If you want to understand why bandleaders kept hiring Billy Hart for half a century, just look at the list: Wes Montgomery, Eddie Harris, Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, McCoy Tyner. That's not a résumé, that's a cross-section of American jazz from hard bop through fusion and back again, and Hart is the connective tissue running through all of it. He came up in Washington D.C., playing in organ trios and backing singers like Shirley Horn before he ever got to New York, and that grounding in groove never left him even after the music got strange.

The strange part came with Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band in the early 1970s. This was electric, open-ended, spiritually loaded music, and Hart's drumming on albums like Crossings (1972) and Sextant (1972) is where you really hear what he does — he doesn't just keep time, he reshapes it, breaking up the pulse into something that feels like weather instead of metronome. It's dense, exploratory playing, but it never loses the thread. That's the trick with Hart: he can sound free without sounding lost.

What's easy to miss, because he spent so many years as a sideman, is how distinctive his own musical personality actually is. Listen across his career and you hear a drummer obsessed with texture — cymbals that shimmer instead of crash, a snare that talks more than it announces. He brought that same sensibility to Quest, the cooperative band he ran with Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach in the 1980s, and later to his own quartet with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson, and Ben Street, heard on records like All Our Reasons (2012). That band, decades into his career, still sounded like someone searching rather than someone coasting.

He's also spent a long stretch teaching, at the New England Conservatory and elsewhere, and if you talk to younger drummers who came through those rooms, Hart's name comes up constantly — not as a legend to imitate but as someone who actually explained how the music works. That's probably the most honest way to sum him up: a drummer's drummer, respected by the people who understand just how hard what he does actually is, even when it sounds effortless.