Page One
a column by
Bill Shoemaker
Alexander Hawkins: Breaking Vases
Alexander Hawkins © 2024 Edu Hawkins
Many of the artists shaping the music of the first quarter of the 21st Century were already making an impact before the millennium. But not Alexander Hawkins. In 2000, the keyboardist-composer was a second-year undergraduate studying law at Cambridge University, shortly before pursing what he recently characterized as “an old school PhD with a dissertation about decision making, 100,000 words of pure research.” He had decided the previous year to focus on piano instead of church organ, even though he was considerably more advanced in terms of classical training. (Since 2009, Hawkins has played Hammond C-3 with Decoy, a trio with John Edwards and Steve Noble, and in other settings.) Although he played standards locally to pay the bills, he considered himself more of a music fan and student than a pianist; given the demands of his dissertation and teaching undergraduates, he spent more time in the practice room than on the bandstand.
Hawkins was already an ardent listener, having absorbed his dad’s record collection from a very early age: one of his earliest childhood recollections was hearing Duke Ellington’s “Saturday Night Function.” Unlike many of his colleagues, who were initially taken by contemporary, cutting-edge jazz and then learned the music’s history in reverse- or non-chronological order, Hawkins started with Ellington and Art Tatum and plowed ahead through the works of titans like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell – and the riches of Elmo Hope and others consigned to the margins – reaching the work of Muhal Richard Abrams, Don Pullen, and Cecil Taylor by his late teens.
It was during the first five years of the new millennium that Hawkins gained confidence that he could make a go at being a professional pianist. By the time he returned to Oxford after obtaining his PhD, Hawkins had gravitated to the UK improvised music community for their creativity and individualism. Three Oxford-based musicians proved to be important to Hawkins’ matriculation: bassist Dominic Lash, saxophonist Pete McPhail, and multi-instrumentalist Pat Thomas. He particularly bonded with Lash, citing their miles-long uphill walks – Lash lugging his bass – to play with Oxford Improvisers Orchestra on Mondays.
Playing with OIO and others led to Hawkins first London gigs in the mid aughts at The Red Rose and various incarnations of The Klinker, often with Nostromo, a quartet with McPhail, Lash, and drummer Roger Telford. Hawkins’ initial London contacts included multi-instrumentalist Alex Ward, with whom Hawkins, Lash, and percussionist Paul May played the 2007 Freedom of the City festival, documented on Barkingside (Emanem). About this time, Hawkins met Lol Coxhill and Evan Parker; while he first performed with Coxhill, his ongoing work with Parker gained traction through the saxophonist’s monthly Vortex gigs, where Hawkins met John Edwards, Mark Sanders, and others.
“Soon thereafter, Evan called me for a Foxes Fox gig because Steve Beresford had a schedule conflict,” Hawkins recalled about the circumstances leading to his pivotal meeting with Louis Moholo-Moholo. “I had never met Louis at this point. He was already on the stand when I got there, and we had barely said hello when the first set started. We really hit it off, musically, and barely a month passed before Louis had a gig of his own at The Vortex. I was in the audience. When Louis saw me, he asked if I wanted to sit in for the second set. It was crazy for me to say yes, because I had never played the music, and there were never any charts with that band, but it would have been crazier to say no.”
By the time Hawkins and Moholo-Moholo recorded Keep Your Heart Straight (Ogun) in 2011, Hawkins was already on the radar of influential UK commentators for his work with the transatlantic cooperative Convergence Quartet with Lash, cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, and percussionist Harris Eisenstadt. In his notes for Keep Your Heart Straight, John Fordham cited the quartet’s 2009 Vortex gig as “an idiomatic white-knuckle ride,” and singled out Hawkins for “the audacity of his ideas, the depth of his understanding of both thematic and free-form music, and for his Cecil Taylor-like stamina and power.”
Two albums by Hawkins’ Ensemble had also been issued prior to the session with the iconic drummer: No Now is So (FMR) and All There, Ever Out (Babel). A distinctively configured sextet with three string players – Lash, cellist Hannah Marshall, and guitarist Otto Fischer – and two percussionists – kit drummer Javier Carmona and Orphy Robinson, who played pans on the former and marimba on the latter – Hawkins’ Ensemble refreshed the often-labored mixing of notated and improvised materials, and sensitively extrapolated compositions by Wadada Leo Smith and Sun Ra.
Despite the compositional acumen he demonstrated with both the Convergence Quartet and his Ensemble, Hawkins was routinely tagged as a free improviser because of his work with Parker and Moholo-Moholo, which he felt was somewhat ill-fitting, given the deep well of compositions played by the drummer’s groups. “While I love free improvisation,” he explained, “my heart has always been with composition, or at least organizing music. Free improvisation has never been where I felt freest as a bandleader. There isn’t an album under my name solely that is totally improvised. It’s a language that interests me profoundly, and it is one of the privileges of my career to be able to investigate is with people like Evan, who is after all a rigorous sonic organizer and architect, but beyond collaborative contexts, I have always been curious about how that language could be relevant in a composed context.
“An important point in my thinking about this came with hearing Anthony Braxton’s quintet with Taylor, Mary [Halvorson], Satoshi Takeishi, and Chris Dahlgren at Royal Festival Hall in 2004 [released on Leo as Quintet (London) 2004]. That was a significant event for me because hearing Taylor immediately clarified my thinking. If you came up listening to early Ellington, you knew exactly the relevance of what he’s doing in Anthony’s world. The experience of this concert really showed me possible direction for the synthesis of structural concerns, aspects of the earlier music with which I had grown up, and some of the linguistic and dynamic aspects of free improvisation.
During a winter 2004 holiday in New York, Hawkins connected with Bynum, who was playing in Cecil Taylor’s big band at the Iridium, a meeting that led to the formation of the Convergence Quartet (Lash made initial contact with Eisenstadt when the drummer, Vinny Golia, and others, had a London run in a theater piece). The Convergence Quartet was the first platform where Hawkins tested his approach to composing for improvisers. With half of the group residing in Brooklyn and half in the UK, the quartet was an occasional proposition – they did manage to record four albums between 2006 and 2013 – prompting Hawkins to form his Ensemble to further develop his methods and materials.
“My interest in writing for improvisers is deeply influenced in so many ways by from listening to Ellington since I was three years old,” Hawkins admitted “For example, it is often difficult for me to hear an idea apart from the type of voice I want to hear playing it. So, when I decided to form my own ensemble, there were very distinctive players I was interested in, and I was trying to find interesting ways to construct the group. With the first lineup of guitar, cello, steel pan, bass, and drums, I wanted to solve the problem of how to take this group which crowded the tenor-baritone register, but which was filled with radically different colors. I was also interested in putting the musicians in slightly unusual settings.
“At that time, I was also fascinated with that post-Ives/post-Braxton/post-Stockhausen idea of multiple independent sub-ensembles. Of course, you can have four people working independently in a quartet, but with a sextet you can have, for instance, three groups of two or two groups of three, and it can become more explicit that there are independent ideas being pursued. At this early stage, I was also listening to anything by members of the AACM that I could lay my hands on, which was not easy to do in the UK. Sound, Levels and Degrees of Light, Three Compositions of New Jazz, the two [Joseph] Jarman records, and others, were very influential.
“Dom [Lash] had acquired Braxton’s Composition Notes, and we pored over them. They were an absolute gold mine for me in terms of structural devices which I could play with in my work with the ensemble. One example would be the “Baobabs” pieces, which proceed on the same principle as Braxton’s “Composition 23C” or [Frederic] Rzewski’s “Coming Together,” the additive idea of A, A plus B, A and B plus C, and so on. Those books gave me so many ideas.
“Then there was a composition Taylor had on one of his sextet records called “mm(pf)” [the middle picture; Firehouse 12], which was so unbelievably elegant, structurally speaking. Classical composition students are often given exercises where they hang a new set of notes on the architecture of, for example, a Mozart sonata. So, I tried some of these ideas from Taylor’s “mm(pf)” model, a piece that coalesces component parts, rather than deconstructs them, which is the more routine course. This can be heard in compositions such as “assemble/melancholy” [Step, Wide, Step Deep; Babel, 2013] or “Forge(t)” [Unit(e); Alexander Hawkins Music, 2016].
“That was the second main strain of what was going on with me at that time,” Hawkins continued, “while as a player in other people’s bands I was deep into free improvisation, but it was my peers in America that influenced me as a composer, because in the UK there were not very many people doing that. There was Barry Guy and Simon H. Fell, but they had moved abroad by then. People don’t mention Simon enough. He did very interesting things.”
Contrary to many artists, whose first recordings are essentially drafts of who they may become, Hawkins’ early recordings, which included the stellar 2012 solo album, Song Singular (Babel), reflect an artistry fully realized by virtue of its being rooted in learning. As much as he is a pianist and composer, Hawkins is a scholar, his readings and research informing work that balances erudition and the joy of discovery. As furthered confirmed by more recent projects like his 2018 solo disc, Iron into Wind, the 2020 Togetherness Music, the 2020 meeting of improvisers and contemporary classical musicians in a 16-piece ensemble, and Break a Vase, the 2021 debut of his Mirror Canon sextet (all on Intakt), Hawkins’ music falls outside the boundaries of freely improvised music and contemporary British jazz. He had the early support of presenters like Gerard Tierney and broadcasters like Jez Nelson.
“My music was too strange for the British jazz audience at that time,” Hawkins said. “The scene at that time was deeply conservative. It’s still Londoncentric, with all the London music colleges and all the biases associated with them having considerable weight. Opportunities in the London jazz clubs came later, the Vortex being the exception, as it is in the cases of many musicians. Café Oto had yet to really exert its presence then. It was then a matter of being caught in between jazz and improvised music and contemporary classical music. One of the things that gave me heart at that time was looking to people like Evan [Parker] and Anthony [Braxton] as models: musicians who have a dizzying range of interests and influences, and who continue to chart an unstintingly creative course blind to definitions or perceived idiomatic boundaries.
Part of those examples is the reality of a dependency on work outside one’s own country. “I don’t know what percentage of my work is abroad,” Hawkins pondered, “but it’s probably 90%. Sure, I will play at festivals in this country, but that’s one concert every few years at a given festival, naturally. And there is of course the oasis-like presence of Café Oto; but, generally, there’s no opportunity to work regularly in this country, which is a situation I don’t mind because it’s always been that way. I can’t miss something I’ve never had, I suppose.”
One salient measure of the support Hawkins receives from outside the UK is his relationship with Zürich-based Intakt, whose CD catalog now has more than 400 titles. Since the 2017 Uproot by the quartet co-led by the vocalist Elaine Mitchener, Intakt has issued his music at an impressive rate: duos with saxophonist Angelika Niescier, cellist Tomeka Reid, and, imminently, singer Sofia Jernberg, as well as solo, trio, and small and large ensemble albums. This detailed documentation reveals Hawkins’ ongoing evolution as a pianist, composer, and bandleader.
2018’s Iron into Wind (Pears from an Elm) represents Hawkins’ rethinking of solo piano. “One of the problems I felt I had in my early solo playing, which I continue to work on to improve, was concerned with technique. I did things because I could instead of having a musical imperative, not that there was any egregious showing off, but I felt the exuberance of throwing around a lot of notes because I could sometimes clouded the flow of ideas. I remember one important moment after the duo recording with Louis, one reviewer said I had a horreur de vide. This idea of a horror of emptiness had an element of truth. As I started playing solo a bit more, I wanted to pare things down, not necessarily in the amounts of notes I played, but in terms of their rigor. Cecil [Taylor] is a player I regard as a pianist who very rarely sprays notes, gesturally. It does happen, but they are so tightly organized, so welded to the essence of the composition.
“This is also a quality I love in [Maurizio] Pollini, an absolute lack of histrionics. Some people may be surprised by this being a point of comparison with Cecil, given the physical effort it takes for him to play his music and its intensity, but all of that is necessary and therefore not indulgent. Pollini’s playing is very stripped down, without any indulgence. In both Pollini and [Arturo Benedetti] Michelangeli I find there is an incredible beauty in their austerity. As I continued to play solo, I tried to refine my ability to keep the music organized. I begin solos with units of material, not strictly in Cecil’s idea of unit structures, but they’re related in that I would have rhythmic cells or melodic cells or textural ideas that I would reconfigure in real time. As I am playing, I am always thinking of developing material and then, which is so often the case when you’re improvising, it takes on a life of its own.
“Presenting something leaner became a goal after Song Singular, trying to operate without this fear of emptiness, this horreur de vide. It is one of the things I admire in the music of [Leoš] Janáček and Mal Waldron, both of whom repeat materials obsessively, all the while remaining parsimonious in the extreme. Being economical with material was in the forefront of my mind as I developed the music for Iron into Wind. I feel I have even more control over that now. Sometimes the self-censorship is a little crippling. The amount of stuff I discard compared to what I keep is pretty dramatic. Even if there are aspects of imperfection with certain pieces on Iron into Wind, they nevertheless represent a process I am proud of.
“The more I think about Cecil Taylor, the more I realize how his music is rigorously designed. It’s no mistake that in the All the Notes documentary he’s sitting there with a book about architecture. There has been a strand of post-1960s piano that runs with the gestures – fistfuls of note, clusters, and so on – but sometimes throws the baby out with the bath water, and it becomes a slightly self-indulgent exercise. Those effects are brilliant but they lose their impact if you don’t deploy them judiciously. As some kind of expressionism, I get it. But the idea of organizing materials and being somewhat parsimonious with them is something that goes back to Braxton and the Language Musics, or Roscoe [Mitchell] with a piece like “Nonaah.” They are ways of breaking through and developing ideas.
“These are some of the ideas that I applied to Togetherness Music, which is quite tightly organized. Take a piece like Stockhausen’s Gruppen. The fact that it operates with such strict serial parameters means that the moment he decides to discard those parameters is musically astonishing. In setting up contexts that are structured in that way, you add to your arsenal the possibility of something chaotic or dense really feeling like an event. It can also create intricate beauty.
“I was hugely influenced by working on Braxton’s Sonic Genome, both the Turin incarnation, with eighty musicians playing for eight hours, and the Berlin realization, where sixty musicians played for six hours. You can’t sit back and listen to a recording and fully make sense of it on one pass – though letting it wash over you with its sheer scale is certainly one way to experience it – but you can plot your way through a performance in a number of ways. There’s a choose-your-own-adventure aspect to it. Density or misdirection or confusion are useful ideas to me. Another really important piece to me is Josquin’s “Qui Habitat”, which is made out of four six-part canons which go on at the same time. You can’t necessarily perceive that as you listen, although you might guess that something canonic is going on: it takes repeated listenings, if not a study of the score, to hear the precise details. Like the Genome, it can be experienced as a single, all-enveloping sound mass, but nevertheless has a great sense of integrity due to its construction. Things like that were very influential to my thinking when I started to look at writing for that large ensemble of improvisers and contemporary classical musicians like the Riot Ensemble, who played on Togetherness Music.
“More and more I find musicians are comfortable with the rigors of contemporary classical music and improvising, whereas before improvisers – of course with the caveat of a number of outstanding exceptions – may have been sympathetic to contemporary classical music but they found the rigors too daunting. And vice versa. There’s a generation of musicians now that just don’t care. They are genre-blind.”
Although Hawkins’ explorations have been increasingly outbound over the past decade, he still has a deft touch with infectious grooves and ear-caressing melody. There are fine examples of both on 2021’s Break a Vase by his Mirror Canon ensemble. The album’s name – and that of his highly recommended podcast’s – is taken from a Derek Walcott poem: “Break a vase, and the love/that reassembles the fragments/is stronger than the love/which took its symmetry for granted/when it was whole.” The dual carburetor-like percussion tandem of Stephen Davis and Richard Olátúndé Baker deserve credit for fueling rhythmically infectious compositions like “Stamped Down or Shovelled” and “Stride Rhyme Gospel” (both feature commanding tenor solos from Shabaka Hutchings), while Hawkins three solo pieces are carefully etched miniatures gleaming with melodic kernels suggestive of Billy Strayhorn and Erik Satie.
The same assessment can be made of Carnival Celestial, the 2022 offering by Hawkins’ trio with Davis and Neil Charles, stalwarts of both Hawkins’ varied ensemble projects and section mates with the pianist in Anthony Braxton’s standards quartet. They impressively summate the issues facing the jazz piano trio as the first quarter of the 21st Century winds down: renovating conventions while maintaining their essences; avoiding trendy makeovers that will themselves become dated, if not moribund; and asserting free agency while acknowledging a pantheon’s worth of trios. He repurposes compositional methods like fugue, canon, and counterpoint, as well as Baroque dance forms like the sarabande; but instead of cramming his materials into a rigid mold, he allows to them to flow where they will, occasionally aided by an undercurrent of sample-sourced color. Subsequently, the album is teeming with sinuous melodies and gently prodding rhythms, including a loping calypso groove. In doing so, Hawkins has created a fresh space for an old format.
For both Break a Vase and Carnival Celestial, Hawkins “set out to do something really rigorous but with a light touch, in that the music was often more explicitly groove based than before, rhythmic, even danceable in places. I like the collision of vernacular ideas with very cerebral ideas. That’s what I like about Prime Time and Henry Threadgill’s projects. I started with a compositional idea rather than the idea of personnel. Both records reflect a sea change that was going on, and I wanted to get these ideas out there so that I could really understand where I was going, and then push forward.”