JazzFest Berlin gives pianist Alexander Hawkins the premiere of Willow Music

Alexander Hawkins will give Willow Music its first European performance at JazzFest Berlin on 29 October, closing the opening night of a festival that runs through to 1 November. The piece is the third and last set of the evening, and the one before it is the premiere of a new Anthony Braxton septet written for four saxophones and three tubas. Both are listed in the festival tracker.

Hawkins told UK Jazz News he could not be happier about the running order, partly because it puts him in one of the best seats in the house for the Braxton piece. He raised Braxton's own term for a listener, the friendly experiencer, and said the older composer's open-mindedness takes the pressure off rather than adding to it.

There was no commission behind Willow Music. Hawkins had a set of ideas he wanted to write down, and did it across late 2025 and early 2026. Cafe OTO gave him a residency where the group played the music for the first time, and the band went into the studio for two days straight afterwards. That recording is due next year on the Intakt label.

The book holds ten compositions that share what Hawkins calls a particular musical DNA, and in this case the shared device is a system for generating vertical harmony out of a single line. He points to Ornette Coleman's writing on Skies of America and Prime Time and to Braxton's diamond clef as other examples. One piece is a swinging thing in three-part counterpoint with the top two voices harmonised in a stack; elsewhere eight or nine instruments hold the same melodic contour in their own transpositions, which he compares to the blocks of sound in late Xenakis scores such as Ata and Horos.

Much of the colour comes from doublers. Five woodwind players give him three flutes, with piccolo and bass flute inside that, or four clarinets, or three saxophones. Olivia Hughes is on tuba, although she is primarily a bass trombonist, and Hawkins singled her out as rock solid on technical writing and inventive once a piece opens up.

The Berlin line-up is not the one that played Cafe OTO. Xhosa Cole, Alex Ward, Alex Paxton and Neil Charles all had prior commitments, so Chelsea Carmichael, Marco Colonna, Matthias Muller and Nick Dunston come in. Colonna and Dunston have played Hawkins's music before.

Hawkins also pushed back at a lazy use of the phrase free jazz. For him the interesting version is freedom to rather than freedom from: a hard-blowing saxophonist can run out of ideas inside an ostensibly free setting, while Sonny Rollins playing standards sounded as free as anyone ever has. The pieces, he said, are meant to leave room for players with the inclination to use it. His earlier large ensemble work, 2021's Togetherness Music, was written for sixteen musicians.

The compositions are not a suite and do not need to be played in a fixed order, so the Berlin setlist can be built the way he would from any other book. The first performance ran to two hour-long sets. Hawkins was complimentary about the programme Nadin Deventer and Peter Margasak put together each year, and said the festivals he enjoys playing are the ones where he also gets to listen. Other autumn programmes worth a look sit in the previews for the Newcastle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music and Swansea International Jazz Festival, both also filed under jazz.