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‘He rose through notes as if through worlds’

The Billy Hart Quartet
All Our Reasons (ECM)
One is the Other (ECM)

The veteran drummer Billy Hart, born in Washington DC in 1940, has not only become one of jazz’s most powerful and creative drummers.

He unwittingly became a character in Rafi Zabor’s soulful and sparkling novel The Bear Comes Home, where his fiery drumming accompanies the saxophone-playing plantigrade quadruped who is the narrative’s protagonist, inspiring his primal dream of freedom.

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