Alexander Hawkins Trio

'Sounds like all the future jazz you might imagine without ever being able to conceive of the details' - The Guardian Tracks 1 and 3 are extracted and adapted from a larger ensemble work, commissioned by the BBC in 2012, and first performed in February 2013. Tracks 4, 5, and6 were commissioned by the EFG London Jazz Festival, and performed in the 2013 edition of the Festival. From the liner notes by Richard Williams: 'A trio is the place where countless jazz pianists get their start, finding security in the armature provided by a bassist and a drummer and perhaps a sense of direction, too, from a long tradition that began in the music’s early days and continues to evolve in new directions. The extraordinarily gifted Alexander Hawkins, by contrast, waited before committing himself to a format so familiar as to represent, for a creative pianist, a considerable test of the imagination.
 
 Born in Oxford in 1981, Hawkins has been heard in many contexts, among them his own six-piece ensemble, the Ethiopian vibraphonist Mulatu Astatke’s band, the multinational Convergence Quartet, the three-piece Decoy (in which he plays Hammond organ), the quartets of the trumpeter Nick Malcolm, the drummer Steve Davis and the bassist Dominic Lash, as a solo pianist, and recently in duo, quartet and octet environments with Louis Moholo-Moholo. To encounter him at last in a trio (with the bassist Neil Charles and the drummer Tom Skinner) is like hearing the final element of a piece of machinery click into place.
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