With intricate interplay and textural passages, Chicago improvising cellist Tomeka Reid and UK pianist Alexander Hawkins present their first collaboration, an exciting set of rapid interchanges of pointillistic playing and introspective playfullness, 9 collective dialogs alongside Leroy Jenkin's piece for "Albert Ayler (His Life Was Too Short)".
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2020 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Jewel Case Recorded at Challow Park Studios, in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, on April 13th, 2019, by Will Biggs.
"Shards and Constellations presents duets with two remarkable musicians Tomeka Reid and Alexander Hawkins. Both have become creative epicenters in the jazz and improvisation scene in recent years with their original, versatile and innovative art. Reid has recorded extensively with many legendary artists from the AACM such as Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell as well as the next generation of AACM artists including Nicole Mitchell, Dee Alexander and Mike Reed.
Hawkins is a composer and pianist from the London jazz scene and is regarded in the UK as one of the most innovative musicians of the younger generation with a surprising radius of action. His work attempts to reconcile both his love of free improvisation and his infatuation with composition and structure.
Five of the compositions are collectively conceived with intricate textures and interplay. Two of the pieces feature works by two masters from the first generation of the AACM - Muhal Richard Abrams and Leroy Jenkins. "Shards and Constellations is asingular achievement exploring a broad spectrum of musical avenues from the lyrical to the pointillistic, from the angular to the serene. This adventurous music deserves to be heard," writes Anthony Davis in the liner notes."-Intakt
"The first recorded collaboration between British polymath pianist Alexander Hawkins and the versatile American cellist Tomeka Reid reveals a natural rapport that takes multiple shapes. Eight of the recording's ten tracks are free improvisations, most of them focusing on refined dialogues rife with extended techniques, subtle textural shifts and quicksilver responses. The opener 'If Becomes Is' finds Reid initially producing brittle, wandering pizz figures that gradually morph into an elusive rhythmic thrum in sync with Hawkins' patient organisation of pointillistic notes into fitful, cycling patterns. The pianist summons the sound of early free jazz piano on 'Danced Together', with a jagged left hand chordal runs intersected by the cellist's toggle of clean walking lines and dissonant, plucked note clusters. The duo seems to be of a single mind, together finding a pathway, whether abstract or linear, regardless of how far apart them might appear at the beginning of each piece, but that connection never opts for the glib or predictable. They also imaginatively essay a couple of tunes from the AACM songbook.-the lyrically yearning 'Peace On You' by Muhal Richard Abrams and the elegantly pastoral 'Albert Ayler (His Life Was Too Short)' by Leroy Jenkins-a repertoire of great importance for both musicians."-Peter Margasak, The Quietus