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On a recording session in the early 1970s, drummer Billy Hart was given a piece of wisdom about improvisation. “Start everything on four, and don’t finish nothin’,” Hart, doing a reverential imitation, said Miles Davis told him. Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart as Told to Ethan Iverson, a new book released in July by Cymbal Press, chronicles many more such experiences, Hart said.
The autobiography wasn’t Hart’s idea. He asked friends, in fact, if they thought it was a good one. “Everybody wants to know about you,” he recounted them saying. And Hart could understand that.
“There’s something about what I played that they seemed to be inspired by,” Hart said, humbly referring to a career in which he’s worked with the above-mentioned everybody — Davis, Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock, Shirley Horn, Pharoah Sanders, Wayne Shorter, and McCoy Tyner, to name just a handful. Hart, a member of New England Conservatory’s faculty, has been a professional musician for more than 60 years. In 2022 the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master. Three years later the Mellon Foundation awarded him a Jazz Legacies Fellowship.
Oceans of Time is the yield of more than 20 hours of conversation that jazz pianist Ethan Iverson, who’s also a member of NEC’s faculty, had with Hart.
Ethan Iverson
It was on a gig with Hart in the 1990s that Iverson first knew he wanted to mine the drummer’s memory. “I immediately felt like he was someone I needed to try to get close to,” Iverson said. “This was an actual jazz master.”
While gigs were canceled during the pandemic — including those booked by the Billy Hart Quartet, in which Iverson plays — Zoom had unlimited bandwidth for the conversations Iverson had with Hart. The transcription of all that dialogue was made possible by a personal development grant from NEC.
Iverson had previously interviewed Hart for Do the Math, a blog that Iverson has since reimagined as the Substack newsletter Transitional Technology. He got a “good start on the book with those initial Billy Hart interviews.”
“I’ve always loved his playing,” Iverson said, adding that Hart is a fantastic teacher who “has a discourse ready for any topic.”
Oceans of Time includes an appendix in which other drummers — including Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Erskine, and NEC faculty member Nasheet Waits, to name a few — comment on Hart’s work and career. “Those are drummers that I’m curious about,” Hart said.
Oceans of Time is hardly for drummers alone.
“What a story. What a storyteller,” guitarist Bill Frisell, with whom Hart’s worked, said of the book — which, through the drummer’s words, shares a wealth of the traditions and wisdom that imbue America’s classical music.
Learn more about Oceans of Time and read Transitional Technology.
