Multidirectional by Billy Hart

Drummer and NEA Jazz Master Billy Hart releases first live album, MULTIDIRECTIONAL, with his longtime all-star quartet featuring saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Ethan Iverson, and bassist Ben Street.

***

Legendary drummer Billy Hart credits the great Rashied Ali for introducing him to the term “multidirectional” – a descriptor for the elusive, daring approach to the kit that Hart and others of his generation had developed intuitively in response to the increasing freedom and exploration of the era’s jazz experimentation.

“Rashied Ali told me that ‘multidirectional’ was what John Coltrane called this freeform feel, where conventional structure was abandoned and the rhythms could cut in any direction,” he writes in OCEANS OF TIME: THE MUSICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BILLY HART, his captivating new memoir. Hart had begun to explore that style under the influence of Coltrane’s pioneering work, first venturing into the terrain while playing with Pharoah Sanders at the famed East Village club Slugs’.

More than half a century later, Hart has refined and evolved the approach into a singular percussive voice of unparalleled elegance, finesse and intricacy – as exemplified on MULTIDIRECTIONAL, the first live recording by his longstanding quartet featuring tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Ethan Iverson, and bassist Ben Street.

The album’s release arrives just in time for Hart’s 85th birthday, and vividly reveals that the beloved drummer still has surprises to reveal. No less an authority than Iverson, not just a collaborator for more than 25 years but a respected scholar of the music’s history, marvels at hearing Hart veer into this audacious direction.

“A year or two into playing with Billy and his quartet,” Iverson recalls to writer Nate Chinen in his liner notes, “I went over to rehearse, and he sat down at his drums and said: ‘I want some music in this band that’s like John Coltrane with Rashied Ali.’ Then he started playing in the style, which I don’t think I’ve heard Billy ever play in another setting. He was always swinging so hard, doing what he does at the highest level every time—but I didn’t catch a situation with Quest, or any other group live where I would have heard a taste of that.”

Not that Hart is a stranger to adapting his distinctive voice to multifarious approaches. Iverson mentions Quest, the post-bop quartet in which he joined Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach; add to that another venerated collective, the hard bop all-star group The Cookers, not to mention Herbie Hancock’s pioneering Mwandishi sextet – the context in which Hart earned his sobriquet Jabali, Swahili for “rock.”

Then there’s the long history of work with many of jazz’s greatest artists, a list that ranges from Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Smith to Bill Frisell, Charles Lloyd, Branford Marsalis and Joe Lovano, among countless others. In 2022 he took his well-deserved place among the ranks of NEA Jazz Masters.

For more than 20 years now, Hart’s stellar quartet has added inestimably to that legacy. Their studio albums have documented the development of the band’s scintillating chemistry and an intense yet spacious group sound. But something further bursts forth when they take the stage together, a kaleidoscopic searching and bristling energy that has finally been captured, like lightning in a bottle, in this exhilarating live recording from the stage of Smoke Jazz Club.

As Hart describes, “Everybody in the band has had a direction in mind since I met them, and there were times when we got to certain points but never got a chance to record it. We did make records, but we weren’t playing in front of an audience.”

The album is an ideal showcase for Hart’s quartet, the members of which are a generation younger than the drummer/bandleader but all acclaimed veterans in their own right. “I know I’ve changed a lot as a result of playing with Billy in this band,” Turner says. “In terms of our experience level, we’ve come closer to Billy, if that’s not too egotistical to say. We’re 20 years older. We’ve all improved. We’ve gotten better as musicians, more comfortable in our own skin.”

Hart inaugurates the set on mallets, establishing an almost reverent tone on “Song for Balkis,” a tribute to his daughter that also opened the quartet’s 2012 ECM release ALL OUR REASONS. The song turns tumultuous – and, yes, multidirectional – as Turner unfurls a probing solo. Trane’s influence becomes explicit on an unusually restrained version of “Giant Steps,” which gains intensity and velocity as the familiar tune progresses from Iverson’s tentative, agitated solo intro.

Turner’s “Sonnet for Stevie” is propelled by Hart’s broad, unhurried swing foundation, Iverson’s solo seeming to hang suspended from Street’s sturdy basslines. Hart reaches back to the title track of a 1993 album for “Amethyst,” offering perhaps the date’s most striking example of the band’s fluid multidirectionality – never quite settling into a recognizable tempo or rhythm, yet maintaining a determined momentum and cohesiveness throughout. They conclude with Iverson’s “Showdown,” an introspective ballad that opened the quartet’s most recent studio outing, Just, highlighted by Turner’s eloquent melodicism over the leader’s sensitive, nuanced touch.

Deep into a storied career, Billy Hart remarkably continues to discover new paths to traverse. MULTIDIRECTIONAL refers to the rhythmic unpredictability displayed on this essential album, of course, but there’s a philosophy suggested by the word that defines Jabali’s restless curiosity – striking out along varied and divergent currents, unpredictable but always possessed by a resolute sense of direction.

Billy Hart is a jazz drummer who has performed with some of the most important jazz musicians in history.

He performed in Washington, D.C. with soul artists and then later with Shirley Horn, Jimmy Smith, and Wes Montgomery.

Hart moved to New York in 1968. He was a member of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi Sextet, played with McCoy Tyner, Stan Getz, and Miles Davis, among many others.

billyhartmusic.com