Billy Hart Quartet - "Just" After twenty years of playing together, the Billy Hart Quartet - with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson and Ben Street - is distinguished by it's stylistic openness. A drummer of enormous experience, who has played through many of jazz's idiomatic upheavals, Hart, now 83, advocates a 'multi-directional' sound approach, and his younger confreres respond accordingly, each piece subtly opening another door. The new album, Just, was recorded in New York's Sound On Sound Studios in December 2021. Verve Label Group; ECM; Jazz

In contemporary music, the divide between composition and improvisation has become blurry over the generations. Twentieth and twenty-first century composers have stretched the boundaries of melodic and harmonic structure, leading to pieces that challenge listeners and performers alike. Hoping to work along these lines, pianist and composer Jake Hart immersed himself in the worlds of jazz and contemporary music. For his debut recording, Collage, Hart has woven together musical ideas from contemporary classical music into a through-composed piece that sounds like an improvised piece of music. It was during his formative studies on piano that Hart discovered his love of solo playing. He knew that when he recorded his first album it would be solo piano. Though he started playing solo piano in the jazz vein while a teenager, Hart's study of modern composition led him to incorporate the sounds of 20th and 21st century composers into his improvisations. By the time he finished his degrees, Hart had discovered a new method of composing that suited his particular style. Hart's long study and absorption of an encyclopedic list of composers, including those as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg, Toru Takemitsu, and Morton Feldman, gave him access to myriads of musical ideas that he began to incorporate into his composing process. These internalized ideas were then arranged and memorized to form a through composed piece without notating. The effect of the performance is to sound like a long solo piano improvisation that sounds as contemporary as any improvising artist. The resulting composition, Collage, is a nearly hour long piece that is a cornucopia of musical ideas expertly arranged into an intriguing performance. Having begun the composing process in 2021, Hart has internalized Collage, a piece that has solidified his unique style and voice. The creation of Collage has led to Hart's decision to create a collection of twelve collage pieces, which will utilize the same concept of creative borrowing from composers but will engage with a wider variety and from farther back in the music's development. On his debut album, Collage, Jake Hart has composed an intriguing and singular piece of music for solo piano, one that breaks the boundaries of classical and jazz form in it's own kaleidoscopic musical universe.

Though guitarist John Hart has performed with quite a few organists, including the distinguished Jack McDuff with whom he played 16 years, this is his third album with organ in the group. With the award-winning, remarkable Gary Versace at the B-3, John Hart unfolds here a spellbinding Act Three of his guitar/organ trio performance. John Hart, while leading an active life as performer on the world jazz scene, has held a full-schedule lecturer/head post of the jazz guitar department at the FROST SCHOOL OF MUSIC of his alma mater, University of Miami for several years now. On Hart’s previous and the first release on SteepleChase SCCD 31865 “Crop Circles” last year Ken Dryden commented, “The strength of this session merits more frequent record dates for John Hart.”

Resonus Classics is pleased to present an exquisite album of orchestral and chamber works by the London-based contemporary composer Peter Fribbins. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra and conductor Robertas Servenikas are joined by violinist Philippe Graffin and trumpeter Christopher Hart in a programme of mostly world premiere recordings including Soliloquies for Trumpet & Strings and the substantial Concerto for Violin and Orchestra titled Dances, Elegies & Epitaphs dedicated to the memory of the composer's father. Completing this portrait is Capriccio for Orchestra, based on the hymn tune ''Abide with Me'' and the wind quintet ''In Xanadu''.