Billy Hart Quartet at Philadelphia Art Alliance

Ars Nova Workshop is excited to present the Philadelphia debut of the Billy Hart Quartet. Led by the drummer Billy Hart, the group includes the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, the pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Ben Street. All Our Reasons, the quartet’s critically acclaimed album, was released in 2012 on ECM.

“The drummer Billy Hart,” writes The New York Times, “has had a richly peripatetic jazz career, coming into his own during a period of headlong flux — the searching or soul-fortified post-bop of the 1960s, the intrepid hybrids of the ’70s — and approaching each situation with an enlightened but earthy grace.”...

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Ars Nova Workshop is excited to present the Philadelphia debut of the Billy Hart Quartet. Led by the drummer Billy Hart, the group includes the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, the pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Ben Street. All Our Reasons, the quartet’s critically acclaimed album, was released in 2012 on ECM.

“The drummer Billy Hart,” writes The New York Times, “has had a richly peripatetic jazz career, coming into his own during a period of headlong flux — the searching or soul-fortified post-bop of the 1960s, the intrepid hybrids of the ’70s — and approaching each situation with an enlightened but earthy grace.”

The Washington, D.C. drummer Billy Hart has worked with Otis Redding, Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, Pharoah Sanders, Stan Getz, Dave Holland and Oliver Lake. He also played for several years with Herbie Hancock, as well as on Miles Davis’s classic 1972 album On the Corner.

When this quartet was originally formed, in 2003, it was co-led by the pianist Ethan Iverson and the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, with Hart and the bassist Ben Street as sidemen. (Iverson, a member of the trio The Bad Plus, has worked with Tim Berne, Charlie Haden and Lee Konitz, and is the founder of the jazz blog Do The Math; Turner was a member of the Dave Holland Big Band and has played with Joshua Redman and Kurt Rosenwinkel; Street has worked with Holland, Rosenwinkel, Sam Rivers and Miroslav Vitous, the former drummer of Weather Report.) But, soon after, Hart became the leader of the quartet.

Quartet, the group’s first album, was released in 2006 on HighNote; six years later, they returned with All Our Reasons, on ECM. Guardian celebrated All Our Reasons for its “cinematic eloquence,” and The New York Times called it “marvelous.” Tonight the group will perform songs from the album.

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