Billy Hart Quartet - Just

After 20 years of playing together, the Billy Hart Quartet, with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson & 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 & his younger confreres respond accordingly, each piece subtly opening another door. On Just, Iverson contributes four compositions, ranging from the sly, floating “Chamber Music” to the eruptively motoric “Aviation”. Turner and Hart bring three tunes apiece. Hart’s include updates of two of his well-known tunes, “Layla Joy” & “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”. Just was recorded in New York’s Sound On Sound Studios in Dec 2021, and mixed in Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in Sept 2023.