had somehow gotten that history together.  And it is not just patterns, it’s the reason why… I guess it would be in any kind of musical tradition, certain chords or accents or whatever present an emotion that been tried and true over a length of time, which I guess “speaks” or is traditionally accurate or correct.  Tony had that.  It wasn’t just that he played this rhythm or pattern, it was that the pattern belonged there traditionally.  A lot of people today might play a Tony Williams pattern, but they play it just because they heard it…they don’t know why or how it works.

There is that video you played me of the Miles Davis quintet with Herbie and Ron playing “Autumn Leaves.”  There are some tensions in the piano and bass, and Tony responds by playing a simple shuffle on the snare and cymbal, which is kind of an advanced response to the tension.

Except that it so correct!  You can see Miles is immediately influenced and affected emotionally.  And then you back to Philly Joe or anybody, hear them do it, and go, “oh right.”  It’s like a change of color or a heightened intensity.  (As opposed to starting a tune that way---if you start a tune there, you have to stay there.) 

One of the interesting things about the Miles band is that there were a lot of details about the tunes that incoming members have to learn, like the cymbal beat and piano tremolos on “All Blues.” Tony and Herbie interpreted those parts in their own way, but still they clearly knew the details.

That’s something else that Tony said.  Someone asked him about getting the gig with Miles just before he was 17 years old.  There must have been other good drummers, right?  Tony said, “Hard to know.  I’d like to ask Miles myself. I can’t say that I was better than anybody else. But I was definitely prepared for the gig.  There was nothing Miles could play that I didn’t already know.”

You once told me that in your development that you thought you found your own style, but then you heard Roy Haynes.

Yeah.  Not only that, I even used to look like Haynes—a lot!  In the magazines his drum set also looked like mine.  Evidently I wasn’t the only one that thought that.  When I first moved to New York, and it looked like I would never have a gig, ever, I went to see Roy play for some inspiration, and I tried to muster up all the bravado I could get.

I walked up to him and said, [aggressively] “How you doin’ Haynes?”

He looked up and said,  [even more aggressively] “How YOU doin’, Haynes?”

[Extended laughter.]

And then I played this legendary club in Brooklyn called The Blue Coronet.  I was playing with Jimmy Heath and Art Farmer. (This was during the days that Billy Higgins didn’t even own a drum stick, let alone a drum set.  Higgins was playing gigs with spoons and knives and shit.)  There was this drummer named Lenny McBrowne at that gig, and when he came up to me afterwards he said, “Billy!  You sound great, man, just like a young Roy Haynes!”

Recently, just a couple of months ago, I played some Eric Dolphy music with pianist Eric Reed.  He gave a tape of Dolphy with Haynes on drums. It wasn’t until I heard this Dolphy tape that I realized that had never really studied “Far Cry” and all those tunes, or that concept of playing.   I found the music very challenging, and Haynes played it back in a day when you don’t think of guys reading on a very high level.  I’m still puzzled how Haynes was able to play that music so masterfully.  I mean, you can easily just chalk it up to genius, but I’m still looking for…something else!   As I much as I thought I knew about Haynes, that he was this brilliant and innovative drummer who had the true message of bebop from Bird and Monk and Diz, I know now that he performed miracles with the next generation too. 

There’s also great Roy on that Andrew Hill record with Joe Henderson and Richard Davis, Black Fire.

You know, I had that…and the Jackie McLean album It’s Time.  But think that Haynes was playing so advanced on that music that it was over my head at the time.  Now that I’m 65, I’m beginning to catch up.  Thanks for reminding me of those records;  I’ll go back to them too.

You don’t play like Haynes any more.  In fact, you seem to have had your own style from the earliest recordings I’ve heard you on in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

Well, I guess what I thought was gonna “my style” that Roy Haynes was already playing that was only a part of “my style.”  An important part, but there were certainly other elements—especially because of the gigs I got.  I left Buck Hill and was with Shirley Horn.  Later I was with Wes Montgomery and Jimmy Smith.

Right at that point, something very, very important for drumming happened.  (This relates very much to Tony Williams again.) At that point, the bebop guys had already embraced afro-cuban music.  (Not unlike they’re doing today.  As usual, the guys who romanticize that thing today seem to be totally oblivious to the fact that the bebop cats romanticized the Afro-Cuban thing at least as much then as we do now.  Think of “Night in Tunisia” and “Woody’n You.”)   That had changed quarter notes to eighth notes. [Sings an example of juke joint music first with swing eighths and then with an even eighth backbeat.] That’s what the beboppers did for popular music (as far I’m seeing it).  So, by the time I’m checking Roy Haynes, I’m also looking at this, in sort of an osmosis kind of way.  Like any young boy today. 

(I do all these clinics, and young cats ask me what I think of pop music—rock and roll, hip-hop—as if I hadn’t been there when it was invented, and as if it didn’t influence me!)

So anyway, at this time [the late 1950’s] the possibility of that [the even-eighth backbeat] being part of a positive evolution for drumming-- if not the music itself-- takes hold.  Because as much as Roy Haynes and Max and those cats were a part of the process, they didn’t play [the backbeat]. They were playing like Chano Pozo and Machito. 

This makes me think of that song “Eighty One,” on the Miles album E.S.P., with Tony on drums.

“Eighty One” is it.  Tony is so deep that shows what I just demonstrated [with the juke joint singing], but it also shows how Tony knew the “second-line.”  Do you know what I mean by “second-line?”

New Orleans parade beat.

But it is more than that.  It’s the direct translation of the African rhythm through India, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the West Indies to the drum set.  As we get rid of racial prejudice, we know more about the origins of rhythm.  A lot of the more advanced drummers of today are basically going backwards.  Because: the Swing Era was the West Indies, and Bebop was Afro-Cuban and the Caribbean (Puerto Rico too), and then right when I hit the scene we have Brazil!  And now metric-modulation, odd-groupings, and hemiola implies the study of the classical music of India.

As the American players of those styles begin understand that each step, it’s like the real cats have been there waiting—“Oh, now you’ve found it?  You’ve figured it out?  Ok, now we will show you how to do it with a little more authenticity.” And as we learn that authenticity, it makes the whole thing a little stronger, I suspect.  First we brought in some of the Afro-Cubans like Machito, and then eventually Eddie Palmieri and  (even more jazz) Hilton Ruiz...now we are to the point that Danilo Perez and Gonzalo Rubalcaba are fully in the mix.  From Brazil we had Jobim and Sergio Mendes, then Milton. Now, there are Indian players on the scene like Vijay Iyer.

Anyway, the “second-line” is all over this music, and still is today (like in Kenny Garrett’s or John Scofield’s music).  Do you realize that Vernel Fournier’s beat on “Poinciana” is pure “second line?”    (A modern example of traditional style “second line” is Adonis Rose on Donald Harrison’s New Orleans Legacy album.)

So, anyway, back to me.  I had Roy, and I had this other stuff, which I acquired though osmosis or had naturally.  Then I began playing with Jimmy Smith.  I went with Jimmy Smith to learn more about bebop—or whatever you want to call it. Let’s call it the jazz tradition--that huge world that is a sociological development demonstrated through music. Although I went with Jimmy Smith to learn that, he wanted me because I could play the new beat, or this new way of looking.  He was looking to for a way to cross over with more authenticity. 

I’m not on Jimmy’s records from the time I played with him, since the record label Verve was trying to make Jimmy a big star using an certain system. They put Jimmy with big arrangements, almost Frank Sinatra style, to make him make palatable for a wider audience.  It was Creed Taylor’s concept, first at Verve, then at A&M, and then finally his own record label CTI.  It was very successful!  Jimmy was the first jazz artist to get the Creed Taylor treatment. Jimmy played with strings and big bands, like he was a popular singer. 

I was with Jimmy three and a half years. 

A lot of us don’t realize you did serious road time with both Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery.

I was with Wes immediately after Jimmy, and not for that long—maybe for about a year and a half or two years.  Wes was coming out of the same concept.  Identical Creed Taylor concept on Verve and A&M. 

I buried Wes.  I was a pallbearer at his funeral.  I might still be with Wes Montgomery today because he put me on salary.  I got paid every week whether we worked or not.  He had a hand-drummer in the band, which meant he was already open or aware of what was to come, right?  All this was pre-fusion fusion music, as I look at it now.  Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, and Eddie Harris.  After Wes passed, I went with Eddie until I didn’t want to do it any more (I got tired of the gig). 

Tell me about Wes and the ride cymbal beat.

Right!   It was very, very helpful.  As helpful as it was humiliating.

Basically, what he wanted was just what I didn’t have:  more of a clear understanding, a clear direction of keeping time.  I couldn’t do it. So Wes gave me a lesson that showed me that I didn’t have a clear cymbal beat. Which is how I learned how to play.

(Ed Blackwell has one of the clearest cymbal beats.  Well, he’s from New Orleans.   They get a special badge from birth, right after they cut the umbilical cord.  It says, “You will have great time for the rest of your life.”)

What did Wes tell you?  He certainly didn’t say, “Billy, could you play a clearer cymbal beat?”

[Laughter.]

It happened again with Stan Getz. He did the same thing to me.  It’s interesting how you learn things—I wonder how someone like Tony Williams learned it so correctly?  Or how Elvin Jones learned it so correctly…well, anyway, someone had to tell me in the most embarrassing way possible, you know?  But at least I learned it—or became aware of it, anyway.

Wes said to me, “Billy, what’s that you’re doin’ with your cymbal?” 

And I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wes.” 

“You know what I’m talking about.” 

“Wes, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” 

“OK , Billy, let me put it this way:  the shit ain’t laying.”

Now, how am I supposed to know what that means?  Well, of course I did know what it meant, you know what it means...how do you put that in words?  “It’s not perfectly in sync?”  Or “It’s not causing the kind of euphoria that we refer to as swinging or grooving?”  Well, anyway, the way he put it was:  “The shit ain’t laying.” 

Did he just tell you that just once?

No, no.  Being a younger person, I wasn’t going to accept it, so I said, “OK, well, he means he wants me to play that old-fashioned, old-style-ass cymbal beat.  If he wants it, fuck it, I’ll do that, but I still have my other three limbs.  With my left hand and right foot I’ll still help the evolution of the planet in a positive way, without this buffoon imposing his own old-fashioned-ass ways.  So, two or three months later, he says to me, “Billy, what’s that you’re doing with your left hand?”  And we went through the same thing again. 

With all the limbs, I suppose.

Well, I don’t think we had to deal with the high-hat.  But it definitely went down with the snare drum and the bass-drum.

In keeping time, this kind of time, since the music started out as a sort of dance music, that meant the drummer was in jail, if not a slave. (A modern drummer like Nasheet Waits would consider it hard time on a chain gang.)  So, it took evolution to get out of that, but once cats tried to do that, then they were really leaned on in terms of how to keep the beat.  Basically, it boiled down to:  “You can try some of this shit, but if the beat transfers one iota, it’s out!”  Kenny Clarke told stories of how, after a while, he could look at the leader’s face—the leader wouldn’t have to say anything, he’d just start packing up his drums, ‘cause he knew he was fired. So, when you’re playing this dance music, what ends up happening is that guys begin start developing this independence in a very clear way, because the time could not waver. How it starts is with rudiments—stuff you do with your hands.  After a while you play them with your hand and your foot while keeping time.  As the thing evolved, the rudiments evolved too, so the shit between the left hand and the right foot got even more complicated. There were three guys were able to take this into a very clear fruition right around when I was comin’ in.  The three guys are Edgar Bateman, Donald Bailey, and, of course, Elvin Jones. 

Donald Bailey was particularly important to me since I took his place with Jimmy Smith.  Even if I hadn’t been that interested in this approach, I would have had to learn it to play the gig. 

By the time I get to Wes, I’ve had three and a half years to work on all of this.  Wes, you know, his concept of a very fucking advanced drummer was Jimmy Cobb. 

[Laughter.]

Now, Jimmy's great--one of the greatest. He's also one of my mentors.  But Jimmy keeps time so that he STARES at his [right] hand and cymbal as he plays.  It’s like a computer graph, where you make sure everything is in sync.  Suffice to say, I didn’t quite play like that!  And that was Wes’ favorite drummer, right?  So there was a WIDE space between us…and I had to get it together.  In one club in San Francisco the bandstand was next to the wall, and the wall was next to this glass painting that acted like a mirror.  So I could sit there, and watch myself play…check out my posture.  Sitting there watching myself, that’s how I learned to play Wes’ beat. 

Wes never mentioned Jimmy Cobb to me, which would have been a simple thing to do, but maybe he didn’t realize Jimmy was from Washington and that I knew Jimmy’s playing.  Whatever, he just said it wasn’t laying. 

What about the snare and bass drum?

The snare drum, (as I understand it) relates to the treble clef of any ensemble.  (The bass drum relates more to the bass clef.) That means your snare drum could be the trumpet section of a big band.  It implies a certain tradition of arranging, whether it’s Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Thad Jones:  it’s how you put that in the mix.  That’s what Wes needed, that tradition.

One of my perceptions about Jimmy’s Cobb’s beat is that it feels kind of aggressive or even like it’s rushing.

H’mm.  Well.  That’s interesting.

There’s a way of playing on top of the beat which makes things happen… like Ron Carter, Tony Williams, or even Louis Hayes …it definitely works and is accurate musically.   It’s a definite way of playing and it doesn’t rush.  All you have to do is have that attitude.  If you don’t have that attitude, it will rush.  But if you know what you’re doing, it is just a way of playing.  (I have really only become aware of this approach as a clear concept in the last ten years or so.)

Now, Jimmy, that’s not his real way of playing.  In fact, I think that Washington, D.C. (where I’m from) has a way of producing drummers that play behind the beat. But Miles tried to get every drummer to play more on top.

Really?

Oh yeah.  Definitely!

When I listen to the records I feel that Philly Joe is more laid back on the beat than Jimmy.

It’s a serious conflict if you naturally feel the beat in the front and the bass player feels it behind (or vice versa).  There’s a professional way to resolve the situation that explains Philly Joe.  If you’re playing behind the beat and you don’t want it to slow down, you play more upbeats.  That’s where the shuffle comes in.  That’s why the shuffle is valid and correct, because it resolves that situation.  If you want to lay back, then you use more shuffles.  There’s a certain euphoric sensuality to laying back in certain situations, but you don’t want to lose your erection.  To keep it up and lay back at the same time, you shuffle—and Philly Joe was great at that. 

Philly Joe’s rim click on the track “Milestones” is pretty on top—unusually so, for him.  It’s as ahead as it can be and still feel good.

Well, that was probably Miles.  Miles always wanted his drummers to play on top.  Same with Stan Getz, even with ballads… I was very uncomfortable playing ballads with Stan Getz since it was never fast enough for him.  Never!  I grew up playing with Shirley Horn—you can imagine how different that was.  A modern day cat who is the same way is Geri Allen.  It doesn’t matter what I do.  I’ll say to her, “How was that, Geri?”  And she’ll say, “Oh, that was great!  Except, it still feels like it is slowin’ down.”

What about McCoy Tyner?

Well, he plays on top of the beat.  So, if anything, he might be the opposite.  He might want you to pull him back a bit.  He wants that isometric thing.

Oh, right.  Like he had with Elvin, of course.

Absolutely.

Continued...

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