Another wonderfully ambitious and superbly executed album from pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins, with nods to Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill and even Johann Sebastian Bach, expanding his core trio of bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis with saxophonist & clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings, guitarist Otto Fischer and drummer Richard Olatunde Baker.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2022 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold 3 Panels w/ booklet Recorded at Challow Park Studios, in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, on July 27th and 28th, 2021, by Will Biggs.
"After the album Togetherness Music, British pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins presents another musical panorama: An ensemble in which his trio with bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis meets saxophonist and clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings, guitarist Otto Fischer, and drummer Richard Olatunde Baker.
For anybody who has followed Hawkins's work since his emergence on the British improvised music scene in the mid 2000's this is a fresh band full of familiar musicians with whom Hawkins has played in a wide variety of formations. The new pieces Break A Vase presents emerge from Hawkins' own imagination, but they also capture the thrust of energy in collaborating with these outstanding musicians.
"Hawkins gives one of his most complete performances to date," writes Kevin Le Gendre in the liner notes. "Nothing is perhaps more majestic than the title track, which comes from Derek Walcott's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize:
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took it's symmetry for granted when it was whole.
Enjoy then all these wily bits and pieces that come together in the kind of daring, courageous construction that is made to last."-Intakt
"Pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins sequences the ten tracks of Break A Vase in a seemingly counterintuitive manner. The title track, which is taken from West Indian poet Derek Walcott's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, is not heard until track six; it is a solo piano performance which emulates Walcott's words, "Break A Vase, and the love that re assembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole." Hawkins' solo performance on grand piano with serrated bits of staticky samples urges concentration on his assembly rather than distraction. The brief track flows into a quartet performance of "Chaplin In Slow Motion" which is centered upon locomotion, both acceleration and deceleration.
Before we get to those two themes, Hawkins has constructed the container which he reduces to its constituent parts. This is indeed a branded Hawkins trait, evident in Togetherness Music (For Sixteen Musicians) (Intakt, 2021) and his past composing for The Convergence Quartet. He opens the disc with that same solo piano plus static before diving into "Stamped Down, Or Shovelled" with his trio, bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis, augmented by electric guitarist Otto Fischer, percussionist Richard Ol‡tœndŽ Baker, and saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. The composition's character is a salute to the music of Henry Threadgill with its quirky time signature and singular logic. Elsewhere, Hawkins weaves a complex DNA strand with "Generous Souls" not unlike the patterns one might hear in a Steve Lehman composition. He allows room for Hutchings to solo over the percussive turbulence here and with "Stride Rhyme Gospel." These compositions are the vase Walcott spoke of that gets smashed, only to come together to form a stronger whole."-Mark Corroto, All About Jazz