Most artists settle into the comfort of one thriving path, yet Mickey Hart has never followed that route. As the drummer who entered the Grateful Dead in 1967, he sidestepped the inertia that often overtakes established acts by pursuing an exploratory course centered on percussion traditions from many regions. That direction took shape through his connection with Indian master drummer Zakir Hussain, which produced the 1975 release Diga Rhythm Band, an initial venture into worldbeat fusion. Beyond his continuing contributions to the various lineups that carried the Grateful Dead legacy forward, Hart’s work alongside international percussionists deepened his fascination with the ceremonial and mythic functions of drumming across societies, a pursuit preserved on the recordings Planet Drum in 1991, Global Drum Project in 2007, and In the Groove in 2022.
Hart stepped away from the Grateful Dead in 1970 to record the solo album Rolling Thunder, issued in 1972 and featuring several Dead members; he rejoined the group in 1974 and remained through its entire history while maintaining an active catalog of projects outside the band. Round Records, the Dead’s own imprint, issued Diga by the Diga Rhythm Band in 1976. Between 1979 and 1980, Hart supplied substantial portions of the two soundtrack albums drawn from the film Apocalypse Now.
Under the banner the World, Hart issued a sequence of recordings beginning in 1983 with a reissue of the earlier Diga Rhythm Band material followed by further collections of location recordings made across multiple continents. Music to Be Born By, constructed around the heartbeat of his unborn son, appeared in 1989; the next year brought both the publication of his first book, Drumming at the Edge of Magic, and the companion album At the Edge. Planet Drum, released simultaneously as book and recording in 1991, reached high positions on the new age and world music charts, as did its predecessor. Supralingua arrived in 1998, and Spirit into Sound followed in 2000.
Global Drum Project, credited jointly to Hart, Zakir Hussain, Sikiru Adepoju, and Giovanni Hidalgo, came out on Shout! Factory in 2007 and received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album. The same four musicians contributed to Mysterium Tremendum, released in 2012 under the Mickey Hart Band name and containing seven songs co-written by Hart and longtime Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Superorganism appeared the following year with a nearly identical lineup and included four additional tracks bearing Hunter’s words. Hart moved to Verve for the 2017 album Ramu. In the Groove surfaced in 2022 under the Planet Drum collective name, again featuring Hart, Hussain, Hidalgo, and Adepoju; it marked the group’s first new material since Global Drum Project and originated as a remote recording project during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic before the musicians reconvened in the studio once restrictions eased.
