Very occasional quote of the day: you call it swing

“You call it swing, but what I’m saying is it’s a rhythmic sophistication that causes a euphoric reaction, and on a folk level that reaction can go anywhere from sensual feelings, to partying, to dancing, to actual meditation… That positive feeling can actually cause healing. 

I sincerely believe that’s one of the main purposes for rhythm, if not for music period, to cause that kind of healing effect.”  

- Billy Hart, Billy Higgins memorial roundtable, by Ted Panken

[h/t to @thenuge at DFO for the link]

Transcription: Billy Hart - Don Is - 01

I've been listening to this record a lot in the last several months— Enjoy The View, by Bobby Hutcherson, with Billy Hart on drums, plus Joey de Francesco and David Sanborn. The tune is Don Is, and it's a blues, 12 bars long, played twice on the head in, which is what the transcription covers:

This will be useful mostly as a listening guide, so you can check out how Billy Hart handles this rhythmic tune. It's very interesting, I want to write more about it when I understand it. In the mean time we can just listen. See what's going on with those triplet fills. 

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Daily best music in the world: Billy Hart

This is an interesting record from 2014, by Bobby Hutcherson, with David Sanborn, Joey DeFrancesco, and Billy Hart on drums. The whole thing is real loose, and basically the opposite of everything happening in music lately— like a titanic expression of the performer's great abilities. Not that.   

Billy Hart is 74 years old here, and has played and recorded as much music as anyone alive, and is working from a level of familiarity with act of playing— and through levels of burnout— it's hard to conceive, and hard for me to write about— what I'm hearing with his playing here.  

You wouldn't mistake him for being a stylist. He's more a “contextist”— and the context is all of modern jazz from ~1960-1980. Including free jazz and early fusion, as well as R&B and funk. Which largely means playing interactively and not just playing idiomatic stuff.

They're playing familiar music, but there's nothing routine here— everything sounds present and in the moment and there to serve a purpose. More like music behavior than a performance for an audience, or even necessarily for musical effect. All very unforced. When he plays assertively, it's not coming from a personality intruding, he's more riding an energy.

It's easy to hear the vocabulary items he's using, and basically why. He'll do one thing for awhile, and you can hear how he uses it, where it goes. You can pick stuff out and use it yourself. 

Daily best music in the world: Buck Hill

Here's a really nice 1978 recording of some 70s powerhouse bebop by Washington DC saxophonist Buck Hill. Wikipedia says about him:

Hill began playing professionally in 1943 but held a day job as a mailman in his birthplace of Washington, D.C. for over thirty years. He played with Charlie Byrd in 1958-59, but was only occasionally active during the 1960s. 

In the 70s, after age 50, he began recording as a leader. Here the rhythm section is Kenny Barron, Buster Williams, and Billy Hart— as a young man Hart actually knew Hill in Washington, and played with him. Hart says Hill gave him his first jazz records, a couple of Charlie Parker 78s.

Billy Hart interview

Photo by Anthony Porcar Cano

More Billy Hart. Michael Griener sent me this 1994 Modern Drummer interview by Ken Micallef, and it's excellent. It gives a much fuller picture of his musical intellect than I got to see in the clinic. This is high level player's philosophy.

Micallef says at the beginning, “Categorizing Hart's contribution is no easy task. Among the four hundred or so albums Hart has recorded— including his solo records— one hears a musician not so much in love with the drums as with the possibilities they hold for expression within the music.” I think that may be part of why I have been slow to get into his playing seriously— he doesn't project an overt drumming personality the same way as some other players. No one would ever dismiss him as being a stylist.

I'm going to excerpt the interview pretty heavily, because that's what this site is about: collecting important information about drumming. So thank you Ken and thank you Modern Drummer, without you this important contribution to the literature of drumming would not exist. Subscribe to MD and call up Ken and tell him thank you.

Anybody can be a great instrumentalist. It's simply a matter of technique. The difference is in musicianship. You can be a great instrumentalist, but there are very few musicians.

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Coltrane once told me about Elvin, “No matter how tense the situation gets, Elvin never tightens up.” I learned what that means. You don't mind taking chances in certain situations because you have confidence that it will come out. Or you enjoy reaching for it even if it doesn't come out.

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[Milford Graves and Sunny Murray] were like magic; they conjured up spirits and ghosts and rainbow. You could actually believe that these guys could make it rain and give you visions. It was psychedelic. Now the high comes from precision and technique

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The point is that what makes a rhythm you play groove is not that you're approximating a record, but that the groove is correct from what was played centuries ago in Africa. It's a rhythmic significance that's built on this heavy intelligence. Over centuries of playing they've come up with something that is so correct that when you play it accurately, based on the history, people are going to respond euphorically. 

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...the rhythmic reason for this is to make people feel good. On the highest level you actually heal people, both physically and psychologically. It makes people happy and it makes them move. That's the purpose of drumming in the first place. The dance. That's the point of anyone playing the drums.

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Q: Where do those soaring buzz rolls that you play come from?   

A: Art Blakey, but he would always conclude it with a cymbal crash. Tony would do it with single strokes, but not conclude it, he'd leave it empty. 

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Girls are always slightly behind the beat, but in the pocket. Watch them snap their fingers to the beat. They're sitting on it. It's what Gadd and Chambers are masters at. How come that shit never slows down? 

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Joao Gilberto used to tell me: “Play like the wind, play like rain.” Miles said the same thing. “Start everything on 4 and don't finish nothin'.”

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How you resolve something is the key. You resolve it, but don't conclude it in a logical way. Find something else hip to play. You're concluding it, but in a more abstract way. That's what all the geniuses did. 

Also see Ethan Iverson's interview with Hart.

Daily best music in the world: Billy Hart with Buster Williams

A busy few days here, so here's a Buster Williams album with Billy Hart on drums, which I've been running on a continuous loop since Monday.

Billy Hart clinic

Had a very interesting time at a Billy Hart clinic yesterday at Portland State University— I was sick, and barely made it through the two hours, but I went.

If you came into the clinic knowing nothing you might underestimate the man. He played for about five minutes up front— more creative musing than any kind of demonstration or display— and then answered questions, usually indirectly, in a very broad way, often philosophical.

Which itself tells you something, given the technocratic thing we have going today— everybody expects penetrating analysis, and extended, very detailed technical answers to everything. Or some kind of packaged enlightenment. We really nursemaid people through the learning process.

You really got the impression that he has lived his whole life on the gig, and that the true medium for his intelligence is in playing music. Not drumming itself, not talking about drumming, or talking about music, or practicing, or teaching. Then again, he's 79 years old, and the ultimate veteran; you can understand that he might not be effusive about thinking hard for people and giving up everything to just anyone. But I felt like I was seeing a member of the very oldest school, which just lived through playing, on the gig.

He became well known playing modern music at the same time as some very technical drummers, but as an artist he seems to be non-analytical, closer in attitude to Paul Motian than Billy Cobham. He claimed not to have thought about certain technical things now usually taken for granted as being very important. Listening to him, the overwhelming technique school of drumming seems a little cheap and commercial in comparison.



Since there is no such thing as being a better drummer than Billy Hart— he has over 600 album performance credits, with the best people in the world— I think the big lesson here is that playing intelligence is its own thing, and different from all the things we do as musicians that are not actually playing music with humans. I felt like I was seeing a consummate player— distinct from all the other roles we have as professionals: sidemen, accompanists, soloists, featured artists.

From memory, a few quotes:

On Stan Getz: He was performing his whole life, and never really got a chance to grow up. So if he did things that were selfish— little kids do that, and nobody hates them for it. 

Q: Does he feel like a master?: No. 

Response from a bandleader when Hart requested charts and a rehearsal: You don't use charts on this band. Play the dance.  

On an anonymous phone call: They said, “Love is the highest form of intelligence in the universe.” I'm still trying to figure that one out.

There were other bits I can't recall clearly enough to make a decent paraphrase:

• Seemingly mystified by what motivates some drummers (“I guess they like hitting drums.”) 

• Saxophonists asking why he chose the least technical of three masterful takes of a track with Chris Potter.  

• I was amused that nobody in the room, which included some great players, could name the drummer on Hub-Tones when it came up. “It's on Blue Note!” said Hart— he finally remembered that it was Clifford Jarvis. 

• Said that focus on what is current or hip right now is really a corporate, consumer mentality.  

• Remarking that he must have looked very stunned when Miles came up and enthused about his playing, and told Hart he would call him when he needed a drummer— Miles finished by leaning in close and saying “OK?!”

Transcription: Billy Hart - Batuki

UPDATE: Jeez, what a moron. Naturally I spelled the title wrong on the actual page. It's Batuki, not Batuka. Well, we'll fix it for the book...

Here's an interesting little bit of playing by Billy Hart, playing with Buster Williams, on the album Pinnacle. The tune is Batuki, and I've transcribed the drums from Woody Shaw's trumpet solo, starting at 3:10 in the track. I don't know if there's anything extremely exciting in the transcription, maybe it's more an entry to understanding modern playing, and giving the entire recording a really close listen— which you should do.

The style is a 70s Bossa-derived Latin— if there were a style indication on the page, it would probably just by “Latin”— but you'll notice Hart is playing very little that's recognizable as a standard Bossa Nova groove. It's very open and modern, with a lot of space, dynamic shape, and big fills at appropriate places in the form.

It's a very musical performance, and while there's plenty of drums, there's isn't much happening that's particularly technical— throughout the entire track. In measure 20 there's a floor tom hit which could be a little awkward; absolutely no reason not to do something easier there. In measure 24 the rolls are played as single strokes. I neglected to mark the tempo— it's quarter note = 126.

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Daily best music in the world: Bennie Maupin — Ensenada

Here's a beautiful piece, Ensenada, from Bennie Maupin's 1974 album The Jewel In The Lotus, with Billy Hart on Drums and Freddie Waits on marimba:

VOQOTD: Elvin

“Don’t ask me to show you anything, because if I could show you, we would all be Max Roach.”

- Elvin Jones, from part 2 of Ethan Iverson's Billy Hart interview

Ethan Iverson interview with Billy Hart

Here's part of another great interview by the Bad Plus' Ethan Iverson, this time with Billy Hart:


Miles and Tony
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.”


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