SATURDAY MORNING LISTEN

An avant-garde studio album recorded in London last year English improvisers pianist Alexander Hawkins and bassist Neil Charles with brilliant Northern Ireland drummer Stephen Davis have played together a lot over the years under their own steam and toured with Anthony Braxton.

Davis, whose style is grounded in multi-directional playing, a way of playing associated primarily with the John Coltrane free player icon, Rashied Ali, down the years played in a similar piano trio to Hawkins' within the brilliantly ferocious and far more hardcore Bourne/Davis/Kane.

When you listen here certainly Leeds beautiful spirit and Moog monster Matthew Bourne and Davis' dialogue on any number of recordings springs to mind. But Hawkins has achieved even more of an exalted position on the UK scene and beyond further into the continent playing redoubts of the avant-garde clubs and festivals (beyond this trio often in a different domain entirely with Ethiojazz vibes legend Mulatu Astatke) and yet he often isn't as interesting a player as Kit Downes or for that matter closer to the avant garde where his heart lies the still-too-underrated Elliot Galvin and remarkable Pat Thomas.

The true avantist out of the UK scene in piano-playing terms since the 1980s remains the greatest of all - the genius that is Django Bates, even when he isn't playing obviously, or at all, avant. Go figure that conundrum. The code to crack that puzzle lies in spirit, individuality and vision. And yet Hawkins, think the product of Sun Ra, Elmo Hope, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Keith Tippett, Alex von Schlippenbach if all their sounds were put in a blender, isn't anywhere nearly as maverick a listen as you might wish for on this recording at least. Hawkins' compositions don't fire on all cylinders as much as you'd hope. This isn't an album of tabula rasa free improvisation spontaneously conceived in the moment or anything like that although the idiom it is created in points directly to that domain. Quite a few tracks have ''celestial'' tacked on and often there is a strong somehow ''electronics sounding'' dimension especially to the title track ''celestial'' even though the essential heart of the trio remains resolutely the vast panorama of the imagination the piano can survey and accommodate. Hawkins' one time trio with Charles and Tom Skinner - go back to 2015 and Alexander Hawkins Trio - is if push were to come to shove the best place to hear Hawkins in a trio on record. But for all that this is as usual highly stimulating but not as good as the trio's Davis led Room to Dream Trio release in 2020. Pick of the tracks is easily the very unbaroque 'Counterpoint Celestial.' Top l-r: Neil Charles, Alexander Hawkins, Stephen Davis, photo: publicity, play London's Vortex on 11 May