After twenty years of playing together, the Billy Hart Quartet – with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson and Ben Street – is distinguished by its stylistic openness. “If ever there was an example of contemporary jazz that draws extensively on all the ‘traditions’ while infusing some of the melodic clarity associated with the more challenging end of popular song, then this is it,” wrote critic Kevin Le Gendre of the quartet’s previous ECM album One Is The Other.

A drummer of enormous experience, who has played through many of jazz’s idiomatic upheavals, Hart, now 83, advocates a ‘multi-directional’ sound approach, and his younger confrères respond accordingly, each piece subtly opening another door.

On Just, Ethan Iverson contributes four compositions, ranging from the sly, floating “Chamber Music” to the eruptively motoric “Aviation”. Mark Turner and Hart himself bring three tunes apiece. Hart’s include updates of two of his well-known tunes, “Layla Joy” and “Naaj”, while among Turner’s pieces is “Billy’s Waltz”, both a graceful dance and a vehicle for blues-conscious expression, and the uptempo vamp “Top of the Middle”.

1. Showdown [5:25]
2. Layla Joy [5:58]
3. Aviation [4:39]
4. Chamber Music [5:01]
5. South Hampton [7:04]
6. Just [3:54]
7. Billy’s Waltz [7:21]
8. Bo Brussels [4:48]
9. Naaj [4:47]
10. Top of the Middle [7:45]

Recorded in New York’s Sound On Sound Studios in December 2021, and mixed in Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in September 2023, the album opens on an haunting ache that drives Showdown and a shimmering Layla Joy and then we get the spirited Aviation, the subtle, yet dignified Chamber Music, and the furtively pulsed South Hampton.

Billy Hart, now 84, and who favors a ‘multi-directional’ sound approach, next reveals the silky foot tapper title track Just and the languishing beauty of Billy’s Waltz, and they are in turn followed smartly by the emphatic Bo Brussels, the diligently crafted Naaj, with the drum-tastic Top of the Middle bringing the collection to a close.

In an interview with Jazz Times, in the early days of the BHQ, Hart said of his colleagues: “They’re brilliant contemporary conceptualists. Playing my older tunes, I’m not playing any freer with anybody than I play with them. Mark profoundly understands Coltrane, but also has total command of Lennie Tristano’s vocabulary. With Ethan, it’s like playing with Thelonious Monk or Andrew Hill one minute and Herbie Hancock the next.” It has remained a forward-looking group thoroughly grounded in the music’s history.

Musicians:
Billy Hart - Drums
Ethan Iverson - Piano
Mark Turner - Tenor Saxophone
Ben Street - Double Bass

Official Purchase Link

www.billyhartmusic.com