Friday 31 January 2025, 7.30pm
Three-day residency with the great pianist, Alexander Hawkins, widely recognised as one of contemporary creative music’s most innovative and imaginative voices. Working in a vast array of creative contexts, his own unique soundworld is shaped by a profound fascination with composition and structure, alongside a love of chance and open forms.
Alexander Hawkins’ work ranges from his acclaimed solo performances (‘intensely intricate…powerful, technically brilliant and melodically inventive’) through to works on a much larger canvas, such as his Togetherness Music ('[a] masterpiece that can stand next to the best works of Mitchell, Braxton or Parker’). He collaborates regularly with all generations of creative musicians, including the likes of Anthony Braxton, Marshall Allen, Evan Parker, John Surman, Joe McPhee, Hamid Drake, Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, Sofia Jernberg, Shabaka Hutchings, and many others. Further creative associations, with two very different icons of African music, Louis Moholo-Moholo and Mulatu Astatke, stretch back for well over a decade. He has been widely commissioned as a composer, including by the likes of the BBC, Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, and numerous festivals. His performance schedule takes him to club, concert hall, and festival stages worldwide.
Singer and composer, born in Ethiopia in 1983 and currently based in two cities: Oslo, Norway and Stockholm, Sweden. As a singer she is developing the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Sofia’s singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict a natural singing style. She has dug deep into split tone singing, pitchless singing and distorted singing.
“...it is the singing that is most impressive. Jernberg's vocal agility is sweeping, analogous, conceivably, to the range of sounds that Wadada Leo Smith can generate with the trumpet. She is a phenomenon that merits attention.” – Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz
'Profoundly moving' - Downbeat
'a sheer emotional power that makes it very much stand out from the pack' - Point of Departure
'There's a profound, almost searing, spirituality about the music here' - Jazzwise
Sofia Jernberg and Alexander Hawkins first performed together at Amsterdam's Bimhuis in October 2016, under the name Musho – an Amharic word meaning 'Sad Song'. Jernberg's work frequently takes her to the outer edges of vocal technique, including performances in contexts ranging from Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire to Mats Gustafsson's The End. Alexander Hawkins has been described as 'unlike anything else in modern creative music', and alongside his profile as a bandleader and composer, is a frequent collaborator in duo with the likes Tomeka Reid, Evan Parker and John Surman.
In this duo, they draw on their shared affinity for the music of Ethiopia, having both honed their languages in the company of musical elder statesmen from that country: Jernberg with Hailu Mergia, and Hawkins with Mulatu Astatke.
Musho moves quietly and seamlessly between abstract exploration and the immediacy of traditional song, taking in repertoire from Ethiopia, Sweden, the UK, Armenia, and elsewhere.
Whilst the duo have performed throughout the rest of Europe, this performance marks their first in the UK. Their eponymous album was released in early 2024 on Intakt Records.
