Alexander Hawkins
At Earth School
*300 copies limited edition*
Recorded live 2nd October 2022 at Café OTO, London by Pedro SubtilMixed December 2022 by Alex BonneyMastered by Mikey Young
All compositions by Nicole Mitchell (Wheatgoddess Creations ASCAP) and Alexander Hawkins (PRS), except "There is a Balm in Gilead" (traditional, arr. Mitchell/Hawkins)
What Else Is There
In late winter of 2021, four improvisers convened in a Chicago studio. This rare event united UK pianist Alexander Hawkins, midwestern bassist Tatsu Aoki, stalwart drummer Michael Zerang, and me, sleepless Oakland guitarist Karl Evangelista (who had arrived in O'Hare mere hours before downbeat). During breaks, the conversation turned to music and family, two threads that seemed to dominate the waking lives of the musicians involved. Pondering this notion, Aoki asked, "What else is there?". "What…
Keep Your Heart Straight
It was May 2009 when I first heard Alexander Hawkins play at the Vortex Jazz Club, with the Anthony Braxton s cornet-playing protégé Taylor Ho Bynum, bassist Dominic Lash and drummer Harris Eisenstadt in the Convergence Quartet. The music was an idiomatic white-knuckle ride, and all the players were variously fascinating but the then 28 year-old Hawkins was a revelation, for the audacity of his ideas, the depth of his understanding of both thematic and free-form musics, and for his Cecil Taylor-…
Apura!
It is intended with the utmost respect that this album is entitled Apura!, which in the Filipino language Tagalog translates to “Very Urgent” (the name of an epochal record by the Blue Notes, the pioneering South African jazz sextet of which drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo was the heartbeat). The musicians of Louis and Trevor Watts’s generation cast a tremendous shadow over the legacy of improvised music. It’s not difficult to romanticize the era in which these musicians first made their marks, exer…
Live at Cafe OTO
** Edition of 200 copies ** Istanbul-based free music ensemble Konstrukt perform alongside special guest Alexander Hawkins building the perfect groove in a sweaty Cafe Oto on August 10th 2015. Two sets from the same night, each a 40 minute long improvisation. First set is a psychedelic warm-up where the Turkish quartet welcomes Hawkins in a whirlwind of hypnotic funky tunes going electric in the Miles Davis way. The second set starts with Hawkins piano keys bouncing along a silent background soo…