Billy Hart - Multidirectional (2025)

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

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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. Not that Hart is a stranger to adapting his distinctive voice to multifarious approaches from Quest, the post-bop quartet with Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach; the hard bop all-star group The Cookers, or Herbie Hancock’s pioneering Mwandishi sextet – where he earned his sobriquet Jabali, Swahili for “rock.” Then there’s the long history with many of jazz’s greatest artists, from Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Smith to Bill Frisell, Charles Lloyd, Branford Marsalis and Joe Lovano. In 2022 he took his well-deserved place among the ranks of NEA Jazz Masters.

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.