Several years ago a group billed as the Mark Turner-Ethan Iverson Quartet made an auspicious debut at the Village Vanguard, with Mr. Turner on tenor saxophone, Mr. Iverson on piano, Ben Street on bass and Billy Hart on drums. This week the same ensemble is back at the Vanguard with a different handle, the Billy Hart Quartet, and a clearer sense of itself, judging by a potent and well-balanced first set on Tuesday night.
Billy Hart, with Ben Street on bass, at the Village Vanguard on Tuesday.
Bebop is the group’s lingua franca, though it should be understood that the word refers here to an aesthetic practice rather than a historical style. Mr. Hart, who is 66, has covered the full jazz spectrum during his accomplished career; he isn’t a classicist or a throwback. His younger band mates demonstrate a grasp of modern traditions but also a strong aversion to nostalgia. The whole enterprise functions in the present tense.
And Mr. Hart is the leader for reasons other than seniority or courtesy. He has a loose but authoritative approach to propulsion, along with an almost scary conviction in the power of a single emphatic gesture: the thwack of a mallet on a floor tom, the washy impact of a full-tilt cymbal crash. He also contributed the most memorable tunes, melodically speaking, in Tuesday’s set. Even more than on the group’s sterling recent album, “Quartet” (High Note), Mr. Hart sounded altogether like the man in charge.
The other members of the group exerted an equal pull. Mr. Turner was the primary soloist, and his distinctive style — heavy on arpeggios and scalar elaborations — was a prominent feature of the set. He ended “Moment’s Notice,” the John Coltrane classic, with a cadenza that gradually spiraled outward, practically ghostwriting an alternate composition. Elsewhere in the set, notably on Mr. Iverson’s stark blues “Mellow B,” Mr. Turner played a stream of 16th notes in his altissimo range, only occasionally tossing in a triplet run or landing on a long tone in his braying low register.
Mr. Iverson adopted a drier and less effusive approach. He sounded best on “Charvez,” a ballad by Mr. Hart with a recurring two-chord flourish; the song’s inherent drama suited Mr. Iverson’s declaratory instincts, and its modal progression prompted him to explore an insistent polytonality. On the more boppish material, he showed signs of Bud Powell’s influence, but with a chromatic tendency informed by the postwar avant-garde.
Mr. Street had his standout solo on “Irah,” a near-ballad by Mr. Hart. He started simply, playing quarter notes in a pedal drone. Then he developed a sequence of ideas with patience and restraint. He stayed within reach of the melody, often brushing against it but also implying some modest harmonic variations.
There is tension in the ensemble’s rhythmic relationship to swing, which Mr. Hart embraces more wholeheartedly than his colleagues. But it doesn’t pose a real problem — Mr. Hart could swing hard enough to pull the entire band, if he needed to — and in some ways the friction distinguishes this ensemble from countless others covering similar post-bop terrain.
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