All Our Reasons is the first ECM album by the Billy Hart Quartet, a New York band that had already been playing together for eight years when it entered the studio. Hart's drums are joined by Ethan Iverson on piano, Mark Turner on tenor saxophone and Ben Street on double bass. Over time their music had grown freer and more spacious, and that open, melodic side is the one this record brings forward.
The quartet was formed in 2003 as the Ethan Iverson/Mark Turner Quartet. When Hart asked to lead it for a gig in his hometown of Montclair, New Jersey, the others voted to make it his band for good. They kept playing a number of dates each year, often at the Village Vanguard, and in 2005 recorded a first album for the hard-bop label High Note. Hart had first recorded for ECM in 1974, on Bennie Maupin's The Jewel in the Lotus, and spent ten years in Charles Lloyd's quartet. Iverson and Street make their ECM debut here. The album was recorded in June 2011 at Avatar Studios in New York, with James Farber engineering and Manfred Eicher producing.
The writing is shared among Hart (four pieces), Iverson (three) and Turner (two). Hart's Song for Balkis opens the set with a drum solo in his freer mode, loosely swinging but unpredictable enough to draw the others in. Iverson's Ohnedaruth takes its title from John Coltrane's spiritual name and reworks the changes of Giant Steps, hiding them under delayed resolutions while staying close to Coltrane in feeling. Turner's Wasteland is through-composed and was learned in the studio for this session. The only improvised parts are the saxophone cadenza at the start and the drum interludes.
In JazzTimes, Michael J. West heard nine "sublime, ruminative tracks" and noted that the album's "main thrust is not rhythm but melody". Tyran Grillo, in his ECM archive Between Sound and Space, found Iverson "as bold as a composer as he is understated as a pianist". Elsewhere Turner's Nigeria starts from Sonny Rollins's Airegin, and Hart's Imke's March begins and ends with the whistled tune he used to call his daughter in from the playground.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2248, first released in March 2012.
