Intakt records have announced details of a new Alexander Hawkins Large Ensemble project recorded during Lockdown that will mark the acclaimed avant pianist-composer's 40th birthday on its release next year.

Hawkins explains via the label: "The genesis of this particular project was a commission in 2018 from conductor and composer Aaron Holloway-Nahum, for an hour of music for the Riot Ensemble. The first incarnation of the music was performed in early 2019, effectively as a concerto for two improvising soloists – Evan Parker and myself. (It's an echo no musician could miss […] As I began to consider recording the music, I wanted to revise and expand it. Studying my scores, I noticed motivic connections between the movements, not all of which had been consciously made. I then noticed that a huge amount of what I'd written over the last few years – whether completed pieces or scraps in notebooks – was effectively worrying away at different transformations of this handful of (themselves connected) motivic kernels: and this fact provided the way forward for the expansion of the material. This recording session was a first opportunity for so many of us on the album to play music after the lockdown, and my hope is that even a small bit of the joy we all felt at being able to make something together has found itself into the music."

Photo of Hawkins (centre) with trumpeter Percy Pursglove (left) and Evan Parker, via Intakt.