Artist: Billy Hart Quartet
Album: Just
Genre: Post-Bop, Contemporary Jazz
Label: ECM Records
Released: 2025
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
- Showdown (Iverson) - 5:25
- Layla Joy (Hart) - 5:59
- Aviation (Iverson) - 4:40
- Chamber Music (Iverson) - 5:02
- South Hampton (Iverson) - 7:05
- Just (Hart) - 3:55
- Billy's Waltz (Turner) - 7:22
- Bo Brussels (Turner) - 4:48
- Naaj (Hart) - 4:47
- Top of the Middle (Turner) - 7:45
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- Personnel:
- Billy Hart - drums
- Mark Turner - tenor saxophone
- Ethan Iverson - piano
- Ben Street - double bass
It's a beautiful thing when a jazz group stays together for as long as drummer Billy Hart's Quartet has. Since debuting in 2006, the quartet, featuring tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Ethan Iverson, and bassist Ben Street, has only grown more entwined; a sentiment they further underscore on their fourth album, 2025's Just. An icon at 83 years old who has played with such luminaries as Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis, Hart's reputation precedes his quartet. Yet, his bandmates (who are all under 60) are also stars in their own right; something that could describe them as a kind of supergroup, if not for their deeply ego-less and generous playing; this is a band in the truest sense. Although he has played electric fusion and driving hard-bop, Hart takes a measured, if no less inventive approach with his quartet. These are lyrical songs, full of harmonic and rhythmic textures that pull you deeper within the group's sound as the album progresses. The opening "Showdown" is a delicately soulful Iverson original that spotlights Turner's burnished tone and wouldn't sound out of place as a love theme to a late-'60s romantic thriller. Yet more atmospheric is Hart's "Layla Joy," a modal-esque tone poem that starts with a rumbling storm of low-end mallet and cymbal work before Turner, Iverson, and Street emerge like a ship cutting through fog. Yet more kinetic moments pop up, as on Turner's crackling, off-kilter funk title-track and Iverson's spritely and swinging "Aviation," both of which evoke the heady late-'60s and '70s work of players like Charles Lloyd and Joe Henderson. More than any one player's contribution, it is the combination of sounds from the Billy Hart Quartet that is ever present on Just.
Review by Matt Collar