Oxford-based keyboardist and composer Alexander Hawkins walks his own line between free-improv and contemporary-classical composition, when he isn’t touring as a world-music one-off with the veteran Ethiopian star Mulatu Astatke. A bold Hawkins balance of left-field dancefloor punch, abstract collective-improv sounds and cutting-edge composition fuels this double album, with one disc performed by the pianist’s regular sextet including Sons of Kemet stalwarts Shabaka Hutchings and Tom Skinner, the other by a 13-piece ensemble including trumpeters Laura Jurd and Percy Pursglove, and Danish free-sax original Julie Kjaer.
The small band sometimes echoes Ornette Coleman’s avant-fusion Prime Time group, notably on the infectious, pounding [C]all and its tightly hooky, soulfully tenor-wailing second part. The large ensemble inhabits more remote sonic and rhythmic territories, but Hawkins’ guidance – in his dynamic control, and loose arrangements for flutes, bass clarinets, brass, strings and percussion – steers an improvised music full of dramatic and tonally colourful shape-shifting narratives that are sometimes like superheated free jazz, sometimes like surreal street parades.
