Oceans Of Time is an oral autobiography of the drummer Billy Hart, from interviews by the pianist Ethan Iverson, assembled and edited by Iverson. You’re going to want to get it, and have it in your library forever. The book, not the “e” book. It should really be required reading in every jazz department on the planet. I’m really excited about it.
Billy Hart is really the quintessential jazz musician. He has been continuously active for something like 65 years, and has played on hundreds of records. The book is a great portrait of how jazz musicians think, especially in the modern era— from someone who lived all the developments of the 1960s, with the 50s as the recent background. Which is the same terrain, the same foundation we generally have today. It’s a great antidote to a lot of wrong attitudes and ideas floating around in recent years— the popular conversation about what is right/wrong/otherwise in the pursuit of jazz has become very one dimensional.
As a musical autobiography, the book is framed around Hart’s playing life, as a youngster in Washington D.C., his early professional life there, his development as a musician, and some long running gigs he had with Shirley Horn, Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Smith, Stan Getz, Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, and others. The rest is about his projects as a leader, about other people in the jazz world, and somewhat about his teaching.
There is way too much of value to summarize. There is a lot about records, about ideas about jazz, and playing, and about human interactions and relationships, especially employer/employee relationships in a jazz environment.
It’s a good portrait of the peculiar emotional discomforts of this art form— because of conflicting personalities, artistic values, duties, motives, and abilities, and the often oblique way all of the above are communicated, there is a certain amount of discomfort and uncertainty, that really are a part of the business— like dealing with stage fright, hecklers, and bombing are universals in the field of stand-up comedy.
Like this situation, two heavy weight singers in the audience (who may possibly want to employ you in the future, and who will talk about you to other people) tell you one thing, your current employer tells you another:
After one set at a fancy supper club in midtown with Shirley [Horn], Sarah Vaughn and Betty Carter both told me I was playing too loud for a singer. So the next set, I pulled back. Afterwards, Shirley came up to me and growled “Billy, are you for me or against me?”
She looked me in the eyes and said, “Don’t tickle me.” The implication was clear.
Or, newly in New York, having just been fired in the middle of a week long engagement with Sonny Rollins at the Village 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.”
A lot of this book is about normal people dealing with the demands of “charismatic masters” (per some recent commentary by the late Hal Galper). Hart, though famous to us, as primarily a sideman, would be a normal person, charismatic masters would be people like Stan Getz, Miles Davis, and McCoy Tyner, who are apt to push you hard, treat you ruthlessly in business, make unreasonable demands, and take what you do personally.
It’s popular to portray these well known players as “iconic”— that popular favorite idiot word— all-capable, all-knowing super beings, rather than as human beings on a normal human life trajectory, with strengths and weaknesses, who had to learn to play, who struggle(d) doing some things, and had to be pushed, who have to learn material, do rehearsals, who may be dissatisfied with what they’re doing, who maybe didn’t judge a situation correctly, who maybe didn’t play great one night. And we see all that here.
It always impresses me is that everybody notices and likes the same things. In this book you have Billy Hart and Jack Dejohnette talking to each other about learning to play the ride cymbal (in a certain modern way) from One Finger Snap— a track we have all listened to countless times. What you notice today in your listening are the same things I noticed listening in high school, that are the same things a younger Billy Hart noticed when these records were brand new, as someone who knew the participants personally. For example, he mentions Tunji and Out Of This World from the album Coltrane— not the most fawned upon album or tracks among jazz fans or other musicians, but very important to me as a drummer. Or Frelon Brun, from the Miles Davis album Filles de Kilimanjaro. It’s remarkable to catch the same things independently, without having them pointed out. Roy Haynes loves his loud POP at the beginning of Have You Met Miss Jones as much as you do, the crash at the beginning of Miles’s solo on So What was significant to Jimmy Cobb, too— he was afraid he was too loud.
The best stuff asserts itself. It’s an equalizing thing. Billy Hart notices it living in the middle of that scene, and then I notice it as a high school kid, knowing nothing, listening in my bedroom off in Oregon 20 years after the fact, that everyone else in the intervening 40 years also noticed. You learn to honor the significance of things you notice.
The thing too is the mooshiness of it all— it was always very difficult for me to find the information I wanted to know in precise terms. That’s a lot of what this site is about, I’m writing the information I was looking for, after I figured it out through playing a lot. Jazz musicians don’t tend to speak in real exact terms; they might have something precise in mind, but won’t give it to you clean— you have to figure it out, or already know instinctively what they’re talking about. And there’s room for interpretation. You are left to figure it out and work with it, maybe for years. Usually, if you’re doing the rest of the process, you figure it out. That is the normal situation, that’s how it’s done— and it’s what we see here.
So this book is what a jazz musician is— 1:1, this kind of thought/activity = jazz musician.
You can get Oceans Of Time from Cymbalpress.com. They have other excellent titles as well. Order it now, spend some money. 206 pages.
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
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