Alexander Hawkins, Neil Charles and Stephen Davis
Cafe Oto, Dalston

BACK again to Cafe Oto’s stone floors, iron pillars and a living artistic heritage of the one-time factory that for decades produced Reeves’s paints and brushes for generations of young artists and child painters, now a house of revolutionary sounds and startling and audacious musicianship.

A scintillating opening: Alex Hawkins’s founding, compelling, chirping piano notes, Neil Charles’s stirring bass bow-work and drummer Stephen Davis’s tinkling brushes provoking the silence of Cafe Oto’s spellbound listeners.

No preordained tunes, only those coming from the improvised moment full of invented melody and collective now-times sound drawn from a century of jazz tradition and love of musical freedom from Britain, the Americas, Africa and the Caribbean in a proud and rebellious amalgam.

Hawkins and Davis still fresh from touring with and inspired by the fomenting power of Anthony Braxton’s Chicago innovations; the pianist still imbibing Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Blue Notes and Cape Town drum griot genius: Charles’s classical apprenticeship bursting with the liberation of jazz and blues release.

This is quite a trio — every sound and phrase they create is newly formed, freshly invented, holding fast to jazz discovery cutting through the Hackney soundscape and Ridley Road’s history and streets of struggle — bringing the outside inside.

In their second long selection, the energy of Charles’s low-down plucking, Davis’s rattling, booming skins and Hawkins’s sudden swinging phrases create new listener realisations of the roots of their music.

It could be Mingus or Charlie Haden; Max Roach, Blakey or Elvin; Monk, Powell or Pullen. And how they swung! In this musical union of three jazz troubadours in the rampant heart of London’s cosmopolis.

For further tour dates visit www.alexanderhawkinsmusic.com.