At Village Vanguard....

Hear The Concert Live From The Vilage Vanguard, At 9 p.m. ET
Live Tonight: Billy Hart Quartet In Concert
September 23, 2009 from WBGO - Here's a good story about the amount of respect drummer Billy Hart receives. For several years now, he's been playing in a quartet with three other musicians nearly half his age. The band was once something of a side project for member Ethan Iverson — best known as the pianist in The Bad Plus — until he, the saxophonist and the bassist all decided that Hart really deserved the credit, the billing and the leadership role. When the Billy Hart quartet plays the Village Vanguard this week, we'll see a career sideman drummer who has grown quite comfortable in the leader's chair. Hear the band perform on Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 9 p.m. ET, in a live on-air broadcast via WBGO and online webcast (including live video) at this page on NPR Music.

Hart's quartet does have an album to its name, the 2006 release Quartet. High in the mix, and prominently featured in the songs, he makes the case that he should be considered a master of contemporary expression. Hart can swing with the best of them, but he also accents with ever-churning creativity and distinctly modern group interaction. Clearly, Hart has lived through multiple sea changes in jazz; what makes him exciting to watch is that he's also clearly absorbed them all. Hart wrote four of the tunes on the album, Iverson a few more, while landmark tunes from the John Coltrane and Charlie Parker songbooks — disassembled and reconstructed — comprise the remaining material. Those could well be Iverson's trademarks, as a Bad Plus fan might intuit; the pianist's off-camber lyricism is all over this band's music. Mark Turner is a master of his middleweight tone, and his solos are snaky, lithe, unpredictable. Ben Street is a full-service bassist who has already appeared on the Live at the Village Vanguard concert series three times this year alone.

Billy Hart has recorded on more than 500 albums as a sideman. He emerged as an accompanist to Shirley Horn, then was repeatedly drilled in the rudiments with Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery. He followed jazz as some of its chief notables tried fusion — he played on some of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock's most backbeat-driven discs in the early 1970s — and spent long stints with countless other giants of jazz ever since. Hart has been playing the Village Vanguard since goodness knows when, though it's not terribly often that he actually gets to pack the seats for his own projects. This particular concert broadcast also happens to fall on the birthday of one of Hart's biggest inspirations as a young musician: John Coltrane.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113016411&ft=1&f=10002