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Quartet was chosen as "10 Best records of 2006" by both K. Leander Williams at Time Out/New York (number one) and Nate Chinen at the New York Times (number ten).

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Reviews of the record:

(From Downbeat, December, 2006)

****--Billy Hart has been a coveted drummer for decades...His open-ended, direct technique opens up the msuic and the other soloists...makes few expected moves.

---Jeff McCord

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(From Signal to Noise #44)

Turner is still a serious character, stretching Warne Marsh's riddling obliquity out into linear assaults on the sublime, but his solos are spiced with a little Shorterish surrealism that fits snugly with Iverson's dark sense of humor...but the star is still the drummer, who contributes four strong originals and plays with fire and invention throughout. Where too many contemporary drummers break up the time automatically, without really meaning anything by it, Hart makes sure every curveball and provocation really counts.

---Nate Dorward

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(From All Music Guide (link here))

****--The interplay between the four men and the intensity of the individual solos leave no doubt that they have earned a return trip to the studio.

---Ken Dryden

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(From Time Out New York, September 6, 2006)

The sleight of hand begins early on Quartet, veteran drummer Billy Hart’s inaugural date heading up a collective of younger musicians wise and humble enough to understand that his rhythmic shape-shifting deserves top billing.  “Mellow B,” the first piece, opens with a thunderous crash from Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson, but almost instantly becomes an intro duet between Hart and bassist Ben Street. The cut could easily have been your run-of-the-mill walking, slow blues if Street weren’t left to be the lone cool spot in the midst of increasing heat.  Almost in spite of the bassist’s steady gait, each member—especially Hart and tenorist Mark Turner—accelerates.  The tension mirrors the melody’s engagingly unorthodox structure, though that’s not apparent at the onset. 

Such shifts tinge what is basically an accessible album with an adventurousness that seems wholly unself-conscious, whereas a lesser ensemble might sound rote or forced.  Iverson and Turner are often sparkling and reflective on Hart’s pieces (all of which, incidentally, are named for family members), yet both seem to have a mandate to rejigger the two old faves in the bunch (Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice” and Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation”).  Hart’s playing, all elegant cymbal wash and snare-to-tom stutters, is a veritable clinic in how to keep even the most heteroclite players both on track and off guard.

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(From The Village Voice, August 8, 2006)

Billy Hart Quartet, a stunner that might set your brain and pulse racing more than you want in this summer heat, features a band that started off as Iverson's before he, bassist Ben Street, and tenor saxophonist Mark Turner unanimously voted Hart leader in recognition of his seniority and the sizzle and spread of his beat....Roy Haynes was famous for being underrated...[now] Hart, who's been around since the early '70s, when he was one of the drummers on Miles Davis's On the Corner, is...Congrats to his younger bandmates if Billy Hart Quartet helps make him famous for it.

---Francis Davis

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(From All About Jazz, August 2006)

On Quartet, the statesman gives a free and invaluable drum clinic reflecting his luminous, exact and vibrant skills...If you are expecting the group to play it completely straight, then think again. The nine selections of mostly original music are filled with little oddities that keep things surprising, like Hart's fine drum solo against a slightly suureal blues vamp on "Mellow B." John Coltrane's "Moment's Notice" also starts off on familiar ground, but opens up with a growling tenor solo by Turner that leads into a straight but slightly off-center reworking. Even Charlie Parker's "Confirmation" is quite elastic, with a superb closing free solo by Iverson....The crowning jewel is the Hart ballad "Lullaby for Imke," which has a memorable melody, a brilliantly emotive sax solo by Turner, dreamy piano by Iverson, and colorful drum touches by Hart. Iverson's enigmatic "Neon" closes the set with wonderful tribal drumming and strong statements by each musician...Whether the younger players are inspired by Hart or the other way around, the results are magical on Quartet, one of the year's more rewarding releases.

---Mark F. Turner

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Reviews of the band live:

(From "Night After Night," April 17, 2006)

An undersung drummer of the generation that produced Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette, Hart has come into his own as a bandleader rather later than those peers. An impressively diverse CV includes important engagements with Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery and Shirley Horn, but Hart is probably best remembered as the drummer for the protean fusion group Herbie Hancock assembled upon his graduation from Miles Davis's band -- a band that finally claimed the renown it deserved well after its players had dispersed.

Hart is a drummer whose style can't be easily pigeonholed. To a large extent he carries on the ever-forward leaning urges of Williams, and did as much as any drummer to shape the nascent fusion vocabulary. But Hart is equally beholden to the legacies of Elvin Jones (in his volcanic temperament) and Ed Blackwell (in his thorough melodicism), not to mention the still-active Roy Haynes, whose multi-limbed coordination paved the way for Hart by bridging the gap between bop essentials and the emerging avant-garde of the late 1950s.

From his earliest efforts as bandleader, Hart has demonstrated a proclivity for wedding disparate players. His first album as leader, Enchance (A&M Horizon, 1977), included such mavericks as Dewey Redman, Oliver Lake and Don Pullen. Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland appeared alongside Bill Frisell and Steve Coleman on Hart recordings during the '80s; a '90s band featured Mark Feldman and Dave Fiuczynski. Accordingly, Hart's current quartet unites saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Ben Street.

"Mellow B," the Iverson composition that opened the set, found Hart's turbulent bashes, splashes and rumbles grounded by Street's slow, patient bass line. Iverson's solo climaxed in circular torrents, while Turner blew dry, disjunct lines that broke the melody apart into Mondrian-like blocks. John Coltrane's "Moment's Notice" was slyly teased, then thoroughly dissected before its theme was stated outright; Turner seemed to sneak up on every note he played. Iverson's hushed opening soliloquy in "Charvez" sounded as if it was being played at some gaping distance. Turner's solo revealed his most gorgeous tone; behind him, Street tossed off five-beat handfuls of 16th notes against Hart's slightly outside-the-pocket sway.

Alternating figures at the top and bottom of his instrument, Street opened "Irah" like two songbirds conversing from tree to tree. Turner once again unspooled a strand of consumate beauty; Iverson's whispered solo was punctuated by Hart's rude smacks on a low tom-tom. The pianist introduced a thoroughly fragmented "Body and Soul" that seemed to reference both Monk ballads and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" -- the latter quote I almost certainly invented. Over skeletal bass and a whisper of brushes, Iverson's left hand chased right at a canonical distance. A bright, upbeat rendition of Wayne Shorter's "This Is for Albert" ended in a splashy solo by the leader, punctuated by a persistent three-note tattoo that evolved into a take on Max Roach's signature piece, "The Drum Also Waltzes." Paradoxically, in this performance of another drummer's solo, Hart asserted his own personality; there could be no mistaking one for the other. The set ended with another Iverson composition, "Neon," in which the band seemed to frolic in duple and triple time simultaneously.

---Steve Smith (you can read the full original blog post here.)

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(From The New York Times, December 24, 2004)

Some jazz bands operate under a kind of aesthetic mandate, imposed by a bandleader in search of a sound. Many are much looser, allowing for whatever happens in the combination of certain ingredients. The drummer Billy Hart, who has had a busy career in New York since the late 1960's, allows for happy accidents.

During Mr. Hart's career, his field has turned upside down and then over again. When he played with Jimmy Smith 40 years ago, a cracking, hard-bitten, post-Philly Joe Jones swing was the common jazz drummer's language. As he moved into the 70's, playing with Herbie Hancock's band - he can be heard on the spaced-out classic Sextant - he adapted to a language with more backbeats, extreme textures and abstract phrasing; it was a time when either nobody was soloing or everyone was soloing at once.

 Later, the music began chasing after the pre-70's values again, and jazz drummers had to find a swinging medium between strict patterns and abstraction. Mr. Hart always did.

He has become a bandleader of modest ambition, and he now leads a band that includes the pianist Ethan Iverson and the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, two important younger musicians on the new jazz scene; Ben Street is the bassist. At the Fat Cat on Wednesday night, the band played a mixture of standards and originals, and as a musical statement it was the exact sum of each member's musical personality.

Mr. Turner played solos that sounded as if they had been left out in the sun and baked down to their skeletal essence; he was examining every interval with care, building momentum gradually. Mr. Iverson is a much more outward player, with a kind of dry romantic streak. He has been influenced by Paul Bley and invents extended, rhapsodic melodies that burst through bar lines with a slightly metallic touch; he works his way outward to the extreme ends of the piano and explodes with precision every now and then, repeating lines and elaborating on them in fuguelike patterns.

 Mr. Street played hard, aggressive grooves with a strong tone, and Mr. Hart established the swing at the center of each piece, never abandoning it but building on it, making certain figures of cymbal or snare or tom-tom gush out over the edges of the rhythm.

They played two pieces by Mr. Hart, a ballad called "Charvez" and a compact, singsong piece called "Irah," as well as a driving, dire piece by Mr. Iverson called "Neon." But the most impressive, perhaps, was the most common: a version of Coltrane's "Moment's Notice," which began in runic phrases and worked up to an outpouring, at which point the melody finally emerged.

---Ben Ratliff

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