Togetherness Music (For Sixteen Musicians) featuring Evan Parker + Riot Ensemble (Intakt)

Togetherness Music (For Sixteen Musicians) featuring Evan Parker + Riot Ensemble (Intakt)

Alexander Hawkins

Released January 15, 2021

New York City Record Best Large Ensemble Releases of 2021

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About:

With Togetherness Music, British pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins presents a fascinating musical panorama, a distillation and synthesis of different traditions and influences, reflecting the broad spectrum of an extraordinary musical spirit. Released to celebrate Hawkins’ 40th birthday, this six-movement quasi-orchestral work is an extensive expansion and revision of a piece which originated with a commission from conductor and composer Aaron Holloway-Nahum for the Riot Ensemble, to feature Hawkins and saxophone icon Evan Parker – with whom Hawkins has enjoyed a now more than decade-long musical association – as soloists. The new incarnation of the work features the original forces, augmented by additional acoustic improvisers and the electronic wizardry of Matthew Wright.
Whilst the Riot Ensemble are primarily renowned for their performan- ces of notated contemporary classical music, and Parker is one of the seminal figures in free improvisation and the post-Coltrane jazz continuum, roles shift fluidly throughout this work, creating an entirely distinctive soundworld.
“Collaborations among improvisers and classical musicians can be fraught – a clash of cultures,” writes musician James Fei in the comprehensive liner notes. “When it works, however, something unique and in-between becomes possible.” Indeed: Togetherness Music shows new musical possibilities. A highly contemporary musical work, which points to the future.

Track Listing:

1. Indistinguishable From Magic 09:31           

2. Sea No Shore 07:24

3. Ensemble Equals Together 06:57               

4. Leaving the Classroom of a Beloved Teacher 08:31   

5. Ecstatic Boababs 08:50           

6. Optimism of the Will 09:33                

Music by Alexander Hawkins (PRS)

Personnel:

Alexander Hawkins: piano Evan Parker: soprano saxophone
Aaron Holloway-Nahum: conductor
Rachel Musson: flute, tenor saxophone
Percy Pursglove: trumpet
James Arben: flute, bass clarinet
Neil Charles: double bass
Mark Sanders: drums, percussion
Matthew Wright: electronics
Benedict Taylor: viola
Hannah Marshall: cello

The Riot Ensemble

Mandhira de Saram: violin

Marie Schreer: violin

Stephen Upshaw: viola

Louise McMonagle: cello

Marianne Schofield: double bass

Recorded July 30th, 2020 at Challow Park Studios, Oxfordshire, UK by Will Biggs

Assistant engineer: James Towler

Mixed and Mastered: Alex Bonney

Cover Art and Graphic Design: Jonas Schoder

Produced by Alexander Hawkins and Intakt Records

Review:

Togetherness Music (For Sixteen Musicians) opens with one of the most mesmerising opening sequences you could hope to hear, an other-worldly, multi-phonic Evan Parker solo extemporisation of eight minutes duration with gravelly electronic interventions and slippery glissandi from the combined strings amplifying the sense of untrammelled movement through space. Ultra-discreet processing by Matt Wright (electronics) in the final moments adds a mysterious ambiguity to the layers of Parker’s remarkable live playing.

This extended passage constitutes the first of the work’s six movements each of which has its own character and personality, mixing improvisation and scored composition in various combinations, including transcriptions of improvisations to add intriguing layers of complexity.

The roots of the work hark back to two major commissions, from Peggy Sutton for BBC Radio 3 and from Aaron Holloway-Nahum for the Riot Ensemble. Through reworkings and the genesis of further material Hawkins has, in this entirely live recording made in a single day, inspired a powerful musical statement, crossing genres to consolidate its spacious, yet granular, textures. More is to be read about the genesis of this album in my INTERVIEW with Alexander Hawkins.  Just incidentally, when asked if the sub-title For Sixteen Musicians was a nod to Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians, Hawkins admitted that the coincidence had not occurred to him, even though he’d been present at performances of Reich’s piece!

Hawkins has picked his co-musicians judiciously. Percy Pursglove, Mark Sanders and Neil Charles each bring different sensibilities to key passages. Pursglove draws on the post-Miles explorations of Wadada Leo Smith and Kenny Wheeler’s elegance in his finely crafted phrasing, and his earthily breathed punctuations counter in raw fashion.

Hawkins’ piano comes to the fore in the third movement which opens with a gentle mesh of jungle chattering. The flutes of Rachel Musson and James Arben combine and strings effervesce to provide an intensifying cushion of sound in to which Parker ever so carefully insinuates a jazz-inflected presence. A sense of Messiaen’s music of the spheres pervades, overtaken by controlled, improvised chaos which prompts James Fei, in his sleeve notes, to evoke Ornette Coleman’s under-appreciated magnum opus, Skies of America.

The bluesy fourth movement, where Sanders and Charles, in nonchalant, rock-solid style, introduce the contradictions of discipline and anarchy associated with Mingus, is the vehicle for Hawkins’ contrapuntal interplay with the hefty walking bass, something of McCoy Tyner’s intensity coming through in his virtuosic runs.

Gentle tensions and a sense of the limitless firmament imbue further passages, with the majestic, mischievous strings of the Riot Ensemble converging and conversing, wheeling in to remote yet intimate spaces.

The work concludes with Charles and Sanders, in funky banter, ramping it up as Hawkins strides in and the whole ensemble takes on the drive of Miles 70s electric meets Weather Report, with Parker’s soprano tinted with touches of Wayne Shorter phrasing. The intense barrage dissolves leaving only Hawkins and Parker to weave a bright, spiky dialogue before they quietly tiptoe off the radar.

Geoff Winston (LondonJazz News)