Essential Listening: Alexander Hawkins’ Desert Island Picks

Photo (c) Cristina Marx

By David Cristol

At festivals in Italy and Portugal in March and May of this year, I met and talked about music with Oxford pianist, organist, composer, bandleader and teacher Alexander Hawkins, who was premiering his new quintet and playing with Michael Formanek, Ricardo Toscano and Tim Berne. An avid record listener and fan, with tastes ranging from classical to global, soul, jazz and beyond, this passion led him to hosting the weekly radio program “Break a Vase” starting in 2023 (on mixcloud then reprised on the online radio station OneJazz), where he talks about favorite tracks selected for audiences to get acquainted with or revisit. Before he embarked on a series of dazzlingly diverse gigs in the US, from San Francisco to Ann Arbor, and then more shows in Europe, he agreed to browse through his shelves and extract seven discs that mean a lot to him, for any reason, be it influential pianism, production qualities, pure listening pleasure or composed works he finds baffling. 

Alexander Hawkins:

I love this type of interview where I get to choose records to talk about them because, ultimately, I’m a music fan as much as I am a musician. I think the two are part of the same thing. It’s also horribly difficult to talk about albums. Being asked to talk about albums is a little like free improvisation: it’s not as free as you might think; this is a different interview – but that’s one of the reasons why I personally steer clear of completely free improvisation in my own practice. The point is that the choices are so varied that there’s a bit of a brain freeze involved. And just like a compositional prompt helps me to be freer in a musical context, I almost like to impose parameters on myself when choosing records. So, for example in this selection I’m going to leave apart some albums which are simply part of my DNA, that I’ve known since I was so little that I just have a non-critical love relationship to them. If I were a robot, these would be pre-installed software. I’m thinking here of things like the Art Tatum trio album with Red Callender and Jo Jones, or the Tatum/Ben Webster record, or the Rex Stewart/Duke Ellington small group session from July 3, 1941 where they play Menelik (The Lion of Judah) and Poor Bubber... Albums like this I’ve known for so long that I just can’t think critically about them, although I love to talk about them. And then, I would love to talk about, you know, what about “five albums I don’t understand” , because that’s an interesting conversation too, or “don’t like but feel I somehow should” , or “ five favorite pianists” or “five albums by living musicians” . In the end what I’ve done this time around is just going to my shelves and pulled some things off because I understand that at some point I’m passionate about whatever I’m listening to, maybe even in a positive or negative way because I feel one of the things I’m getting better at is learning from music that I’m not into, you know, why is that? what do I learn about my musical identity from that fact? and so on. 

This first album I chose is the Smithsonian Folkways recording of the “Mbuti People of the Ituri Rainforest”. It’s this absolutely stunning polyphonic choral music which I suppose many people will be familiar with. It’s one of the recordings that was actually sent into space as an experience and example of culture to friendly aliens. And I love this music on a very surface level because it’s incredibly beautiful; it inspires me because it has a mysterious quality. I understand what is happening on a technical level, that it’s a music of yodeling and rapid transpositions, a music of hocketing, interlocking parts, and yet even knowing this, it has this mystery and elusiveness quality to it. I feel about these recordings much the same way I do about music of, for example, Bach: astonishing organization and almost because of this degree of order, a great degree of mystery to what’s going on, beautiful and endlessly inspiring, because I don’t quite get it to some level. There’s also by the way an incredible book written by Colin Turnbull, called “The Forest People”, and it was he who collected these recordings in Congo.

Second album comes from the classical section of the shelves. On a million occasions I have expressed my deep passion for Maurizio Pollini, a genius pianist who we sadly lost earlier in the year. What I love is that he has this absolute clarity of vision, refusal to compromise, lack of histrionics and a perfect simplicity to his playing. Well, the same is true of the pianist in this selection, which is Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli , one of my heroes on the instrument. One of the recordings I love is that on Deutsche Grammophon, of him playing the Chopin “Mazurkas” . I initially didn’t love Chopin because I have a block against romantic music, I loved the structuralists, Bach and XXth century musicians, and then I frankly got over myself because I realized there was a lot of weirdness and counterpoint and structure in romantic music. Chopin carried around a copy of Bach’s “Well-tempered Clavier” with him repeatedly, and you can hear it in the organization of a lot of his music. The Mazurkas are possibly my favorite among his pieces. They’re often very short, folk-influenced, and epigrammatic in a certain way. What’s beguiling to me about Chopin is that on a surface level it can be very beautiful and that can give it a sheen, a gloss that sometimes I don’t find attractive, and people like Pollini or in this case Michelangeli stripped that away. There is no prettiness, it’s in a sense an ugly beauty, to paraphrase Monk. One producer talked about Michelangeli having a baffling coldness to his playing, and that intrigues me, that coldness is almost like a white heat of interpretation, it goes so far, and it makes these pieces epigrammatic in a weird and stripped back way, and you then focus in on the materials and realize that some of them are deeply strange, very dark pieces. The Mazurka opus 68 n° 4, at the end bears the mark – well, not at the end, this is the point – da capo senza fine, it’s a conceptual piece before the event, it means go back to the top and just keep going ‘round, there is no end. It’s very odd, he’s out-Satied Satie, out- As Slow as Possible John Cage.

 Staying with the classical music, one of the record labels I collect is Supraphon. I love Czech music, am a Leoš Janáček junkie, and happily Supraphon made lots and lots of records and you can always find them very cheap. The Czech orchestras had an incredible sound, especially in the 1960s there was a very distinctive woodwind sound which is just perfect for the Czech repertoire. Janáček is a composer who I love because of his complete parcimony. He would repeat something doggedly without variation to hammer home the point, Roscoe Mitchell-style. There is no dressing up, no elaboration, it’s the pure distilled architecture of the music. And the album I have chosen is a Supraphon recording of “The Diary of One who Disappeared” , an extremely cryptic piece, a song cycle effectively. And it’s the version recorded in 1956 by Josef Páleníček on the piano and operatic tenor Beno Blachut and contralto Štěpánka Štěpánová. This music is an incredible mix of the extremes of expression. Janáček was a master of using the voice at its extremes to convey the emotions. Listen to the last song of this set, it’s a little like those moments where Curtis Mayfield disappears into the top of his falsetto, it’s got this expressionistic thing which is kind of reminiscent of Albert Ayler, and yet this same last song is basically constructed of three notes. It shows me how the music can be both extremely rigorous, cerebral and extremely expressionist or emotive. There is no distinction and there’s been this constant dichotomy in a lot of music criticism between the cerebral and the more heartfelt somehow. This distinction is not in my lexicon.

I mentioned Curtis Mayfield just then. How could anybody choose one Curtis Mayfield record? So, I’m torn. I would love to choose the album “Curtis” itself, a masterpiece of production. I’m obsessed with The Impressions; there’s one song called I loved and I lost [penned and produced by Mayfield on the “We’re a Winner” album] where I could write an essay about this one brass figure in the backing which I’m obsessed about. But forced to rescue one album from the flames, let me say “Curtis Live”, an amazing stripped back album played all there in the room. It’s like listening to Monk in a way, the economy of what’s going on. There’s not a single note which isn’t needed – apart from a bit of feedback on the recording which isn’t needed, but the economy of expression is incredible. The simplicity and directness with which Mayfield is able to convey things allied with his incredible subtlety and shading and inflection of every note. One of the things that people don’t talk about is that Curtis Mayfield is also one of the most incredible guitarists. There is an almost Brandon Ross-like ability to play the space as much as the sound. I love this record!

 Let me talk about Sonny Rollins. I am obsessed with Sonny Rollins, he pretty much fits into the musical DNA part of my listening alongside Tatum and Ellington and Parker and so on, but I feel I don’t talk about him as much as I would like to. So, I’m choosing “Volume 1” on Blue Note. It could have been any Rollins record frankly. Yes, even the ones from the 80s which people hate on a little bit, but I love them all almost unconditionally. Sonny Rollins is interesting to me conceptually when thinking about freedom in music, because you understand that freedom is related to your own sensitivities, proclivities, abilities. Nothing to me is more free than listening to Sonny Rollins play a million choruses on I got rhythm [actually Rollins’ composition Oleo based on chords from the Gershwin tune] . He has such facility that this endless flow of melody, you know when you listen to the Rollins recordings with Don Cherry at the Village Gate, it’s interesting because the so-called free improvisations kind of sound a little bit stilted to my ears, and the freest stuff is when he’s playing tunes. Other than conceptually, it’s his sound, we all have improvisers whom we feel are speaking to us, for me Rollins is that guy, he just plays and each note is at once the sound of surprise and of complete inevitability. His melodic/rhythmic flow, his humor, his kind of brawling sound quality is mind-blowing, but also, he can kill you with a ballad like How are things in Glocca Morra? on this record: classic Rollins, but not a tune that many people play.

I first heard Geri Allen when I was quite young and it would have been for sure on an album with Ornette Coleman. I loved it and I love almost anything she touches. But I discovered this interesting solo album, “Homegrown”[Minor Music, 1990], a little bit later. It was actually on one of those occasions when you hang around with friends and you’re blindfold-tested with something, and it was my friend Kaja Draksler, the incredible pianist, who played this record, and I did pick it was Geri. The album is like a Rosetta Stone, you hear it and suddenly you understand where basically almost anything that anyone is doing on the instrument today comes from. The music has a remarkable clarity of purpose and of concept in the way that Monk does, but also a – roughness is the wrong word with such accomplished playing but – a willingness to investigate the gritty spaces in between notes, the angular intervals, also a mix between this and the vernacular, you know, groove, she’s not afraid of groove, but also the ugly side of the music. You can tell about the way I’m not expressing myself massively clearly about this album the level with which I identify with it really. It’s difficult to articulate why but it’s magical. And it does provide an amazing way to understand what many contemporary pianists are doing. Geri was really prophetic in that sense.

Now let me pick one more record – Henry Threadgill’s “Too much sugar for a dime” [Axiom, 1993]. Threadgill is a musician whom these days I love unconditionally. Even when he does something that I’m unsure about, I’m so fascinated by it, I assume that it’s on me, that I don’t get something rather than he’s missed the target. When I first heard him, I didn’t get it. But it was magnetic, I was intrigued and gripped by it, partly because I’m gripped by music I don’t understand. I love to analyze and always try to understand music, and a certain point you get good at analyzing and understanding music, and when there’s something that I don’t get I’m intrigued because I want to know why. This is how it was when I first heard Threadgill, I think it was the Sextett and in it you can hear the legacy of small-group Ellington, you can hear Mingus in there, you can hear some of the harmonic language of Cecil Taylor ballad playing even, but I didn’t quite get what was going on. This sensation was only magnified when I came across the Very Very Circus group. On the one hand, it’s in-your-face and grooving like nothing else you ever heard, on the other hand there’s something otherworldly about the language, which you couldn’t mistake for anything else. There’s something distant and alien while at the same time it is urbane and banging, and this album bears this out. There’s a track featuring a Venezuelan percussionist where the Very Very Circus band is sort of spelled by this interlude of singing and traditional drumming, and it’s completely disorientating. You don’t really know how it works until the end of the song when the two elements come together quite brilliantly. I love musical puzzles that do that, that’s something that Bach and many other composers would do, it doesn’t make sense until the end when it’s glued together. And that is something which I love in a group like Ornette’s Prime Time, which I had a similar experience upon encountering that group as with Threadgill’s. On the one hand, I was attracted to it and intrigued, on the other hand I didn’t quite understand it, in spite of the fact it’s a mostly in-your-face funky thing which should make it accessible and does have that vernacular element, that kind of James Brown, P-Funk thing to it and yet this unbelievable weirdness. Back to Very Very Circus, I love it because it represents the music which I have to work out and spend time with to understand and get into the depth of it, and when you get there you then come to love it unconditionally. Have you read Threadgill’s biography which came out last year? You should, it’s a great one.

The list could go on and on and on, and that’s the beauty of it. I hope the chosen discs will give an entry window into my listening.

Further listening:

Alexander Hawkins on Intakt Records:

“Uproot” (quartet co-led by Elaine Mitchener, 2017)

“Iron into Wind (Pears from an Elm)” (2019)

“Shards and Constellations” with Tomeka Reid (2020)

“Togetherness Music” with Evan Parker + Riot Ensemble (2021)

“Soul in Plain Sight” with Angelika Niescier (2021)

“Mirror Canon” by the Break a Vase Sextet (2022)

“Carnival Celestial” with Neil Charles & Stephen Davis (2023)

“Musho” with Sofia Jernberg (2024)

Other selected releases:

“Guts & Strings” Ingebrigt Håker Flaten & Paal Nilssen-Love (Sonic Transmissions Records/PNL Records, 2023)

“At Earth School” with Nicole Mitchell (Astral Spirits, 2023)

“Fatrasies” with François Houle & Kate Gentile (Victo, 2024)

“You can't stand still” with Patrick Wolff & Louis Moholo-Moholo (Phenotypic Records, 2024)

“People” Roberto Ottaviano Eternal Love (Dodicilune, 2024)

Upcoming Live Dates:

Jazzfest Berlin, Oct. 31: Decoy with Joe McPhee, John Edwards and Steve Noble (Berliner Festspiele).

Jazzfest Berlin, Nov. 3: Musho with Sofia Jernberg (A-Trane)

Nov. 8 to 21: tour with Mulatu Astatke (Italy, France, Switzerland, Norway)

More info at: https://www.alexanderhawkinsmusic.com