Jabali Ha'i: Billy Hart 85

Billy Hart Quartet - Aviation

I'll get this up in the wee hours to end the month -- and begin my next 900 posts in style -- with a milestone birthday appreciation of one of the all-time great drummers, who's been a part of my personal learning/listening existence for pretty much my whole adult life.

He is one of those players where I'm sitting here thinking, when was the first time I heard any one of the several life-altering albums where he is the anchor motivating the date?

There are a good few that I'm sure didn't just mess up my mind alone: the Eddie Harris LPs Silver Cycles and Free Speech, the latter of which's title track I must have practiced the drums to more times than many people have had hot meals, or truly fulfilling sexual encounters.

The facemelting Melvin Jackson classic Funky Skull. Pharoah Sanders' unbelievable Karma and Izipho Zam. Wayne Shorter's bliss-inducing Odyssey of Iska, itself the predecessor record to Weather Report proper.

All of those would be a career for most cats, but today's b'day guy wasn't even warmed up yet when, at the dawn of 1971, he joined Herbie Hancock's genetics-altering Mwandishi ensemble, staying for three of my favorite platters ever to shatter my matter: Mwandishi, Crossings and of course the DNA-recalibrating Sextant.

That's the one with Hidden Shadows, in 19/8 or whatever treachery it is, that I used to practice to until my ankles swelled up like overripe butternut squashes in a zero gravity environment.

He didn't stop there, either. He's also the dude holding down much of On the Corner, possibly the craziest and most challenging of all the Miles Davis electric selections. And Asante, one of my go-to McCoy Tyner LPs.

Then there's all those wicked Dr. Eddie Henderson fusion-fests from the mid 1970s like Realization and Sunburst, oh man! the list goes on longer than I'm allowed on the internet per day.

Speaking of realizations, the relevant one right now is that Billy Hart -- sometimes called by the African name Jabali, which is Swahili for "rock" and was, appropriately, given to him by percussionist Mtume -- is the drummer on more of my all-time beloved records than I can even recount in this early-morning moment.

And it isn't like he did all this and faded away to that Great Drum Throne In The Sky just yet, either. He's turning 85 today and still plays! The performance I'm sharing here, where he's leading a quartet of his own, was recorded only a little over a scant three years ago.

Not that you'd be able to discern that he's in his eighties from the sheer, implacable power with which he is percussing the proceedings. Here, check the specs for yourself...

Billy Hart Quartet

Ferrara In Jazz 2022-23

Jazzclub Ferrara

Ferrara, Italy 

10.4.2022

01 Billy Hart talks about Stevie Wonder

02 Sonnet for Stevie

03 Teulé's Redemption

04 Ohnedaruth

05 All the Things You Are

06 Billy Hart talks about grandmothers

07 Duchess

08 Aviation

09 Song for Balkis

10 Nigeria/applause & announcements

11 The Showdown

Total time: 1:54:30

disc break goes after Track 05

Mark Turner - tenor saxophone

Ethan Iverson - piano

Ben Street - bass

Billy Hart - drums

Jazzrita edit of 320/48 vbr audio from a live Facebook stream of the event

likely captured by onstage microphones of some configuration

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, remux-rebalanced, edited, repaired, denoised, retracked & remastered by EN, November 2025
738 MB FLAC/direct link

This concert, which is firmly in the aforementioned Pharoah Sanders-type transcendent Spiritual Jazz vein, was so ecstasy-inducing when I heard it, I made the effort of busting it apart in the Audacity stem-splitter tool to see if I could rebalance it some.

That's because it comes from a Facebook livestream, and I guess -- given the overall sound and tone of it, and the relative lack of in-song audience noise -- it was captured with some sort of onstage microphone setup, which may or may have not been rearranged at the set break.

Anyway I felt it would benefit from a remux and I'd say it definitely did, with the horn and piano emerging from behind BH's thundering drums to make something that sounds like an effective document halfway worthy of the third-eye-opening nature of the music.

That'll do it for November, but I will be back with one more of those unfortunate memorials to start December, before I go back to sitting in limbo, scrabbling away on the big (and sadly, also a memorial) compilation I have got cooking.

But that's then, this is now! And now is the moment in these things where I thank happy birthday boy Jabali Billy Hart -- 85 years young today -- for decades and counting of superlative sounds and drumfluence upon generations of percussion people, myself of course included!--J.