Alexander Hawkins

Not sure about the Charing Cross Road one, not being a Londoner, but there are still Waterstones around (e.g. here in Oxford)!

Oh wow - Paul on bagpipes is really magical. He's doing a duo in London this evening with Tony Bianco - a 'Trane tribute - that I'd have loved to get to...Paul's one of the few guys around I'm interested in hearing do that sort of thing!

For anyone who hasn't seen it, this is priceless, with a great deal of footage of the Lyons/Silva/Cyrille band too...

Wow - that's too long! So did the tour as Mujician minus Keith?

Barry and Paul are pretty infrequent visitors to these shores unfortunately...but John is very much a regular. By the way - I concur - John in an absolute monster. A real master.

Don't worry...they're safe...strictly for show Thanks so much for the kind comments about the Convergence Quartet! I love that band...looking forward to a short tour later in the year! I'm afraid the Babel releases are going to be CD only. But I completely agree with you about their vinyl, which I think is really nicely produced...maybe I'll have to discuss the next thing with them Thanks Bev!

Hans Reichl's work as a font designer was pretty fantastic...this website is well worth a look.

Thanks for the heads-up. One of the best gigs I have ever been to, honestly...LP will be special!

Wow - what a great piece - thanks!

Peter's an incredible musician. I really love this record on Clean Feed - fantastically imaginative reworkings of some standards, in effect. Often what really gets me about his playing is the exuberance - sort of the same buzz as with some Freddie Hubbard/Johnn Griffin etc...you just hear the joy of *really* playing hard!

I did. Attended a couple of very enjoyable concerts in Silk Hall - a string orchestra that opened my ears to Alwyn's Sinfonietta for Strings and a marvellous quartet/quintet concert doing Britten/Ireland/Elgar. I prefer the concerts there as you have good sight lines whereas in the Abbey the orchestra is crushed at the end. The only disappointment was the new commissions concert in the Abbey where the new commissions were very tame. You need to organise an equivalent to Evan Parker's Freezone at the old Appleby there, Alex! Might bring the average age of attendance below 80! Looking forward to the solo record. Interesting - to be completely honest, I'm not sure I even knew the Alwyn existed! Yes, the sight lines in that space are fantastic - and I always think the sound is particular kind to strings...a shame I was away for most of the weekend. Actually - that's not a bad thought about trying to organise a Freezone-type thing...I may drop them a line...it being my home turf, I'm sure I can scare up a contact address from somewhere!

Will be great to see you!!! I can't wait for this one...Louis was on simply awesome form last month when we did a few things... BTW - did you happen to catch any of the EMF this last weekend?

If anyone's interested, here's at a festival last month, featuring a number of Blue Notes/Brotherhood-related tunes... Psyched to hear Procession for the first time...a real rarity in being 1) Brotherhood with Dyani; and 2) Brotherhood playing 'You Ain't Gonna Know Me...'

Yeah!!!...Sonny and Louis would be no joke...phew.......

Thank you

Actually - while I think of it - this recent one with Joe McPhee, and me playing Hammond, may be appropriate for this thread..!

Ah - I wish (Paris tomorrow...that's as French influenced as I'm scheduled just now!)

If anyone's interested, a new one from The Convergence Quartet is still warm from the presses! It's here, from NoBusiness - unless anyone fancies picking one up from me at a gig sometime soon..

Wow - thanks for checking it out, Bev!

They were on pretty glorious form in London a couple of months back - a concert the BBC recorded. It's available to listen again for this week only, in fact: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rl306. Plus - Misha was on board!

Ah wow, I'm flattered! We had a lovely night at Oto, actually...was a lot of fun...somewhat stressful, as due to an accident on the motorway, we completely missed a final rehearsal of the piece, and only had time for a 20-minute talk through before we hit...however - the 'terrible sound check, great gig' principle rode to our rescue! The Beeb were fantastic actually - I was set no parameters at all, apart from a rough guideline as the length of the piece. However, the more I thought about it, the less there was any need to contrive influence, because I realised there were so many parallels between the genres (whether conscious or not)...I did actually write some quite extensive notes for the session here where I try to go into a few of the ideas I was working with...but ideas of dance, repetitive structures, counterpoint, and so forth all fed into it. Plus, Ellington is where my heart is, so 'The Hot Bach' was also an important organising principle for me!

The costs are fairly prohibitive...although I hope it may be possible to do it somehow...I don't know, it's tricky though. The issue with larger ensembles is also rehearsal time...that many people together for a few days is logistically unfortunately never straightforward. But - I certainly hope there might be a way!

Thanks so much! It should be very soon - as in, within a couple of weeks...I must confess, I don't have the precise release date, but I'll post here to confirm when I know for sure. At any rate: it's coming on NoBusiness Records...and was recorded live at the London Jazz Festival in 2011!

Thanks for the interest! This is all new music...the parameter I set myself was that I wouldn't use anyone from my current working bands, in order to help try to make something distinctive from my sextet writing. I suppose it's true to say that there are a couple of structural models at various places which I've played around with with other groups - but substantively, it's all new material! As for the instrumentation/arrangement - personally, I only use software for presentation/legibility purposes...I always work in manuscript first; usually, although not exclusively after working at the keyboard). I never use software compositionally - I suppose one small exception being that if there's a passage which I just can't play at the keyboard (e.g. too many lines/too many rhythmic layers), then I may listen to it after scoring it out on the computer...but for me, there's a risk with composing at the computer that you 'do' because you 'can'. Also, I'm sufficiently basic with my software that the built-in sounds are fairly awful, so you can't really get the sense of what instrumental blends sound like. For me, I have these in my head, with reference points being recordings I know, or scores of works I know, etc. For example, there's a passage which floors me in the latest Threadgill/Zooid, where the bass flute and trombone are in unison, and make a wonderful sound...so this was a guide for me in a passage in the last movement of this piece, where I paired alto flute/euphonium. The other thing I'd say about software is that it's tyranically accurate, in terms of tuning and rhythm. I suppose it's obvious that living, breathing musicians inflect things, pull them around, get them slightly wrong even - but the more I hear computers, the more I realise how indispensable this is to the performance!

For anyone interested, I was recently commissioned to write a 50-minute work by the BBC, as part of their 'Baroque Season'. It's being broadcast for the first time tomorrow evening on Jazz on 3 - would love for you to check it out if time! And of course, it'll be on the iPlayer for the next week... Anyway, although there are only 8 musicians on stage, there are a lot of 'doublers', so it really I think feels like large ensemble music...so it's something of a rare foray for me... The band: Peter Evans - trumpet Percy Pursglove - trumpet/double bass Byron Wallen - flute/euphonium Oren Marshall - tuba Pete McPhail - flute/alto flute/sopranino/alto/baritone saxophones Chris Cundy - bass clarinet/contrabass clarinet Hannah Marshall - 'cello Mark Sanders - drums/percussion