Two albums by Alexander Hawkins have now been confirmed for release by the pianist’s label, Babel Records. The first set to drop on 4 November as a download album is Step Wide, Step Deep performed by the Alexander Hawkins Ensemble, a seven-track affair featuring the Oxford-born 32-year-old free improvising pianist on fine form already this year in such company as Decoy, Steve 'Dakiz' Davis' Human (Being Human), and as part of the Mulatu Astatke Step Ahead band on Sketches of Ethiopia.

Here Hawkins is joined by violinist Dylan Bates (Human), Neil Charles (Zed-U, ex-Empirical), guitarist Otto Fischer (the only returning member besides Hawkins from 2012’s Ensemble album All There, Ever Out), saxophonist/clarinettist Shabaka Hutchings (Sons of Kemet), and drummer Tom Skinner (also Sons of Kemet).

The second album, Song Singular, delayed from July, is now to be released, again as a download album, on 11 November; and is, as the album name suggests, a solo album whose track titles are: ‘The Way We Dance It Here’, ‘Early Then, M.A.’, ‘Joists, Distilled,’ ‘Stillness from 37,000 ft,’, ‘Two Dormant, One Active,’ ‘Hope Step The Lava Flow,’ Billy's Strayhorn’s ‘Take the A Train’, ‘Distances Between Points,’ ‘Advice’, and ‘Unknown Baobabs (Seen in the Distance)’.