Home » Jazz Articles » Interview » Alexander Hawkins: Retaining The Sense of Discovery
Alexander Hawkins: Retaining The Sense of Discovery
Art Tatum
piano1909 - 1956
Anthony Braxton
woodwindsb.1945
Cecil Taylor
piano1929 - 2018
But he's a thrilling improviser on not just piano but also the Hammond organ, even when in completely spontaneous territory, as amply demonstrated on the wonderful collaboration between the organ trio Decoy and trumpeter
Joe McPhee
woodwindsb.1939
Wadada Leo Smith
trumpetb.1941
Taylor Ho Bynum
cornetb.1975
Evan Parker
saxophone, sopranob.1944
Marshall Allen
saxophone, altob.1924
Sonny Simmons
saxophone, alto1933 - 2021
Louis Moholo-Moholo
drums1940 - 2025
Harris Eisenstadt
drums
Mulatu Astatke
percussionOf late, there's a sense that his career has stepped up a gear in terms of activity and output. Given that his encyclopedic knowledge of the whole spectrum of jazz and creative music is allied to formidable articulateness, it's no surprise to find the pianist enjoying an increasing profile as a broadcaster on BBC Radio while, together with vibraphonist
Corey Mwamba
vibraphoneChapter Index
Beginnings
Piano Heroes
Sounds of the '70s
Working Bands
Inspirations and Reference Points
Compositional Underpinnings
Beginnings
All About Jazz: So, a bit of background first. When and where were you born?
Alexander Hawkins: Oxford, in 1981. Apart from six years, three years of undergraduate study and three years of Ph.D., I've always lived in Oxford. During that six years I was in Cambridge, in fact, hence the Cambridge connection. [Hawkins often plays in Cambridge when on tour.]
AAJ: Do you come from a musical family?
AH: Yes, in the sense that it is very much a music- loving household. My Dad did play decent piano and clarinet, and also has a C-melody saxophone, which is a bit of a rarity. He's a real music lover. Right back from when he was a student, he would go and see Ellington whenever they were in the country. So I've got some good photos of him backstage with Duke. He's been listening forever. So I grew up listening to music at home, and actually one of my Dad's great loves is Ellington. And because he actually likes the very early Ellington, I sort of did jazz chronologically in the sense that the first music I was exposed to was the 1924 Ellington band, and I worked my way forward from there.
AAJ: At what point did you start playing jazz?
AH: That's a slightly tougher one to pinpoint. I initially started playing classical piano, and in fact as a classical musician I was a much better organist than I was pianist. I had no particular technique to speak of, in the classical sense, on the piano. So in terms of studying, I was playing classical music. I probably didn't start playing jazz, or trying to, until I was maybe 14, 15, 16. I really wasn't very good. I'm trying to think when I would have done my first gigs. It was probably at about 16, going out with friends doing standards gigs in local pubs, but they were very much fumbling efforts. I took it up in a much more concerted fashion later. I really liked playing the organ, but I loved the piano, and I wanted to play music in this idealistic way: I wanted to make music my living. And so I thought for that to be the case, I needed to put a lot more time into the piano. So one day when I was 18, I never played the organ again. I was doing a lot of practice each day on the organ. I was playing it quite seriously, and then one day I just didn't play the organ again.
AAJ: Was that church organ?
AH: Yeah. And one of the problems I had with it was that some of the repertoire is fantastic. I loved Bach—I still do—and Messiaen and lots of the French composers I loved, but there was an awful lot that I really wasn't that into. But what that did expose me to was different schools of improvisation. The French organ tradition is mind boggling when it comes to improvisation.
AAJ: Who are you thinking of there?
AH: Well, recordings of musicians like [organist] Daniel Roth, who's at Saint-Sulpice [church in Paris], which is the organ where [organist/composer Marcel] Dupré was. Charles Tournémire. There's this whole tradition of training the organists in the French conservatoires to become, ideally, extremely disciplined improvisers in a variety of forms. [Guitarist]
Derek Bailey
guitar1932 - 2005
AAJ: You did a law degree and a Ph.D. in criminology, so you seemed set on one career path, but at the same time you were thinking that you would love to make a living as a musician. Was that a difficult decision?
AH: No, not at all, actually. Law degrees are often just a means to an end, but perversely I did it and the Ph.D. because I was interested in it. I never toyed with the idea of doing law as a career. And I think I was also fairly bloody-minded in that I didn't want to study jazz. Part of that was a slightly naive line of reasoning. I thought, "None of my heroes have [studied jazz institutionally], so I'm going to figure it out for myself the same." That's kind of crazy, but that schooled sound was not something I was interested in. I know there are a few more far-sighted courses, and if you were able to study with [saxophonist/composer] Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan [University in Connecticut] or [saxophonist/composer] 
Roscoe Mitchell
saxophoneb.1940
AAJ: That's interesting because many of the most distinctive sounds are from people who haven't been through that educated route. You talk about bloody-mindedness. Is it actually more difficult to find your own way?
AH: I was lucky because I had studied the piano and the organ conventionally. So from the point of view of having a technique, I had a facility on the instrument whereby I could play my ideas. So that wasn't something I that I needed to develop quite so much—because of course there are technical things that you need to be able to do on your instrument just to be able to realize your ideas. Of course, every so often there are people who come along who do find a totally idiosyncratic way around the instrument. But in terms of actually learning to improvise, the most useful thing is understanding the tradition, the past voices, in order that you don't sound like them.
There's a really fascinating [saxophonist/composer]
Henry Threadgill
woodwindsb.1944
Bud Powell
piano1924 - 1966
Andrew Hill
piano1931 - 2007
Jaki Byard
piano1922 - 1999
So what not studying probably means is that there are certain technical skills I'm probably deficient in. I'm not a massive walking library of standard tunes. I have a working knowledge of a number, I guess, but I couldn't sit and play those in any key just off the top of my head, for example. But learning or developing a musical voice is developing the facility to play the music you want to play. And given that playing the standard repertoire night after night is not what I'm interested in doing, though I love it very much, it doesn't strike me that that was something that I needed to do.
So the education is an interesting thing, but I really have problems with the very didactic way of: if you have this chord then you play this scale. It just doesn't make sense. No, you don't play that scale, you play the sound you want to play. I can also see that if you are a session musician, you want to be able to reproduce a certain sound. No problem, but that's not improvising. That's the product of repertory music. So, in a very real sense, I think that a lot of music from that tradition is not improvised; it's different permutations of learnt rules.
Piano Heroes
AAJ: You mentioned some pianists you love there, so who are the most prominent pianists in your pantheon? And given what you've said about not wanting to reproduce them, what have you taken from them?
AH: My real hero, my first love, is Art Tatum. I find it very difficult to extract technically what the influence of certain people has been, because for sure there are a lot of things I could pinpoint in Tatum's playing that I absolutely love. His harmonic sense is just extraordinary, and for me he really incorporates virtuosity in a non-self- conscious way, presaging Cecil Taylor more than anyone else, I think. I love his time feel. I actually love his way with a melody. But if I think why do I love Tatum, it's not because of those technical things—that's not how I listen to the music, generally; I just like how it sounds. And with all these guys, I'm inspired by the fact that they sounded like themselves and no one else. I love their music, and that inspires me to do my own music rather than to do theirs. So Tatum would be the main guy for me.
I remember my dad having a tape of a half-hour BBC program about Tatum, and in introducing Tatum that mentioned
Earl Hines
piano1903 - 1983
Fats Waller
piano1904 - 1943
Teddy Wilson
piano1912 - 1986
Meade Lux Lewis
piano1905 - 1964
Albert Ammons
piano1907 - 1949
Pete Johnson
piano1904 - 1967
Elmo Hope
piano1923 - 1967
Herbie Nichols
piano1919 - 1963
Dick Twardzik
piano1931 - 1955
Max Roach
drums1925 - 2007
AAJ: That's the only record he made, isn't it?
AH: I think there was a quartet record with [saxophonist]
Odean Pope
saxophoneb.1938
AAJ: But you knew there was something there that was worth pursuing?
AH: Absolutely. For example, one guy who I didn't mention: Ellington. If he'd never ever gone near a big band, he would still be thought one of the great pianists. And listening to Cecil, I could very, very immediately hear Ellington in the touch, in the way he would voice certain things, and Tatum in the sweep, the architectural aspect of his playing. Then more recently, someone like
Marilyn Crispell
pianob.1947
And then looking for other contemporary ways with my influences, I very soon arrived at
Muhal Richard Abrams
piano1930 - 2017
Don Pullen
piano1941 - 1995
Horace Tapscott
piano1934 - 1999
Chris McGregor
b.1936AAJ: But in the ether rather than in the particular?
AH: I think so. It's an interesting thing, these streams of influence, because for sure I could probably take any one of my recordings and say, "Ah, that owes a stylistic debt to so-and-so," but because I've very single mindedly never transcribed anybody and always studiously avoided thinking I'm going to do an
Irene Schweizer
pianob.1941
Hampton Hawes
piano1928 - 1977
Oscar Peterson
piano1925 - 2007
So I think it goes back to what I was saying about Tatum; the real inspiration is that I like the sound. Obliquely, I can adopt certain rhythmic things from Cecil's playing and certain harmonic things that Muhal will do and
Sun Ra
piano1914 - 1993
Sounds of the '70s
AAJ: In talking there, you have demonstrated a prodigious knowledge both of the jazz canon and the 1970s avant- garde, a very neglected period in some ways. You have featured compositions by Anthony Braxton, [saxophonist]
Arthur Blythe
saxophone, alto1940 - 2017
Leroy Jenkins
bass, electric1932 - 2007
Oliver Lake
saxophoneb.1942
AH: One of the answers to this is really quite unambitious. I love standard tunes, I love Monk's tunes, and I love Bud Powell's tunes, and so on. But they've been done so brilliantly by so many masters that I'm scared of them, in a way. I don't have a problem with playing other people's music. There seems to be a real vogue for only playing your own music because that's the only way to be innovative. But these seams in the '70s are relatively quite unmined, and I think there's a lot further to go with that repertoire than there is with Monk, in terms of people giving hackneyed interpretations. For sure, Braxton wrote some such-brilliant tunes that if people play them as much as they play "Stella By Starlight," there would soon become hackneyed ways to play them. And likewise, another composer, Leroy Jenkins—I love his writing. It's so distinctive, and for sure you could develop hackneyed ways around them, but for me it's such a rich seam because there's not this anxiety of influence when I play them. If I play "Stella By Starlight," I'm very conscious of all the people who played it so much better, whereas with this repertoire there's not that baggage.
But then also, for me compositionally, I feel that jazz composition (or perhaps we need to call it creative music to illustrate the point) has evolved to such a point that the head-solos-head format is old news. It's still a great one if you use it as one option among many. But what interests me about that period is that those are some masters who are showing interesting ways with structure. One way to create an interesting language: there's the micro level of the notes you play and in what order but also the macro-level language of what structure you're using, how you're deploying people. And for me those composers show really fascinating ways forward with that material. But also some of them are just great tunes, for example the Sun Ra tunes that I love to play from that time—on the Ensemble record [No Now Is So... (FMR, 2009)] we did "Love From Outer Space," which is basically just a vamp tune on one chord—are not structurally innovative but just great tunes. Actually, of the Sun Ra tunes I've been playing recently, I've been playing "Fate In A Pleasant Mood" a lot recently, and it's the same, really, an AABA, very tonal tune. It's got a wonky bridge, but I just love it because it's a great tune. So there is a variety of things that draw me to these composers.
Working Bands
AAJ: You have three main outlets for your energies: the latest version of your Ensemble, Decoy (sometimes with Joe McPhee) and the Convergence Quartet. Could you talk about each of them and what opportunities they give you?
AH: So the Ensemble is my thing as a bandleader. That changes the dynamic immediately because I introduce all the repertoire. One of the problems with improvised music—in the caricature of it as a socialist music where no one's allowed to solo, as that's bourgeois—I don't buy into. For me, the AACM did freedom the right way, as freedom to do something. In the same way, I'm happy to do head-solos-head; soloing is one option I like as well. So as a bandleader giving people material, I don't regard this as some great gesture of hegemony on my part. But for me, with Ellington being, along with Tatum, my other great hero, that's the perfect model. You can impose your compositional voice but still allow the musicians completely free rein to do what they want to do. And after all, putting together the group is the first compositional decision. That is also true, I think, of a free- improvised group. If you were to draw people out of a hat, you could minimize that, but really all free-improvised groups involve compositional decisions.
So my Ensemble is a vehicle for me to explore my compositional ideas. As a bandleader, you are able to steer a group dynamic in an interesting way. The older version of the group was concerned with crowding the same range, the same tessituras of the lower mids, with cello, double bass, guitar, steel pan or marimba—crowding that area with radically different tone colors. Unfortunately, that had to move on just because of geographical relocation. So then I thought, "How am I going to replace it?" What I didn't want to do, because I believe where possible in writing the parts for the player rather than the instrument, was sub people in for the musicians I was losing, so I thought, "Start again." And then I was reflecting, "Now among my peers, a quirky instrumentation is no longer quirky as everyone's doing it, so what I really want is a piano- bass-drums thing, and I want some front-line horns, and I want to do something with a conventional group. So I had piano, bass, drums, guitar and bass clarinet as it was.
We did a gig like that, and I thought it could use one more voice, so I added
Dylan Bates
violin
Steve Lacy
saxophone, soprano1934 - 2004
The Convergence Quartet is my longest-running concern. That was the first profile band I had together.
AAJ: What an amazing way to start.
AH: Yes, that was fantastic because Dom [Lash] and I were living in Oxford, and we would walk two miles every Monday night for ages with Dom carrying his bass—I was walking, he was pushing his bass as well—up a really steep hill to these rehearsals, and we would talk about everything. It was to a free-improvisation playing session that we would walk, and we were saying it would be really fun to play something compositional. At that time, we had both just been to what turned into Quintet (London) 2004 (Leo, 2005) with the Braxton group at the Royal Festival Hall.
AAJ: It was fantastic.
AH: It was unbelievable. And Taylor Ho Bynum on cornet just absolutely blew me away. I'd been listening to Braxton before then as well, but immediately when I heard him, having heard all the early Ellington trumpeters I'd grown up listening to, that was a moment when it all clarified for me. I could totally see how it could all be made to gel into a language. So I said something to Dom as we were thinking of putting something together: "Wouldn't it be really great to play with Taylor?" And a couple of years before, when I was away in Cambridge, [drummer] Harris Eisenstadt had been touring with Macbeth, and [reedman]
Vinny Golia
woodwindsb.1946
I happened to be on holiday in New York a couple of months after that and managed to see the Cecil Taylor Big Band at the Iridium, in which Taylor plays. So I chatted with Taylor, gave him a CD and said it would be really fun if we could hook something up. He was up for it. Dom talked to Harris, and then we made that happen. Now we've done three tours and each time documented the music we've made with different releases. The first one was exciting for me because I was just chuffed to play with those three, and probably they dragged me up by my bootstraps a little bit. I punched above my weight, maybe. And then by the second one, I felt I was beginning to get my stuff together a little bit more, and I felt we made some really interesting music on the thing that became Song/Dance (Clean Feed, 2010). I was really proud of that release, and then this last time round, I think we all felt it on the tour, that we really began to develop a group identity. We were all really, really enthused by the music, and so there's a forthcoming release on the No Business label in 2013. It's only an occasional group—these US/UK things can only be that way—so that's something that I would really like to keep simmering on for as long as everyone's into it, which we all are.
But I love that because it's very much a collective. We all contribute equal numbers of compositions, so that's a thrill because we all have an input as interpreters. We have a couple of working norms, which is that if we can't decide how to do something, the composer has the final say. But that's a really exciting dynamic to work in because it's different from being a bandleader—you rehearse the band in a different way. It goes to other compositional areas than we would normally go.
It's an interesting group size as well, because I hadn't thought of it in this way before, but as leaders we work with slightly larger ensembles where you can make a lot more stuff happen. Dom is a slightly different case because, as a bassist, he works in a lot more contexts and slightly less as a bandleader. But it's great if you want lots of concurrent events: if you have a sextet, you can get two people doing that, two people doing something else and so on. A quartet is a really nice number, but you have got to be really careful about getting people doing totally different stuff because it is that much more exposed. But then, by the same token, if you really want to pull everyone together on the same page, it's great from that aspect.
Then Decoy is another collective group which was really initiated by [drummer]
Steve Noble
drumsb.1960
Jimmy Smith
organ, Hammond B31925 - 2005
Big John Patton
organ, Hammond B31935 - 2002
Freddie Roach
b.1931
Larry Young
organ, Hammond B31940 - 1978
Reuben Wilson
organ, Hammond B3b.1935
Jimmy McGriff
organ, Hammond B31936 - 2008
AAJ: He was doing a two-night residency at Cafe Oto with different groups.
AH: That's right. So on one night he worked with N.E.W. with Steve Noble, [bassist]
John Edwards
bass, acoustic
Alex Ward
multi-instrumentalistb.1974
One of the amazing things about them as a rhythm section is that you can either do free improv and have no hierarchical relationship, but they also enjoy the role of being a bassist and a drummer. Because that's more freedom, it's another option, because if they can sit on a groove, that's increasing everyone's options, and it's just another exciting dynamic the music can have. A really interesting side note to Decoy is that we had a couple of things in Europe earlier in the year. We did one with Joe, but Joe couldn't do the second, which was a big Sun Ra festival, so we did it with [reedman and leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra] Marshall Allen, which was different again, but unbelievable. Marshall was just incredible. I mean, so inspiring, and to get completely schooled by somebody not quite three times my age was unbelievable: the stamina of the guy and the flow of musical ideas, and just somebody with such a disarming love of making noise—I mean, melodic or not. He took just so much joy in making music; you can't not be into that. That was really interesting and something we would all like to do again.
AAJ: Was that recorded?
AH: Not properly. I think it was probably bootlegged. There's some YouTube footage. It was this curious festival where we did a set at sunset and a set at sunrise. It was a Sun Ra festival. Basically, there were four nights. Four bands played at sunrise and sunset. And when the bands weren't playing, they would DJ as many of the complete works of Sun Ra as they could possibly find on vinyl, which was a lot, and basically music only stopped when people passed out, whether through tiredness or whatever. The clip on YouTube starts rather bizarrely because it was the morning one, and there was this incredible dawn chorus. The birds were unbelievable. So we were just playing along, all wearing our overcoats because even though it was in summer it was still a bit chilly. The music just began, beautifully but slowly, and I think that is the only bit that exists in an accessible state, which is a shame, as later on in the set it got into some fantastic places. So we would love to make that happen again. It was fun because the baggage of playing organ with Marshall Allen is big [laughs]. But it was fun.
Inspirations and Reference Points
AAJ: Your composition notes for the Ensemble's session broadcast on BBC Jazz On Three were illuminating and reveal a huge range of inspiration and reference points from across the jazz tradition from
Duke Ellington
piano1899 - 1974
AH: Not in the sense that we could draw them as points on a line, but we could draw them as points on a web or a curve. So yes, but only in the sense that it is a continuum of creative music, in the sense of the tradition being innovation rather than sounding like the last guy. From where I come, because I learnt jazz chronologically, when you listen to Threadgill with the Sextet, you do hear Ellington, and I hear the very early stuff in [Threadgill's 1990s band] Very Very Circus. But then, for example, if I had come to Threadgill's music as a funk fan who was listening to the guys who went on to form the Jazz Warriors and did the tour with Threadgill, from that direction, maybe I wouldn't hear that particular jazz part of the continuum so explicitly. The pool of influence is so broad that it depends on your vantage point as to whether you see it as a continuum.
AAJ: Many of the people you have talked about are predominantly African-American, so where does the European free jazz and free improvisation fit into it all?
AH: On that day when I never practiced the organ again and thought, "Right, I'm going to concentrate on jazz," that was very adjacent to me starting at University. Cambridge has a fantastic music scene but for certain types of things. At that time, it was virtually barren as far as jazz went. So basically, my time was spent practicing and listening and because I did things chronologically ... I went from Tatum to Powell to Cecil, and for me I was very focused at that time, and it was the American musicians I was listening to, mostly. And then when I came out of Cambridge and was looking for like-minded people to play with ... I did one thing at Cambridge, actually with Alex Ward who I met for the first time, and we got talking about his history with Derek Bailey, so there was a way in there ... but when I went back to Oxford and started going to these regular playing sessions with
Dominic Lash
bass, acousticb.1980
Barry Guy
bass, acousticb.1947
Pat Thomas
pianob.1960
Interestingly, when I was looking for people to play what I was thinking, in my mind was jazz at that time; the free improvisers seemed to be the natural choice because those were the ideas I was hearing. It struck me that the jazz that my peers who had been through music college were playing—and of course this is generalizing—I wasn't hearing it as jazz. It was repertory music. So for me, the people who were playing the music which held the thrill that I had grown up listening to in jazz were these free improvisers. So I began to play more with these people. Of course, there are certain exceptions to this. So I was listening to the South Africans before this time and [saxophonist]
Lol Coxhill
saxophone, sopranob.1932
Roscoe Mitchell
saxophoneb.1940
Just in terms of my listening and my own proclivities, obviously there is so much cross-fertilization now. We are having this conversation now. We might bump into each other later at the [saxophonist Peter] Br?tzmann Tentet. Is that a European band or an American band? It doesn't matter anymore, either. It's difficult to tell, but if I were to look at my record collection it would largely be American-based music. That's just an aesthetic preference on my part. I love the music from all over, but what I've spent the most time with happens to have been the American music. Because I got into the European scene thinking it was jazz and not realizing there was this whole debate about whether it was jazz or not, because in my mind it sounded like it was, then I've never found it necessary to negotiate this dichotomy. It was only later when I realized that people wasted lots of time debating whether it was jazz or not.
AAJ: It has become an increasingly sterile debate because the cross-fertilization is such that you can no longer pull it apart.
AH: Definitely. When I listen to those [saxophonist]
Steve Lacy
saxophone, soprano1934 - 2004
Derek Bailey
guitar1932 - 2005
Sonny Rollins
saxophoneb.1930
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Alexander Hawkins
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