"Just" is an elegant album calculated to please. More than any earlier releases on ECM, it is Billy Hart's album, The quartet has been working together for over twenty years and has rightly morphed ...

The catalyst: their drummer, Billy Hart, who stirred up rhythmic eddies and punched out stinging cymbal accents while fixing saxophonist Azar Lawrence with an eager, heat-of-battle grin.

There was a telling remark in Wynton Marsalis’s recent interview with Katty Kay for the BBC show “Influential”. Talking about how jazz functions in real time as a democracy, he said: “Our music ...