Just Billy Hart Quartet

• 1 Showdown 05:25
• 2 Layla Joy 05:58
• 3 Aviation 04:39
• 4 Chamber Music 05:01
• 5 South Hampton 07:04
• 6 Just 03:54
• 7 Billy's Waltz 07:21
• 8 Bo Brussels 04:48
• 9 Naaj 04:47
• 10 Top of the Middle 07:45
• Total Runtime 56:42

Info for Just

After twenty-plus years of shared activity, the Billy Hart Quartet – with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson and Ben Street – is still distinguished by its stylistic openness, a consequence of setting out to embrace all the things that drummer-leader Hart likes to play. “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 Kevin Le Gendre in Jazzwise of the quartet’s album One Is The Other. A drummer of enormous experience, who has played through many of jazz’s idiomatic upheavals, Billy Hart, now 84, favours a ‘multi-directional’ sound approach, and his younger confrères respond accordingly, each piece subtly opening another door. The quartet is an alliance of four highly individual improvisers. As pianist Ethan Iverson has noted: “A jazz group is a sensitive mechanism. You’ve got to play together and listen hard, but there’s also a way you need to stay your own course.”

It helps that the group has three strong writers in Iverson, Turner and Hart himself. Iverson contributes four contrasting compositions to Just: the sly, floating “Chamber Music”, the eruptively motoric “Aviation”, the abstract blues “South Hampton”, and the pretty, lilting “Showdown.”

Mark Turner and Hart himself each bring three tunes. Turner’s pieces are “Billy’s Waltz”, both a graceful dance and a vehicle for blues-conscious swing, the up-tempo vamp “Top of the Middle”, and the freely expressive “Bo Brussels” with a theme that continues to unwind in unexpected ways. Hart’s contributions include updates of two of his well-known tunes, “Layla-Joy” and “Naaj”, both returned to on multiple occasions in his long career, and the title piece, whose emphatic beat may trigger memories of the days when Billy was the driving force in Herbie Hancock’s band, or Eddie Harris’s. In this group, older pieces are made new. The present take of “Layla-Joy” opens with Mark Turner phrasing like Coltrane in ballad mode, before the tender melody is splintered and the group moves into spacious and exploratory group improvising.

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.

Billy Hart Quartet:
Billy Hart, drums
Ethan Iverson, piano
Mark Turner, tenor saxophone
Ben Street, double bass

Recorded December 2021, Sound On Sound Recording Inc, New York

No biography found.

Booklet for Just