The Book Cooks Oceans of Time:
Whatever people do, the top version exists in New York City – especially when it comes to jazz. During the Wes Montgomery years, Dolores [Billy’s wife] had found a place for us in Long Island. After Wes passed so suddenly, it was time to go out, to try to meet people, to become part of the scene. Walter Booker helped me a lot, and two established drummers playing with Booker, Mickey Roker and Billy Higgins, started recommending me to others. Billy Cobham, who was already active in the studios and with some good bands, also sent me some gigs. Cobham and I had such a good time analyzing Tony Williams and Elvin Jones together when hanging out at Cobham’s Manhattan pad. Both Howard McGhee and Sam Rivers had rehearsal big bands. Jimmy Heath, Hank Mobley, and Cedar Walton were active with smaller groups. This was an elite caliber of musician! I saw the people in that scene frequently performing “On the Trail” by Ferde Grofé, a standard that helped define that late-60s NYC era of serious music. Back in D.C., all the piano players I looked up to played Red Garland’s intro to “Bye Bye Blackbird.” In New York a decade later, they played “On the Trail.” It could be a little rough. A few times, as I was leaving to go to a gig, my battery was gone, stolen straight out of the car. And while this didn’t happen to me, I heard about drummers who opened their cases to find no drums. The professional thieves would steal the drums, but leave the cases, so the victim would drive away from the scene none the wiser until a terrible moment of truth. Whatever people do, the top version exists in New York City. Musically, it could be rough too. Sonny Rollins asked me to play with him at the Village Vanguard. After two nights, his manager called and fired me. I was never as frightened, disappointed, or dismayed as when Sonny decided to make a change in his band mid-week at the Vanguard. He did try to hire me again a few times over the years, but I never felt able to accept the gig, remembering that bad week at the Vanguard. I tried out with Milt Jackson just after the Sonny Rollins debacle. I thought I knew Milt Jackson because I had the Modern Jazz Quartet records. How was I to know that he often disagreed conceptually with John Lewis and the delicate aesthetic of the MJQ? I tried to play like I would have played with the MJQ, and luckily word got back to me that Milt said: “Billy Hart! I never heard such a drummer that didn’t play nothin’. I thought the motherfucker was dead.” Between Sonny Rollins and Milt Jackson, it dawned on me that these great New York musicians wanted more from a drummer than subservience. They definitely wanted your opinion. Wes Montgomery had taught me to be subservient almost too well! For a short time I was in Eddie Harris’s band, with Jodie Christian on piano and Melvin Jackson on bass, but that was more of the same, almost a step backwards for me. Eddie was trying to bring a controlled pop style into modern jazz, along the lines of Wes Montgomery, Herbie Mann, and Ramsey Lewis. He was one of the great saxophonists, but he had become intrigued with amplifying his saxophone and looking for a commercial hit. Melvin Jackson is not a very famous bass player, but for some reason a huge photo of Melvin – really more like a mural – used to grace the entryway of Fasching, a top jazz club in Stockholm. Melvin made only one album, Funky Skull, where you can hear me playing in a true pop style, as if I was back at The Spa doing 40 on and 20 off for the dancers. (For the jazz historians, that LP is also a rare example of Chicago avant-gardists like Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, and Leo Smith on a commercial dance project.) From the records with Eddie Harris, “Movin’ On Out” on High Voltage gives a sense of his working quartet, where the band plays in support of electronic effects from Eddie’s Varitone saxophone. I didn’t need more of that kind of thing. What I really needed was Pharoah Sanders. For a time I was with both Eddie Harris and Pharoah Sanders, but I quit Eddie when Pharoah had a record date that conflicted with one of Eddie’s tours. Eddie was doing pretty well with his career at that point. He asked me, “Man, you’re gonna quit me now when I’m at the top of my game?” But I wanted to play with Pharoah more than I did with Eddie. There wasn’t a serious contest. Part of my attraction to Pharoah Sanders was his connection to John Coltrane. Pharoah had been John’s choice for a second horn, and Pharoah’s own music had continued in the Coltrane line. When I first started learning about this music, my favorite tenor saxophonists were inspired by Charlie Parker. Johnny Griffin played bluesy and fast; then I was impressed by Sonny Rollins. Soon enough, John Coltrane captured me during his solo on “All of You” from Miles Davis’s ‘Round About Midnight. I’ve talked to Gary Bartz about this, and he felt the same way: “All of You” made us John Coltrane fans forevermore. When I first saw John live, it was through the fan blades at the Spotlite room with Miles. John was back from being with Thelonious Monk, doing that “sheets of sound,” or whatever they called it. I watched it happen. John would use a lot of notes, and a lot of what he played came straight from Charlie Parker, but he also always sounded like a romantic singer – a pure rhapsody – and of course he never stopped playing the blues. I love John Coltrane. At this point, I can honestly say that John is my reason. The church is just a building, but that feeling inside a Black church goes back thousands of years. Coltrane – no matter how avant-garde his late music became – “done get you in touch with that.” A single note from Coltrane shows you he’s in command of a universal, spiritual, and philosophical message. I was waiting for John to form his own band, but Elvin Jones was a surprise. Bassist Wilbur Little had toured with Jones in the J.J. Johnson group in the late ’50s, and laughingly reported back that J.J. Johnson said about Elvin, “Man, this is either the greatest drummer or the worst drummer I’ve ever played with.” At first, this music was for dancing. In the Afro-American community, dancing is very important. I danced throughout high school, when we called our get-togethers at our homes “the rub,” as in, “Where’s the rub tonight?” There’s a wonderful photo of Lee Morgan and Bobby Timmons dancing together on the LP jacket to The Young Lions. Herbie Hancock isn’t that young anymore, but I’m sure if you put on a record of Stevie Wonder or some such today, Herbie would immediately get up and move his body in a certain way. In dance music, the drums basically have to keep a beat. However, after the so-called bebop revolution, drummers were looking to contribute to the ensemble in a contrapuntal fashion. It could be hard to do this with most leaders, who wanted their drummers to keep steady time. Kenny Clarke said that he could tell simply by the leader’s expression mid-set if he was going to be able to leave his drums at the gig for the next night, or have to pack them up and go home. When John Coltrane got Elvin Jones in his band, that was it. The drums were now free. Some of his intensity was surely inspired by Art Blakey. In Trane ‘n Me, Andrew White argues that John simply could not have got to where he wanted to get to without Jones: Trane was structuring his music around Elvin. This was the main source of the symmetry in Trane’s music… Breath is life. The music must breathe. Elvin was the breath in Trane’s music. …It was the manipulation of standard devices that established Coltrane as a thorough improvisor as well as a spontaneous creator, but it was the Elvin Jones grammar that brought these elements into clear focus. Seeing Elvin Jones play with John Coltrane was indescribable. I went every night for a week at the Bohemian Caverns. At the end of the final night, I was looking at Jones taking his drums down. I couldn’t move, like I was stuck in cement. I was just watching him. So finally Jones called me up to the drums, and he gave me his bass drum pedal, which had broken. Jones looked me up and down and said, “Don’t ask me to show you anything, because if I could show you, we would all be Max Roach.” When Jones told me that, it really made an impression. He was letting me know that despite being one of the most innovative drummers the world had ever known, he saw himself as a representative of a tradition. I got nervous one matinee at the Bohemian Caverns, because Jones was really late. Was I gonna have to sit in? I went to the bathroom to hide, but I had to pass Coltrane to get over there. I tried to sneak by, but Coltrane grabbed my arm and made me stop. “Aren’t you going to talk to me?” I said, “What are you going to do about Jones being so late?” John replied, “I’m not going to do anything, because I don’t want to hurt myself.” At that time I was listening to the album Coltrane, with “Out of This World” and “Tunji,” two tracks that heavily featured Jones’s style. When I asked John about the drumming on those tunes, John told me, “Sure, Elvin worked on his style. But the thing that impressed me the most when I first heard Elvin was his professionalism.” When I looked surprised, John continued, “I noticed the way he could dot the i’s and cross the t’s.” John didn’t say anything about polyrhythms, innovation or intensity. John talked about the tradition. John also said, “No matter how tense the situation gets, Elvin never tightens up.” That was good advice. I have tried to keep that in mind in more chaotic musical settings. McCoy Tyner was also so impressive. At some point I realized one of the reasons I was going to see the Coltrane quartet was the pleasure of watching McCoy catch up. Not just technically – McCoy always had an immense technical facility – but harmonically. I could see how the band was growing through listening to the piano. The bass chair evolved in the famous quartet. I first saw them with both Art Davis and Reggie Workman together. Later it was the great Jimmy Garrison, who I had seen in a trio with Bill Evans and Paul Motian. The fact that Garrison had played with both Bill Evans and Ornette Coleman suggests some of the qualities Garrison brought to that group. Everyone in the band could “dot the i’s and cross the t’s.” Some people left John Coltrane at Giant Steps; other people left him at A Love Supreme. Certainly many people left him at Meditations. But I hung in there all the way to the end. I loved the last band with Alice Coltrane and Rashied Ali, and “Expression,” from the very last session, is one of my favorite ballads. Later, in L.A. at the It Club, Coltrane sat with me a minute after his set. A lot of people were walking out in disgust, musicians and non-musicians alike. He walked straight to my table and sat down. I said, “John, what are you going to do with everyone leaving during the set?” “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I just know that I can’t stop.” The whole room turned technicolor, like John was a legendary hero in a romantic setting. I told him, “John, you are really beautiful.” John shrugged and said, “I’m just trying to clean up. Imagine if you were dirty for 30 years.” I didn’t get to play with John, although he asked me to when he came to Washington one time and was looking for two drummers. I couldn’t believe it! He called me at home and asked me if I had my drums. But at that moment, not only did I think I wasn’t ready to play with John, I was just back from Japan and actually didn’t have them. I also thought I was going to get another chance, because I didn’t expect him to die. That was one of those incredible losses of that era: John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., John Coltrane. At one time, I was ready to consider John’s passing as part of a conspiracy, where the establishment worked behind the scenes to keep extinguishing the brightest lights. (Once, when we were in the car with Shirley Horn, comedian Dick Gregory told me that he knew the names of the two secret service men who shot John Fitzgerald Kennedy.) So I missed my chance with John Coltrane, but I did work with Pharoah Sanders. Pianist Lonnie Liston Smith called me to play at Slugs’ Saloon in the East Village in Pharoah’s band, with bassist Bob Cunningham and vocalist Leon Thomas. For a few years, Slugs’ was an important club, a lowbrow joint that was also part of the youth movement. Broadway people and fashion models mingled with college students and the jazz cognoscenti; there was sawdust on the floor, a big hole in the stage, and the club owners and the musicians who played there all chased the same models – or waitresses – and smoked the same pot. Eventually, Lee Morgan was shot and killed at Slugs’. After setting up my drums – being careful to avoid the hole – I went to look for Pharoah. The club was packed, but I had never met Pharoah before and had no idea what we were going to play. Pharoah looked at me and shook my hand but didn’t say anything else. We stood next to each other in silence until the crowd got really restless; they even started slow-clapping in unison in order to encourage the start of the music. Finally, Pharoah turned to me and said, “OK, Billy. You got it.” Well. Trial by fire. I went up there, and started something that could have been an introduction, but nobody came in. I kept playing, like some uptempo time, a few choruses of rhythm changes or something. Still nobody came in. So then I just went for it, playing all out, thinking, “I may lose the gig, but tonight’s gig will belong to me.” Finally, the band comes up on the bandstand and starts playing off whatever I had been playing. And that was my beginning of learning and experiencing how to play multidirectional. Rashied Ali told me that “multidirectional” was what John Coltrane called this freeform feel, where conventional structure was abandoned and the rhythms could cut in any direction. “It’s like you’re playing fast Latin,” Rashied said, and it’s certainly true that Rashied, Milford Graves, and Andrew Cyrille had some Afro-Cuban heritage in their conception. I first heard about this approach from a fellow Howard student, the great saxophonist and composer Marion Brown. He had gone to New York and gotten hooked up with the avant-garde. When Marion came back to campus, he was dressed differently, in a strange colored jacket, and told me, “You know, Billy, I know you’re into Tony and Elvin and such, but in New York, it’s some different shit going on. There’s a cat named Sunny Murray you need to check out.” That was the next step, the newest music. I bought the records and heard Sunny Murray, Milford Graves, Rashied Ali, and Andrew Cyrille. Sunny gets the credit for inventing the style, although he could also be kind of loud and out of order behind the kit. Rashied was the Lester Young or Philly Joe Jones of that vibe, he held it down with John Coltrane. In the early days, Milford Graves was my favorite. I was entranced by Milford’s imagination. Andrew is my friend, and to this very day I am inspired by and learning from the great Andrew Cyrille. All these multidirectional masters were like magic; they conjured up spirits and ghosts and rainbows. They could give you visions like a psychedelic drug. That night at Slugs’ with Pharoah Sanders was the first time I attempted to play multidirectional myself. It just exploded out of me when they left me onstage alone for so long, and then the band exploded around me.
© 2025 Billy Hart
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