Mickey Hart
Allmusic Zine, 1999
When traveling on a long, strange trip, it’s important to know when to shift gears. Those who don’t will, like the lamented Jerry Garcia, burn out. The rest will chase new horizons, where the sights and sounds can surprise even seasoned pilgrims.
When I did this interview by phone from the Allmusic.com office in Ann Arbor, Mickey Hart could look back on thirty years of experimental roots music. The foundation of his explorations was laid with the Grateful Dead, whose multiple rhythms and ventures into free-form improvisation opened his ears to possibilities beyond stoner jams. Through solo and group performances, scholarly study and anti-intellectual trance, Hart worked his way down toward the fundamental pulse of all human activity, then higher toward the spirits that music can liberate.
His efforts produced a series of solo albums, starting with Rolling Thunder in 1972, and books that include Drumming at the Edge of Magic (1990) and Planet Drum (1991). A third book, Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music, cataloged quotes about music from musicians, writers and other visionaries. From psychedelic light shows at the mythic Fillmore Auditorium to the coat-and-tie corridors of Washington, Hart is a fixture in American music. Where many of his peers seem gutted by years of drugs, debauchery and brain-melting volume, he gives an impression of strength in conversation, of having processed the blows and ecstasies of his life into a mature and insightful outlook.
I should note here that my experience with Hart and the Dead is minimal. I saw them perform only once, in San Francisco, sometime in the Eighties. The thing that sticks with me from that night was the bond between the band and its listeners – an inverse of the divide between pop idols and their idolators but also not quite like the illusions of artist/fan friendship that dominate modern country music. (One visit to the Grand Ole Opry, where the stars enthusiastically pose for photos and shake hands with the front line of their audience, as if welcoming them back to a family reunion.)
No, what I saw and felt that night was unique. First, the musicians ambled onto the stage – no intro, no fanfare. As they picked up their instruments and started doodling and tuning, the spectators talked among themselves. I don’t remember them acknowledging the Dead’s appearance. But then, at some point, Jerry Garcia began counting down the tempo of their opening piece. And in those last seconds before the first chord rang out, everyone in the crowd was dancing, already enraptured. Garcia might have kept counting for a full minute and I doubt that would have snapped them from their trance.
It’s a rare privilege to interview an artist of such diverse accomplishment as Hart’s. It’s also a challenge: Where do you begin? For me, the answer came quickly: We would dig as deep as time allowed into the most basic musical element: the magic of rhythm, the power of the pulse.
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Let’s talk about the state of rhythm in Western culture.
“The State of Rhythm.” A very nice place.
So how’s it doing?
It’s healthy.
Well, a lot of the percussion you’ve written so rhapsodically about is organic in its sources. Yet so much of Western music today is based on a non-organic, electronic aesthetic.
Nothing wrong with that. Music is mutating. It’s morphing. There’s a new gumbo out there. There’s room for both worlds, acoustic and electronic. I dabble in both. I mean, we have one foot in the archaic world and one foot in the digital domain. That’s where we live at the end of the century. There’s no reason to think that, as machines get smarter and we learn how to use them, great art is not going to come out of electronic music. There’s beauty in both worlds, and if you exclude either one of them, you’re a fool. I mean, listen to the Chemical Brothers: That’s great art. I love those guys.
The art, then, lies in using technology, rather than letting the technology dictate its usage.
Oh, of course. I process percussion all the time; it’s one of my favorite things for me to do. The world is moving fast. It’s an electronic world; digital binary code is everywhere. You’d better get with it, or else you’ll be with the dead music. Music that doesn’t serve a purpose in the community dies. That’s what music is for.
Yet music throughout history has been based on real-time, unpredictable performance. The players, the human beings, were the sequencers …
… and now the sequencers are able to be programmed with the human feel. And random occurrences as well.
“Redundancy is the basis of trance.”
After coming from this tradition, how did early sequenced music strike you? Kraftwerk, for instance?
I thought they were very adventurous. I thought it was cold in some ways, but it also promoted trance, which was repetition. Redundancy is the basis of trance, and it was redundant in a certain kind of way. It had all the elements: rhythm, melody and harmony. It wasn’t that far away [from traditional musical values], even though it was electronically enhanced or created. I knew it was primitive music. I mean, just listen to the first rock & roll. Listen to the first of any kind of music — the humble first steps. So I looked at all that stuff with a curious eye — you know, Switched-On Bach and all that kind of stuff. It was an oddity, but it also appealed to me because I knew that this was the beginning of something incredible.
When you work with machines, your palette is so much greater, as far as the colors and the amount of information that you can put on a piece of tape or a CD or whatever. That really appeals to me. You can be crushed glass. You can be a gamelan. You can be a thunderstorm. You can be a wine glass. You can be a trumpet. You can be any of those things. I love to paint like that, but I also like the reverberation of a nice acoustic drum from time to time. So I mix the two.
But in Western popular culture, with its emphasis on the backbeat, doesn’t this technology encourage a conformity to certain rhythm patterns?
Well, yes and no. You can look at it like that. There will always be music made by humans, whether it be through machines or human-generated. It all depends on what the ear likes and what you respond to. I wouldn’t look at it quite in those terms, like “anti-human” or “de-evolution” and all of that. There’s a lot of room for a lot of different kinds of music. I mean, I like Loup Garou. I like the Chemical Brothers. And I like the machine-driven music. I also like to listen to Nat “King” Cole. I love to listen to Count Basie and Buddy Rich and the Beatles and all of that. My God, there’s so much to listen to! But it is a machine-driven world, so wouldn’t you think that the music should reflect society? Unconsciously, everybody is going towards that strict meter. But now programs are being developed that deviate and allow for speeding up by the end of the song, or slowing down, or expansion and contraction. This human element is now becoming part of the software program.
Limits of Western Music
You bring a discipline that’s based on very traditional drum rudiments to what you’re doing. Yet you began defining your direction by going outside of this discipline into diverse worlds of rhythm throughout the world. What does this say about the limitations of rhythm to Western music?
Well, I was given this tradition. I didn’t ask for it, these “Pomp and Circumstance” rudiments. That came from the military. That’s what we knew here. We knew two musics here, really: the art music from Europe and the war rhythms from the British and the Mongols. Marching bands and all that stuff, that’s military music. It gave me a skill, to be able to let me move my hands. But it took me years to get rid of it, once I realized that I didn't want to march. I wanted to rock and to swing and to do all of that, but that [Hart articulates a fundamental drum pattern] was so engrained. I mean, it was maddening, because I would always go back to it.
“Psychedelics allowed to expand and contract with the rhythm.”
The Grateful Dead allowed me to fly, and rock & roll freed me from the rudiments. And, of course, psychedelics. Using psychedelics allowed to expand and contract with the rhythm. Once you provide psychedelics and music, there’s a new geography, a new cosmology, a new topography. I felt like a circumnavigator of a new land, personally speaking. Once again, finding your own voice is important. That’s how the Grateful Dead did it.
Bill Evans told a story about how, as a kid playing an arranged piece of music, he accidentally hit a major seventh where an octave had been written. That opened an awareness of new possibilities in his mind. In effect, he realized that he could own that note, that it came to him from someplace other than the written score — the rudiment, if you will. Did you go through something similar in breaking past the limitations imposed by your training?
Sure. I had the same epiphany, you know. It happened by accident. It was when I took the rudiments onto the drum set, and my hand clipped a tom-tom. Then it struck the cymbal by mistake. And I realized that was more fun. I was in my room, all alone; I wasn’t in front of an audience. So I started making mistakes on purpose. That’s how I got into improvising. I’m an improvsationalist by nature now, because of those accidents. Did you ever read that David Sudnow book?
Ways of the Hand?
A magnificent book. He deals with this.
Did you also feel restricted by the narrow range of tones offered in Western drum sets, relative to the sounds available to percussionists in other cultures?
Oh, yeah. Fixed pitch, that’s the other thing. Each drum had just so many tones to it; usually it’s a fixed pitch. But in many parts of the world, especially in Africa, there was the talking drum, which allowed for a variable pitch. Then there were multiple drums, like tabla tarang, which has many drums; it was the same kind of drum, but it offered scales. So the drums of the world really started pulling me, my imagination. I thought of all the alternatives, and once I realized that we made percussive sounds on hundreds of thousands of instruments, we’ve devised the most incredible ways of making percussive sounds in this world. I was like, “Wow, the drum set is so limited!”
And yet the drum set had many different cultures all in one. There was influence from China, from Europe, from Africa, from all over. Drum sets are truly an American invention — the only real American instrument. It also allows for the low sound and the higher sound, and it suited the dance music. It was the first instrument that brought together all these different kinds of sound: the metallophones, the membranophones, the idiophone — all these different classifications of instruments in one neat, local instrument. So it allowed for a certain kind of flexibility that was never had before; it was a perfect American invention.
It was really invented to accompany the silent movies. Pit drummers started it, with whistles, and woodblocks for horses.That’s how the drum set really started. It was a brilliant concept. And it was loud, so it could compete with the brass and the winds. You could reach a lot more people than most drums. The acoustical properties were overwhelming.
They had to do so, originally, without amplification.
Right. It’s what the drum could reach acoustically, so a lot more people could hear the music. Remember, there was one drum and eighteen other instruments, usually, in the dance band.
The Dark Side of Competition
When you combine the discipline or rudiments with the relative limitation on timbral nuance, that seems to lead right to the school of virtuoso drumming: Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich and so on. Now, much of what you’ve done involves an anti-virtuoso aesthetic.
That’s correct. I’m into group sound. I love the rush of group noise. The group mind is so powerful. I love ensemble playing. I’m an ensembleist, a groupist. I like to share sound. You share the thing you love the most. In those days of the virtuoso player, the guy got up there and he played a razzle-dazzle solo. It was sort of like a gymnastic event. Then the other guys come in and he backs them all up. That was never my idea of a good time. I sort of let that go with the Buddy Rich / Gene Krupa days — not that I didn’t really love them. They were my teachers. But that was a whole other kind of form that had nothing to do necessarily with community … with musical community.
There’s a possibly apocryphal story about a drum battle between Buddy Rich and Louie Bellson, where Bellson hits this big rhythmic pattern at the end of his solo. Then Rich responds by leaning down and adjusting part of his kit while replicating Bellson’s big finish with the other.
Yeah, but so what? Okay, that was then. But it doesn’t mean much now.
It was all about cutting the other guy.
Yeah. That stuff, the competition, has no place in my cosmology. I don’t compete in music. I help the other person out. I try to make him play better because he’ll make me play better. Competition and ego really don’t have that much to do with when you’re trying to reach a higher order, when you’re trying to get real high with music. That stuff? That’s kid stuff.
I brought this old-timer to a concert. His name is [Joe] Calato; he makes drumsticks. And he said, “I’m really looking forward to your solo.” And I said, “Oh, good.” After it was all over, he said, “I’ve never heard a solo like that before.” I said, “Well, it’s not really a solo in that sense.” He said, “It’s really changed, hasn’t it?” Because he knew Buddy Rich and all that. “Yes, it really has. Now it’s more like a rhythm-scape that we’re painting, you know? We don’t rehearse it — on purpose. We try to be in the moment. We don’t have a solo memorized. It’s not an Olympic event. It’s more like an exploratory creation, just for that moment, never tone repeated again.” And he started to get it. He sees that these are masterpieces, one-of-a-kind things. And people really love it. Then you realize that you might be onto something here, so you just keep working that to different places every night.
A Solo to Remember
Does heart-oriented music inevitably come in conflict with the virtuoso tradition?
I think there’s room for both. There are certain musicians, who are trained in solo concepts, being able to play alone. Then there are others who like to play in groups, and I wouldn’t put that down. Take a great example: Zakir Hussain, the great tabla drummer. I mean, he’s a great soloist. He’s also a great accompanist. He can do both. And you ask him what he likes the best, I would think he’d probably say the solos, because his father was a great soloist. And his father before him. That’s the sort of thing they were trained to do, to be soloists, although he has a lot of compassion for the group when he’s in a group. Even though he could cut anybody on the stage if he wanted to, he would hold back and would not take that liberty, just because he knows that the good of the whole is more than of the self. He’s a very passionate and soulful guy. I’ve played with him on the stage many times, and it took me a long time to relax with someone with that awesome firepower that you know he has.
Now, I’ve seen him blown off the stage one time. It was done by a guy by the name of Vikku [T. H. “Vikku” Vinayakram], who was a ghatam player, a clay-pot player. It was at the Great American Music Hall [in San Francisco] years ago, with John McLaughlin — a group called Shakti. Vikku was in Planet Drum, and he played the ghatam solo, but he played it with such heart, with such love, that I had never seen anything like that. It wasn’t competitive at all. He was urging Zakir to be able to come up to that level, so it was a different kind of a thing. But I knew that Zakir could never … maybe if he had the best night of his life right then, he might have been able to equal tt. But everybody was clapping the one [i.e., the first beat in the pattern], and at the end Vikku threw the ghatam up in the air, and it came down right on the one! Now, he probably had never played like that in his life. It was probably his greatest solo of his whole life. right there in front of me and Zakir and the audience, which was mostly made up of the Ali Akbar College of Music.
So when it was all over, Zakir just looked at Vikku. He was stunned. And I felt for Zakir. I thought, “He’ll never be able to do this! I mean, the maestro can never come up to this level. The bar was way too high.” Zakir took his towel and went like that [pantomimes waving, as if to cool Vikku down], because they were best of friends — we’re all great friends. Then he tried valiantly. I could see, halfway through, that there was no way he could get near it. He did the best he could, but he was way outclassed that night. It was just that magical moment against a very nice solo [from Zakir], but it wasn’t magic. It didn’t hurt; it wasn’t something that was hurtful. He just happened to have his moment.
Was it a mistake for Zakir to play at all?
I thought about that. But the atmosphere was so friendly. You knew that Zakir was a great maestro, and you knew Vikku was a great maestro, capable of incredible feats. But Zakir would not have not tried. You would expect a great maestro to always try and not to give up and give him the night without a good try. We had a long talk afterwards, and he knew that was not attainable. His spirit was still strong, but it could not have been done. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life; I’ll take that with me forever.
Of course, you never really know. That’s the great thing about performance: Maybe Zakir could have surprised everyone.
You don’t know, but the chances are that it was unattainable. It was just too brilliant. It was beyond words. It was way out of the box.
Solo vs. Group Drumming
From your duo drumming with Bill Kreutzmann in the Grateful Dead to your more recent work, you’ve often played as part of an ensemble of percussionists. Do you occasionally do gigs when you’re the only drummer in a band setting?
I do it from time to time. It’s enjoyable. In fact, I just played with [Bob] Weir in this band called the Flying Other Brothers [a.k.a. the Other Ones]. They’re a Grateful Dead knockoff band. They played great. We played for Al Gore at a fundraiser. It was just like forty-five minutes of Grateful Dead songs, which I hadn’t played in a long time. And I was the only drummer. But I didn’t play the parts exactly as I would have played them if Billy was there. I was sort of covering his part and my part as well. So I played a combination of them, anti was as natural as could be because we’re both each other, in a way, after all these years. We know how each other interprets these things, so I can sound like Billy and Billy can sound just like me. We try to stay out of each other’s way, as a tandem.
That’s how [Jerry] Garcia looked at it, when he first heard it. He said, “Well, this could take us around the world. This is power. This is a twin screw. This is like two engines, two turbines. The band could take either drummer; it could stick with the right one or the left. Or you can relate to both simultaneously.” That’s where all of the polyrhythms and all the strangeness of the Grateful Dead came from, being able to have all that dexterity in the rhythm section. Half of the band would be on Billy’s side, half would be with me and we’d meet at the path. That was part of the magic. That was also part of the chaos, which turned us into an experimental music band and spawned Grateful Dead music. Remember, we were a blues band at one time.
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If I were to hear a tape of a recent performance where you were the sole drummer in a band, how would it differ from a tape of you in a similar performance with the Dead?
Well, I’ve probably pared down a lot of stuff and gotten to the essence. I’ve been playing less. I used to play a lot more because I thought more was better and I was exploring new turf. Now I know a little more what I want to do. It’s less exploratory. I have more fun now, in a way, because there’s less extra beats. It’s more efficient now. I’m more organized now. I’m not as much in chaos. I can get to the point a lot easier. I’m more dependable. And I do a lot less drugs — a lot less.
Also, I’m not nearly as angry as I used to be, because I’m older and I don’t live in those kinds of times. I’m a lot happier than I used to be. In the Sixties, there was a lot of upheaval, you know. We had bad government. There was a war going on. There was a lot to be mad at. Now I have a very happy family and a wonderful life. I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve been able to control my emotions. I have more compassion and more love in my body than I had in the Sixties. And all of that passion comes out in my drumming. It’s a direct reflection of it.
Your music has never seemed angry.
You wouldn’t be able to tell it necessarily, but the artist would. Me, I could tell it. I mean, when I hit a drum, I hit it with more aggressive power in those times. There is a reflection of society in my music. Like Anthem of the Sun: I was very angry at that time. Although it was played with love, I was very aggressive. I was a young lion, twenty years old. And I played like a twenty-year-old, with that peak of his powers, exploring everything all at once. Hormones are raging in your body. You just want to have sex all the time. That’s the same way you can look at the early career of a musician: You’re impetuous, random at times. Not that this wasn’t interesting and very rewarding. But you change as you get older, you know? Your metabolism changes. Your music changes.
The Sound of Darkness
You’ve said that part of your journey involved a search for “odd and powerful instruments.” What makes an instrument powerful?
Its voice has something to do with it, but it’s really about how you relate personally to that instrument. That’s where the power comes from. It’s not necessarily in the divination of it or the sacredness of the culture it comes from. It’s mostly in how you relate to that instrument, whether you strike it with a stick or your hand or your mallet. It’s your love of the sound and the ease of playing and just the delight that you get in hearing that report of percussive sound. And also, what it does to other people. These are the things that make it powerful. Some drums have been used in religious ceremonies, like the damaru, from Tibet, which have certain innate powers that we just don’t understand. But I’m talking about power that you can understand.
So when you pick up, say, an electric guitar, it’s not a powerful instrument because it doesn’t connect with you the way a drum does.
That’s right. If it’s not a powerful instrument for you, then you can’t turn that spirit you have, that connection, into something powerful to give to someone else. If you don’t get it, you can’t give it. It’s a no-brainer.
If instruments can contain a power to bring good to the listener, can they also harbor darker energies that trigger evil?
I’ve never really thought of music from that perspective, from the underworld or the netherworld. It doesn’t take me to Hell or whatever. When music happens, this is the way consciousness goes. I’ve never seen music take one down to the depths to make one want to kill. It’s not like that.
But there is a tradition of martial music that inspires soldiers to go out and do battle.
To march. It’s order. That makes you want to be in order, to facilitate the march.
It dehumanizes those it addresses.
Yeah, and also esprit de corps. It brings that out. It is also frightening to an enemy that can’t see a marching band. It can put fear into one’s heart. It also can give you courage. But you can have courage to do good or to kill. In that sense, yeah … but the music doesn’t say “kill.”
Often lyrics, though, are unintelligible or hard to understand. You can’t necessarily follow every word that Marilyn Manson sings, but you can see the video and get the vibe.
Yeah, it’s to the dark side. Sure. You’re feeling the vibe. He lays it out there very clearly. But you have to be able to have both sides of the coin. Not everything is really beautiful and pretty; there’s a dark side to everything. It makes you appreciate the light side when you hear the dark side. It’s sort of like silence and loudness, you know? I think he’s just reflecting what’s in his heart. He’s feeling these kinds of things. Music should reflect the soul of a people and the condition of society. It’s not all pretty out there. It’s a cold, dark world sometimes. But I don’t see it fostering murderous thoughts — only in the weak-minded, perhaps.
And if it does, the problem certainly isn’t solved by banning certain kinds of music.
Absolutely not. You can’t censor art. Once you do that, you’re history as culture. You can put a label on it, telling you what it is. You want to know what’s in your meat; you like to know what you’re eating. I don’t want my kids listening to “rape the bitches!” and “kill the cops!” I don’t want my six-year-old to be hearing that. I want to know when those kinds of things are in the music. I don’t want to feed my children things they can’t handle at that age. I mean, that’s my birthright.
Sound By The Pound
You’ve played an important role in popularizing what people now call world music.
It’s all world music [laughs]! It’s the world’s music!
So what is the artist’s responsibility in lifting sounds from other cultures and transplanting them into dissimilar kinds of music?
That’s a good question, you know! You should never rip another culture off — take the music without giving them money or credit, asking their permission. But, you know, once the music is let out, and you hear the music, you’re never the same. It’s an osmosis kind of effect. Once you hear another kind of music, it works its way in on you. I never really do a certain kind of music specifically, but I’m being influenced by the world’s music. It’s like, once you meet another person, you’re never the same. But you shouldn’t rip off any particular culture or any particular song. There’s a certain protocol.
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But when the Grateful Dead were primarily a blues band, were you “ripping off any particular culture”?
You have to be more specific. It’s the people’s music. I mean, if you’re taking Baka music [from the southwestern Central African Republic] and doing it without license in your music, then you’re a thief. You’re a pirate. You know, all of that pygmy music stuff in arrangements, that’s immoral.
Are you thinking of a particular record?
Yeah, that Deep Forest music [by French duo Éric Bouquet and Michel Sanchez]. They ripped the pygmies off! They didn’t pay them! They just took music off a record, put it in some other music, called it their own and copyrighted it. I doubt they put the money back into their cultures. Those Deep Forest people really aren’t in the business anymore. I mean, they got pretty well beaten up in the press. People are onto that kind of commercialization of other people’s music.
“When I go into a culture and record their music, the money goes back to the culture that spawns it.”
How does your use of source music differ from theirs?
When I go into a culture and record their music, the money goes back to the culture that spawns it. No, I never take it out. I pay them for their music. A good portion of those royalties go back to that culture. And if you can’t find the people … like, when I recorded the Bedouins in the Sudan, they were nomads; you could never find them. Well, I put light bulbs in the Cairo Museum. I paid for a music program at Aswan. That’s how you do it, if you take music out of a culture and you commercialize it. You have to give it back. It’s the round-trip that’s important.
But what about your choice in how to use music borrowed from other cultures? Can you take something of value to a source culture and just drop it into a rhythm loop?
It’s really hard to define what’s appropriate. It’s a real gray area. Everybody’s got their own line that they won’t cross. I certainly do. You have to be morally responsible. There aren’t that many music cops out there, so it’s up to the individual.
Well, for example, would you sample something from a sacred ceremony and use it in a dance track with lyrics of dubious spiritual value?
If you had permission to do that from the person who made it, and you paid them for their work, it’s appropriate, whether it be a pygmy or whatever. I mean, music has a commercial side to it. In order that you sell your music as a livelihood, you make more music, you buy instruments, you have a house, you have food. That’s how you go through life. It’s a legitimate thing to sell your own songs. I do it all the time. Everybody in music does it. That’s how it’s done. I mean, that’s why we don’t deliver mail; we’re into sound. That’s the commodity. We sell sound by the pound. That’s really what we do. We’re selling vibrations; that’s our medium. Spirit into sound, spirit into form: That’s how I look at these kinds of things, so things are a little gray here because you’re dealing with something that’s invisible. Music is invisible. The spirit world is invisible, except you can feel these things. You know these things. Can you draw a spirit? No. Can you draw God? No. You can give fifty kids fifty pieces of paper and say, “Draw God.” There’ll be fifty different drawings. It’s like, draw the Grateful Dead, the spirit. It’s a wonderful thing, you know?
“Music is not a universal language.”
How often do you come across a culture whose music simply can’t be integrated into yours?
A lot of musics are like that. A lot of musics aren’t improvisational in nature. They’ve very composed, so they don’t mix [with Western musics]. So this “music is a universal language” is not really true. Music is not a universal language. You’ve got to put the right people together. Hamza [el-Din, Egyptian oud virtuoso], for example, is not a great group player. It’s not impossible to play with Hamza, but it’s really difficult. He’s a master. I love playing with him; I just played with him last week. But Zakir is totally flexible. He can play almost any kind of music. It’s not better or worse, but he’s gone outside the box. He’s learned other people’s music, where Hamza plays in a classic style. He’s not a multi-instrumentalist like Hussain, who plays djembe from Nigeria, he plays the classic Indian drum, he can play congas. He even plays a little drum set — badly [laughs]. Luckily! He can’t play everything.
The Rhythmic Personality
Your life with the Grateful Dead is more than exhaustively documented. And you’ve done a thorough job of charting your work since then. What hasn’t been covered so much is your childhood in Brooklyn. What has stayed with you from those days and survives in your music now?
Oh, that’s very easy. Two words: Latin music. You can get that to one word: clavé, which means “key.” The clavé got to me when I was a kid and it never left. So the music I’m making now in Planet Drum is clavé-oriented. They’re the most powerful rhythms on the planet. [Hart taps out a Bo Diddley-like clavé pattern.] That’s it: 3 and 2. Everything is made up of that. And I’ve gravitated to clavé-based music in this part of my life. It’s just sort of a natural occurrence. I just look around and it’s the clavé for me, or some deviant cousin of the clavé. That’s the thing I love the most, really. I love the world’s music, you know. I love the Afro-American spore of music. I mean, I draw from all over. I love the world’s music, you know. I mean, I could play in the Arctic Circle. I could play in Brazil. I could play in India. I could play in China and Japan, this and that. I know a lot of these cultures and I know the instruments that are indigenous to them. And I love them.
The music of some cultures is more or less rhythmic than others. Can you make any general observations about cultural differences that these differences reflect?
Well, a lot of it has to do with the wood and the natural materials that are found in these cultures, whether they be skins or there’s more wood or metal. A lot of it has to do with being nomads, how big the instruments are. Also their heritage, whether they sing the songs or they dance with rhythms. A lot of cultures are more melody-based and less rhythm-based, like the chanting cultures, the overtone singers, the monks and all the prayers, which are very light on the rhythm.
But is it difficult to extrapolate from that and ascribe certain cultural traits to different groups, depending on how they treat rhythm?
No, not really. I think that the more ecstatic cultures have the most rhythmic … If you think of ritual and rapture, you’ll always find rhythm. If you think of ecstatic cultures which are the quieter cultures, you’ll find more melody and harmony and less rhythm. That’s how I see things, in those kinds of terms, when I look at the world’s music. If you had an atlas of the world’s music, that’s what you’d find.
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PHOTOS
Hart presents his artwork at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Hollywood, Florida, November 2019. Photo (c) Mpi04 / Media Punch / Alamy Live News.
(L to R) Grateful Dead members Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart with San Francisco Giants third base coach Tim Flannery before game against Pittsburgh Pirates, San Francisco, September 2011. Photo (c) Jason O. Watson (Sports) / Alamy Stock Photo.
With Zakir Hussain at SFJAZZ Gala, January 2017. Photo (c) WENN Rights Ltd. / Alamy Stock Photo.
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This is a great interview. I appreciate the kinds of questions you ask which are so far away from the clichés which too often count as informative. Conducting a penetrating interview is really hard, but you come through so often, and in music genres that are quite different. You have my respect.