It has taken a little over three years since Just was recorded in New York to appear.
Top tip Billy Hart – one of the world’s greatest jazz drummers – here with a long running quartet of tenorist Mark Turner, pianist Ethan Iverson and double bassist Ben Street, entered Sear Sound in New York to make Just. Pieces include 4 Ethan Iverson numbers and 3 each by Hart and Turner. Like a fine wine it’s sip ready. The bouquet is bright, the scent is complex. Senses come alive at the sound of stick, cymbal, tumble of fill and crowd of rhythms.
Hart is also tremendous on Robin Verheyen’s Liftoff issued recently.
The Hart pieces ‘Layla Joy’ and ‘Naaj’ appeared in earlier versions on Enchance (in a Dewey Redman arrangement on that 1977 Horizon label release) and Rah (Gramavision, 1988) respectively.
The Rah track ‘Naaj’ has Buster Williams on it and Kenny Kirkland with Hart and Williams’ Mwandishi comrade Eddie Henderson on flugel. Williams and Henderson were also on the early ‘Layla Joy’. ‘Naaj’ was later covered by the WDR Big Band with Hart on an album called The Broader Picture.
Hart born 84 years ago in Washington, D. C. began his career playing with soul artists like Otis Redding and Sam & Dave before switching to jazz. He worked with Shirley Horn, Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery and following a late 1960s move to New York became part of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band playing jazz funk and freer directions.
On the spiritual jazz side he is on Pharoah Sanders 1969 classic, Karma. He is the drummer on one of the ultimate spiritual jazz jawdroppers, ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan.’
Hart debuted as a bandleader with the aforementioned Enchance. In the last few decades he has also figured in the David Weiss helmed Freddie Hubbard tribute band The Cookers. Like Iverson he has taught at the New England Conservatory and three years ago was named an NEA Jazz Master, America’s top jazz honour.
Hart is no stranger to ECM both with this quartet and, again a Mwandishi link, a half century ago for his presence on reedist Bennie Maupin’s The Jewel in the Lotus as well as work in the 1990s with Charles Lloyd.
Just – I take the title in both the senses of ”fair” and in its adverbial sense of ”a moment ago” – there are no ifs or buts grammatically or metaphorically about its quality – begins in very stately fashion with Iverson tune ‘Showdown’ which is quite mournful and allows Turner to show the full range of his tenderness when he plays the balladic main motif.
Hart’s work on toms at the beginning of ‘Layla Joy’ is the sort of thing that gets mucked around with by hip hop artists and studied at top music colleges. And it’s the perfection of the technique and feel he has in abundance that is well captured here and beautifully mixed. You get his percussive sense even more at the beginning of Iverson piece ‘Chamber Music’ later.
Iverson piece ‘Aviation’ is a blustery dash up and down the scale – it’s rough and ready, almost like a warm up piece and adds some energy.
Does anything swing in an oblique way? Well yeah go for ‘South Hampton’ in that regard which keeps you guessing. Hart’s quiet explosions are great punctuations and make me think of the sound of bebop pioneer Kenny ‘Klook’ Clarke inventing bebop bombs and known for his ”klook a mop” touch.
The title track, a Hart piece, is a showcase for Turner in some ways. He is very strong throughout and clearly suits playing with Iverson. For Street fans his touch on this track is quiet but very effective. ‘Billy’s Waltz’ as indicated before in these pages is a Turner tune which makes me think of ‘Waltz for Debby’ just at the beginning, that word again in yet another sense. And that’s the final thing to say – there are so many senses and levels that Hart operates on. The sensible thing pun intended is to follow his lead, lightly, politely, subtly, direct, oblique, whatever the path – he’ll get you there in the company of these fine players whose compositional contributions are a strong factor in the success of the album just as their playing spurred on by Hart indubitably is. Duplet, triplet feel, fills, playing time – all the frills. Fill your boots.
For Turner fans who have been following his career since the 1990s ‘Bo Brussels’ which was on In This World is one of the many good things here.
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