“ALTHOUGH I also value the piano as a harp in a box, I love to think of it as 88 tuned drums.”

So says one of the true nonpareils of British piano jazz, Alexander Hawkins. 

Born in Oxford in 1981, his mother was in charge of pastoral care in a local school, and his father a university professor. “We always had a piano in the house,” he told me, “so I started to play piano as soon as I could reach the keys, having my first piano lessons at the age of six.

“As a teenager my musical obsessions were jazz and classical music. They were the musics I had always loved, as far back as I can remember. I didn’t want to be swayed by mainstream opinions, but by a contrarian streak. At school these musics were ‘mine’, and not what my peers were listening to.”

His earliest memories radiate music: “I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t fixated by this music. My very earliest memory was getting lost in a supermarket, my second was of listening to the Duke Ellington composition, Saturday Night Function — and then a programme about Art Tatum in the car. I can even recall the precise track listing, even at a distance of 35 years: Tiger Rag, Dvorak’s Humoresque and Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady. I also remember being in a trance when I first heard Eric Dolphy. I simply loved what I could hear.”

He pays tribute to the great pianists on whose shoulders he stands: “The Tatum Trio record with bassist Red Callendar and drummer Jo Jones is a touchstone for me. Bud Powell's trio on the Blue Note album Time Waits would be a Desert Island pick, Max Roach and the Legendary Hasaan is a stone classic, Sun Ra’s God is More than Ever Love should be, and I couldn’t be without the work of Mary Lou Willams and Geri Allen, two more seminal figures.”

Yet the musician who has influenced him most is the last survivor of the South African Blue Notes, octogenarian drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo, with whom he toured and recorded both as a member of his band, Five Blokes, and as duet partner in the momentous album Keep Your Heart Straight (2012) on Ogun Records.

Hawkins says of his time with Louis: “It would be impossible to overstate how important he has been to me. The energy that band could produce was absolutely electric, a revelation to me how the power of music communicates and galvanises — music that felt powerfully political and vital, while being music that felt nothing more or less than ‘the sound of joy,’ to quote Sun Ra. For Louis, music was really a matter of life and death, something that a musician from the relative privilege of this country would do well to remember.”

Hawkins asserts what every listener came to know on their ears: “Anything was permissible in that band, with one exception. It would have been unforgivable not to give every performance absolutely everything.”

His new record is, like hundreds of others in the century of jazz, but not like any of them, a jazz trio album, with bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis. I asked how the title, Carnival Celestial, arose.

“It came about almost by accident, in the rehearsal room. I was trying to suggest a rhythmic feel for that track, trying to get a calypso-type thing — if heavily refracted in a Sun Ra prism. I came out with this phrase and the title stuck.”

Hawkins explains that the album’s music comes from a combination of certain ideas. “It’s important for me never to have in the background an idea of an x/y/z group/album. That is a problematic path that sends the sound towards the conservative and derivative. There’s a duty to guard against these tendencies, in music as elsewhere.”

“Second: several of the compositions make use of structural and harmonic devices developed in my larger ensemble, now newly applied in a trio setting. Thirdly, I use electronics, and because I’m not terribly competent with them in an orthodox sense, they behave in ways that surprise me, and are juxtaposed with my piano playing where I’m much more in control of what's going on.”

I asked him about the track titles, and the contradictions between the “celestial,” otherworldly concept and titles stemming from a much more politically realist perspective, like If Nature Were a Bank, They Would Have Saved it Already and Unlimited Growth Increases the Divide.

“I thought hard about this, and the jarring between two modes of titling was deliberate. There’s a responsibility to speak about social issues, but as musicians we’re much, much further from the front line than many of us would like to think. We try to be provocative, but must be aware that this is a long way from direct action, even though I want to spotlight the people on the ground who are trying to change things in a more direct way — strikers, charities, researchers and such. But ultimately the ‘otherworldly’ is related to the ‘worldly.’ We need to safeguard those who every day struggle with the right to imagination and escapism.”

What about his trio-mates, Charles and Davis? “When you play with friends you understand there is a much greater possibility of risk-taking and exploration. They share a complete fearlessness — a happiness to jump into the music and follow it wherever it goes, rather than follow preconceptions about where it should go.

“They both pay attention to the architecture of a composition or set as a whole, at the same time taking care with every detail of every sound. Neither exhibits any ego but both project huge musical personality.”

Carnival Celestial is a percussive mountain of a trio record where Moholo-Moholo’s drums are still resonating and talking through Hawkins’s keys, its three mountaineers climbing, descending and discovering with ascents, cadences of sonic artistry and joy.

Carnival Celestial is released by Intakt Records