Clyde Hart
Every history of bebop has the same cast on the piano bench: Bud, Monk, Al Haig, sometimes Duke Jordan or George Wallington. But put on the records where the music actually arrives, and the pianist is usually Clyde Hart.
His name shows up in discographies and almost nowhere else.
The pianists of the swing-to-bop transition are a standing fascination of mine, the players who came up on stride and swing and then had to reckon with a new language in the middle of their careers. Hart is the purest case I know.
Hart was there with a consistency that starts to look eerie once you line up the dates. Coleman Hawkins books the Apollo studio dates in February 1944 that most people call the first bebop record session, with Dizzy Gillespie in the trumpet section, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and a teenage Max Roach on drums. Clyde Hart is the pianist on "Woody'n You" and "Disorder at the Border." Seven months later Tiny Grimes gets a Savoy date and brings in a young altoist named Charlie Parker for his first real studio feature. Hart is the pianist on "Tiny's Tempo" and "Red Cross." In January 1945 the first studio session with Bird and Dizzy on it together goes out under the name Clyde Hart's All Stars. Five days later he's at the piano for Dizzy's "Good Bait," "Salt Peanuts," and "Be-Bop." And at the end of February 1945 he plays the session that gives us "Groovin' High," "All the Things You Are," and "Dizzy Atmosphere."
That February date is the last one in his discography. Hart died of tuberculosis on March 19, 1945, in his mid-thirties, weeks after recording "Groovin' High." When Dizzy's group went back into the studio that spring, the piano chair belonged to the next generation.
Hart spent his whole short life as a working swing pianist: on record with Blanche Calloway's band as early as 1931, alongside Ben Webster and Cozy Cole, then through the middle thirties with Stuff Smith's Onyx Club band at the height of 52nd Street, then sessions with Mildred Bailey, Chu Berry, Hot Lips Page, Lester Young, Billy Eckstine, and half the horn players in New York. He was already backing Dizzy in 1939, on Lionel Hampton's "Hot Mallets" date, an all-star Victor session with Benny Carter, Hawkins, Chu Berry, Ben Webster, and Charlie Christian in the room while a very young Gillespie took an early recorded solo that made people notice him. There's even a surviving live recording of Hart at Minton's in 1941, the laboratory itself. By 1944 he was one of the most-hired pianists in the city, which is exactly why he keeps showing up on these dates. The revolutionaries sent for the guy who could read anything and make a three-hour session come in on time.
Hear him for yourself
Source separation lets us do what no listener in 1945 could: pull Hart out of the band. The mixer below covers fifteen years of his working life, from Billie Holiday in 1936 to "Groovin' High" in 1945. Solo the piano and walk through the years in order.
Start with the thirties sides. Solo the piano on "A Fine Romance" or "Hot Mallets" and you hear a classic swing rhythm player: two-handed oom-pah, bass note answered by chord, steady as a clock under the band. "I've Found a New Baby" is the piano feature of the set, with a twist: what you're hearing is almost certainly two pianos at once, Hart pumping underneath while Hampton pecks out his famous two-finger lines on top.
Keep that sound in your ear and jump ahead to 1944 and 1945. The oom-pah is still in there, he never fully gives it up, but it starts sharing space with the Basie approach: short, snare-like jabs placed against the horns instead of a carpet laid under them. That's how he plays behind Don Byas on "Riffin' and Jivin'," and "Tiny's Tempo" catches him changing his mind mid-record, mostly oom-pah through the opening choruses until around the second half of Bird's solo, where the jabs take over. It's there behind Dizzy on "Good Bait" too.
Then listen to his solo on "Salt Peanuts." On one of the first bebop records, it isn't a bebop solo. It's the language of Teddy Wilson and Earl Hines: freewheeling chromaticism and arpeggiation over a thinner left hand. The comping was already crossing over into the new music. The solo voice hadn't yet. That gap, audible in one man's two hands, is the whole transition in miniature.
Listen to the records in order and you can hear a man renovating his own style in public, in the last year of his life. He never got to finish, which is the sad part of the story. The point of it is larger: the music we call bebop got built partly on the bandstand craft of players like Hart, who carried it from the swing era to the new thing one session at a time, and who died three weeks before "Groovin' High" made the future official.
The records are all in the mixer above.