One Is The Other is the second ECM album by the Billy Hart Quartet, following All Our Reasons. The drummer leads a band of younger players, and the premise is that he gets to play everything he wants to play. The compositions come from Hart, saxophonist Mark Turner and pianist Ethan Iverson, and they range across much of jazz history, from Lennie Tristano and the blues to free improvisation. Only one standard appears, Some Enchanted Evening.
The line-up is Hart on drums, Mark Turner on tenor saxophone, Ethan Iverson on piano and Ben Street on double bass. According to Andy Boeckstaens of London Jazz News, the band grew out of a group co-led by Iverson and Turner, with Street on bass, more than a decade earlier. This was its third album. Hart brings a career that runs through the bands of Jimmy Smith, Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis. The session took place at Avatar Studios, New York, in April and May 2013, with James Farber as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.
The album opens with Turner's Lennie Groove, a blend of Tristano and clave first recorded on his early album In This World. Its odd meter, unusual bass line and fast doubled melody have made it a favourite challenge among players, and Iverson's introduction sounds like Tristano sped up. Hart's Teule's Redemption, written for one of his sons, is in two parts and ends with Street and Hart locked into a powerful groove under Turner's tenor solo. Hart's blues Yard links Charlie Parker with the even-eighth grooves of those years with Smith, Hancock and Davis, at a level of abstraction that comes from a long working relationship.
Reviewing the album for NPR's Fresh Air in May 2014, Kevin Whitehead praised the tight but fluid interplay. He felt, though, that the reverb of the mix made the band sound looser than it is. Hart, who loves musicals, chose Some Enchanted Evening. Whitehead wrote that on it "Turner's sweeping solo is so grand, you could miss how gracefully the others circle him without colliding." Boeckstaens noted that Street, mainly in the background, "makes a profound contribution".
CD edition, ECM 2335, first released in February 2014.
