Hart finding a late-career groove
Legendary drummer brings quartet to Stanford Jazz Fest
The spotlight took its own sweet time finding Billy Hart, but its late arrival should still be celebrated.
Among the first rank of jazz drummers, he’s a keenly responsive musician who brings orchestral color, breathtaking dynamics and riveting narrative flow to straight ahead and freer settings. At 75, he’s not the oldest drum master still active, not with the indomitable Roy Haynes, 91, Jimmy Cobb, 87, and the 81-year-old Tootie Heath still very much on the scene (is it the aerobic workout that keeps so many drummers going strong?). But while he belongs among this august company, he also stands apart as a bandleader and composer who is doing some of his definitive work today.
Surrounding himself with supremely accomplished improvisers some two generations younger, he’s in the midst of a late-career creative crescendo with a quartet featuring widely influential tenor saxophonist Mark Turner; well-traveled bassist Ben Street; and The Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson, who has called Hart “the living embodiment of a near vanished tradition.”
“It reflects, as far as I can see as an older guy, the height of the younger advanced musicians today,” Hart says of the band. “They encourage me to toss something in the pile every now and then. It’s helped me think about my writing, since I’m sort of new at composing. I started in 1977, when I was already 37, and my compositions come from a more contemporary standpoint, hopefully.”
Nowhere has his extraordinary autumnal output been more widely recognized than the Bay Area. Since the Healdsburg Jazz Festival’s inception in 1999, he’s served as the event’s de facto house drummer, and last month the festival devoted two days to Hart, featuring him reunited with various projects he’s led or co-led over the past four decades.
He relished the chance to explore music from his past and renew longtime relationships, but Hart is always looking forward, and his primary vehicle for musical exploration is the quartet, which plays the Stanford Jazz Festival on July 31. The group returns to the region at the end of the summer for a series of gigs, including a two-night run at SFJazz Sept. 15-16, the Monterey Jazz Festival Sept. 17 and Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society Sept. 18 (he also plays with the all-star veteran combo The Cookers at Yoshi’s Oct. 22 and Kuumbwa Oct. 24).
With three albums over the past decade, most recently 2014’s “One Is the Other” (ECM), Hart’s quartet has honed a singular group sound. Hart, Iverson and Turner all contribute arresting originals, but the band’s personality is easiest to discern on jazz standards interpreted with elliptical precision “to the point where it sounds like our concept,” Hart says. “I’ve had many inquiries after those tunes. If you really listen, you can hear they come from Bird, or Coltrane or George Shearing’s ‘Conception,’ but recomposed, re-concepted. It’s something I feel is unique.”
Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Hart grew up in a musically charged household. His grandmother was a pianist who had accompanied the legendary contralto Marian Anderson, and he cites his experience with the vocalist/pianist Shirley Horn as a formative experience during his teenage years. More than jazz’s great minimalist as a vocalist, “Horn was also a great interpreter from the piano,” Hart says. “You could close your eyes and feel like you’re in a movie. What she could trigger, just from playing, was a drama.”
He first gained national exposure touring with Hammond B-3 organ patriarch Jimmy Smith in the mid1960s, followed by a twoyear stint with guitar great Wes Montgomery during the peak of his popularity. Moving to New York City after Montgomery’s death in 1968, he found work with heavyweights like McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul. But it was with a cutting-edge sextet led by Herbie Hancock that Hart really came into his own.
Taking the name of the band’s first album “Mwandishi” (Warner Bros.), which was recorded at Wally Heider’s San Francisco studio in the winter of 1970, the group created a fine-grained mélange of cosmic jazz, funk and rock increasingly shaped by Hancock’s fascination with electronics. With brilliant improvisers like trombonist Julian Priester and trumpeter Eddie Henderson (now one of Hart’s bandmates in The Cookers), the group was an essential part of the Bay Area scene in the early 1970s, though its contributions were overshadowed by Hancock’s massive 1973 solo hit “Head Hunters” (Columbia).
“I loved being in that band,” Hart says of Mwandishi. “Herbie went to college for electrical engineering, and there was some of that in Mwandishi. The concept of keyboards didn’t exist, just the electric piano, and by the time the band ended we had the ARP synthesizer and the beginning of a whole new way of doing music.”