I’m reading the Billy Hart autobiography Oceans Of Time right now— I’ll have a overview of it coming soon— but there are some parts where he talks about feathering the bass drum, and usage of the bass drum in jazz in general. The topic is massively oversimplified in the general conversation, and I’ve long been skeptical of the way it is handled with and by drumming students.
Here is Billy Hart:
Feathering the bass drum is very important. Max Roach played 4/4 on the bass drum. Art Blakey played 4/4 on the bass drum. Feathering the bass drum creates depth and a certain mood. It immediately affects people pschologically. There are subtle versions of it, depending on how smooth the texture is: Is it cotton? Is is silk?
You might not think Elvin Jones does a lot of feathering, but he’s doing enough; certainly, when you think about Elvin Jones, you think about his bass drum depth. Feathering is not boom, boom, boom, boom. There needs to be a bit of syncopation or even clave in feathering, something more like a human heart, keeping the music round.
Jo Jones played the hi-hat so beautifully, but they say Kenny Clarke gave us the ride cymbal beat. When he did that, Kenny Clarke was actually playing his ride cymbal like a bass drum. It’s the same function. If you don’t realize that the cymbal functions the same way the bass drum does with the bass clef of the ensemble, then you’re driving a car that is out of alignment. Some people spend years looking for the perfect cymbal to play their dream ride pattern on, not realizing that you can play the ride pattern on the back of a metal chair and make it work, as long as you play it like a bass drum. Kenny Clarke was famous for his syncopated bass drum bombs— and those bombs were certainly clave— but it made all the difference in the world how his cymbal beat related to the bass clef.
I don’t feather that much. Offhand, I think the only place on record you can hear me playing obvious 4/4 on the bass drum is on Don Byron’s Bug Music, an album that features repertoire from the swing era. But over the years, when I gigged with the old-school and deeply swinging bassists Milt Hinton, Eddie Jones, and George Duvivier, I offered some stumbling, fragmented approach to feathering, like going to a foreign country and attempting to speak their language. All three of those masters applauded me and encouraged me to keep going.
Maybe it wasn’t always enough. When I was first working with Herbie Hancock at the Village Vanguard, word got around that there was a new drummer on the scene, so Clifford Jarvis came down to check me out. He sat right beside me, watching how I played the bass drum. After one and a half tunes, Jarvis got up, said “Aw, shit,” and left. For some people, if you don’t have enough of the right kind of bass drum presence, then you’re simply not playing the music.
In Oceans Of Time Hart talks extensively about swing rhythm, emphasizing— paraphrasing here— that it is just not just 4/4 time, but a fusion of that with clave. Not stated explicitely as a regular thing, of course, but as an emergent rhythm that comes in the course of playing. I’ve written some materials that are supportive of that approach— as a mix of regular time and syncopation. General awareness that it is a time serving part of the instrument helps with that project.
What Billy Hart says here is more useful to me than Mel Lewis’s more dogmatic pronouncements on it— even while Lewis is actually saying a similar thing about how the drum is actually played. He’s so strident about it it’s easy to miss the balancing things he says. With Hart it’s these are the facts, this is what you should be thinking about, not everyone may like what you do, not everyone likes what I do.
A note on what he says about cymbals, too: he’s right. You should get good cymbals, but you also have to play them.
Get the book Oceans Of Time, I highly recommend it.
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