Just is the fourth album by the quartet of drummer Billy Hart, with tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Ben Street. The line-up has not changed since it formed in 2003, and Hart's idea of a "multi-directional" sound leaves each player room to open the music up. Ten pieces by three of the four members move between ballad, bebop, waltz and open-ended vamp, and Street, who wrote none of them, shapes the sound as much as the composers.
Hart began working professionally in 1958 and has played through many of jazz's upheavals, from Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi sextet to Charles Lloyd's quartets of the 1990s. His first ECM appearance was on Bennie Maupin's The Jewel in the Lotus in 1974. The quartet debuted on High Note in 2006, then recorded All Our Reasons (2012) and One Is The Other (2014) for ECM. Just was recorded in December 2021 at Sound On Sound Studios in New York, with Roy Hendrickson engineering. It was mixed in September 2023 by Gérard de Haro at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France. Iverson wrote four of the tunes, Turner and Hart three each.
Iverson's Showdown opens the set as a lilting, lyrical ballad that lets Turner's burnished tone carry the theme. Hart's Layla Joy, an older tune in a new arrangement, starts from a rumble of mallets on toms and cymbals. Saxophone, piano and bass then emerge, with Iverson scratching the piano strings and Street spiralling downward. Turner's Billy's Waltz is both a graceful dance and a vehicle for blues-conscious playing, and it holds one of Iverson's best solos. Elsewhere Aviation is buoyant bebop, Chamber Music floats on brushes, and Hart's Naaj returns with Afro-Cuban and calypso accents.
Critics singled out the writing and the interplay. On AllMusic, Matt Collar heard "lyrical songs, full of harmonic and rhythmic textures that pull you deeper within the group's sound as the album progresses." Ivana Ng, writing in DownBeat, praised its "thoughtful compositions and dynamic interplay". Stephen Graham gave it five stars on marlbank and named it his album of the month for February 2025.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2748, released in February 2025.
