Billy Hart Quartet: Just

After twenty years of making music together, the Billy Hart Quartet - featuring Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson and Ben Street - is characterized by its stylistic openness. "If ever there was an example of contemporary jazz that draws extensively on all the 'traditions' while incorporating some of the melodic clarity associated with the more sophisticated end of the popular song, this is it," wrote critic Kevin Le Gendre of the quartet's latest ECM album "One Is The Other". A drummer of enormous experience who has lived through many of jazz's idiomatic upheavals, Hart, now 83, advocates a "multi-directional" approach to sound, and his younger collaborators 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 each contribute three pieces. Hart's pieces include updates of two of his well-known tunes, "Layla Joy" and "Naaj", while Turner contributes "Billy's Waltz", a graceful dance and vehicle for blues-conscious expression, as well as the uptempo vamp "Top of the Middle". "Just" was recorded at Sound On Sound Studios in New York in December 2021 and mixed at La Buissonne Studios in the South of France in September 2023.