Billy Hart’s fluid rhythms and inner drive reflect decades of drumming at the highest level. Now aged 84, he releases Just on a label he first recorded for over half a century ago – that ECM debut, Benny Maupin’s The Jewel In The Lotus, is now a recognised classic.

His latest album, the third by the quartet he founded in 2003, draws on that lifetime of experience by juxtaposing the straight-ahead grooves he mastered in the early 1960s with the textured delicacies that ensured Herbie Hancock’s 1970s Mwandishi band was an artistic success. The result is music rooted in tradition, but unmistakably of our time. Rock-solid bassist Ben Street is equally adept and Ethan Iveson delivers a masterful round-up of modernist piano. But it is saxophonist Mark Turner, the album’s lead voice, unobtrusively maximising Hart’s rhythm-section support, who confirms the quartet’s identity and makes the album standout.

The set opens with Hart’s mallets spaciously marking the pulse on the gently unfolding ‘Showdown’, one of four compositions written by pianist Iveson. In contrast the pianist’s ‘Aviation’ zips along, ‘Chamber Music’ is a floaty ballad and “South Hampton” a medium-tempo blues. Turner’s three compositions take in abstraction, a pretty waltz and the trenchant album closer ‘Top of the Middle’. Hart’s triptych rounds out a nice and varied set with re-makes of the often-recorded ‘Layla Joy’ and ‘Naaj’ as well as the soulful and funky ‘Just’, the album’s title track.