From Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart (As Told to Ethan Iverson).
Copyright © 2025 Billy Hart. Published by Cymbal Press. All rights reserved.
[Author’s note: This memoir documents the chronology of Billy Hart’s life in music, from his earliest days to becoming one of the most recorded drummers on the New York scene. This excerpt shares from two different chapters discussing Hart’s road time with Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery in the 1960s.]
Rhythm and harmony go right together; you can’t have one without the other, and they affect each other instantaneously. I expected that with Jimmy Smith my role was going to be fully subservient to the gig. Instead, Jimmy’s advanced harmonic conception allowed me to keep experimenting with a modern sound, in the manner I had been trying to play with the JFK Quintet [with Andrew White] or the trio with Joe Chambers on piano. Recently, a few tapes have surfaced of my time with Jimmy, and I was already sort of playing like I play now, breaking up the time, playing cross-rhythms, and so forth. This must also go back to Donald Bailey, who had a conception related to Elvin Jones. I could keep in that direction with Jimmy Smith because Duck had paved the way.
To be clear, Jimmy was just about the only organist who let the drummers get away with this stuff. In most of the organ bands, you had to play more like you were in a pop group. One time the great organist Don Patterson came to hear us, and afterward he came up and asked me with a confused look on his face, “Does Jimmy let you play like that?”
Jimmy was a genius with incredible facility on the instrument. His playing was never dull, it was always fresh. The audience loved him. He didn’t even need to give them variety. In a certain mood, Jimmy would play four tunes in a row in the same key, at the same tempo, each of them a blues. But the audience would get off on all four tunes.
Unlike most organists, Jimmy always played with two Leslie speakers, which is one reason he was bigger and louder than everybody else. That’s probably why Jimmy didn’t mind that I was into Tony Williams and Elvin Jones. It almost didn’t matter what I did, because Jimmy was so loud.
In Detroit, I broke my third pair of sticks trying to play strong enough for Jimmy, so the next morning I got up early and found the nearest mom-and-pop drum shop. I complained to the owner, “I need to learn how to play stronger. I’m not in control, and I’m breaking too many sticks.”
I don’t know who this guy was, but he really helped me that day. Of course, he was trying to sell me some of his inventory as well, and I bought the lot, including a practice pad on a stand and thick parade sticks to be used from a decent height away from the pad. He even sold me metal sticks, warning me that I shouldn’t use them too much—and certainly not for speed—because I might get tendinitis.
I asked him what I was supposed to do with all this stuff, and he said, “You practice your rudiments, of course.”
“What are rudiments?”
He looked at me strangely, and answered, “Well…like a paradiddle.”
He played a paradiddle.
Now, I already knew the paradiddle, because I loved Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones, and Art Blakey, and had learned some of the basic rudiments by ear when trying to play some of their solos. But this was the cue to become more systematic in my studies. I would ask any drummer I met on the road about their favorite rudiments. At the next stop on the West Coast, Roy McCurdy showed me the ratamacue. In Texas, G.T. Hogan showed me a few hip rudiments that weren’t even in the books.
Thus began a new chapter in my life, a new way of living, where I’d practice the rudiments for many hours each day, especially while on the road. I had started exercising, so I’d do twenty minutes of paradiddles, then do jumping jacks. Twenty minutes of ratamacues, then push-ups. I could spend the whole day practicing and working out! To save money on hotels, I’d go to the venue immediately after arriving in town and ask around if anyone had a spare room to put me up for a nominal amount. I met a lot of waitresses this way—I mean, a lot of waitresses. But the rule was this: Wherever I stayed, there needed to be a door, so I could go in, close that door, and practice.
On the road, I got to interact with more musicians, and some of the experiences could be unforgettable. I was fortunate enough to be in the presence of Jonathan “Papa Jo” Jones in San Francisco for four or five days when I was with Jimmy Smith. I couldn’t believe it. I was terrified, and in awe, and excited, all at the same time. In fact, some of those nights I didn’t want to see him, because the pressure of standing beside him was just too much.
After a few days of hanging out, Papa Jo actually sat in. The texture was perfect. Even if it seemed a little dated, it immediately got the point across. There was no rushing or dragging or playing too loud or too soft. It was relaxed and radiated self-confidence.
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There’s a certain tradition of how the music business relates to the social situation of Afro-Americans versus Caucasians in this country. Many times, the innovators are Afro-American. For years, the Caucasians heard the innovation, took it for themselves, and repackaged it with white performers for a white audience to make incredible sums of money. (This is one reason I get irritated when somebody says I’m playing a Steve Gadd beat when the real story is that I learned it from Donald Bailey.) In the ’60s, for the first time, there was some change in that process. Jimmy Smith’s manager was an Afro-American, Clarence Avant. Avant went on to do a lot of things in the industry: one time I saw him on TV talking comfortably with Bill Clinton. Avant was tight with Quincy Jones, someone else who opened a lot of doors.
Buddy Montgomery was a truly great musician, really just as great, if not greater, than his more famous brother. On one of my earliest gigs with Wes, Buddy came over to me and told me, “Some white lady in the audience said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful? I understand that Wes Montgomery can’t read a note of music.’”
In other words, if the black musicians are characterized as primitives with inborn native talent, it can help sell the music. The white lady in the audience can say, “Isn’t that wonderful?”
That’s part of the point I’m trying to explain. At that time, you couldn’t make any money packaging the Afro-American innovators as intellectuals, but you could make money if you played the game. Clarence Avant was the one to take Jimmy Smith away from Blue Note and over to Verve where he was offered an amazing amount of money.
Creed Taylor was the mastermind. After working at Impulse!, Creed went to Verve and then A&M. He first took Jimmy Smith and then Wes Montgomery and treated them exactly the same way, putting them with arrangers, big bands, and string sections. (Jimmy and Wes even made some records together. They would have the same kind of production that a vocalist like Frank Sinatra would have, with arrangements from top people like Oliver Nelson, Don Sebesky, and Claus Ogerman. Eventually, Creed’s own label CTI would be the final stage in that process.
Since Jimmy and Wes were being packaged for public consumption, I’m not on too many of their records, even though I was in the touring bands. Creed Taylor liked studio musicians to support his stars. Good studio musicians make a lot of records and can supply whatever is needed in a commercial situation. On those Creed-produced Jimmy and Wes records, the studio drummers were either another mentor of mine, Grady Tate, or Ed Shaughnessy, who soon moved to the other coast and became famous in Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show band. JT