PIANIST Alexander Hawkins’s 11-piece band Willow has been blossoming again at Dalston’s Cafe Oto. In an onslaught of reeds, breath and brass they played a succession of notated pieces that gave ample space for some powerful improvised solos. The eleventet were a dedicated ensemble grounded by Neil Charles’s delving bass, Stephen Davis’s brotherly, rolling drums and the pumping tuba of Olivia Hughes, slight of build but with a rumbling drive, made subtly melodic by a giant mute which hid her head and shoulders.

Xhosa Cole and Alicia Gardener-Trejo held a long flutesong colloquy, Alex Paxton’s trombone roared and growled in a quasi-tailgate uproar and the clarinets of Alex Ward and Tom Challenger palavered like birds in a nest. George Crowley’s tenor saxophone burst out in a long and potent solo, and Charlotte Keeffe’s trumpet suspirations and blistering phrases sparked audience breathlessness.

As for Hawkins, he shifted between conducting and pianism, sometimes sounding like a reincarnation of Winifred Atwell’s 1950s honky-tonk surprise, other times gentle or chiming, or striking the piano’s innards as if they were new strings of delight.

Hawkins is renowned for his smaller-group formations, whether it is his duo with the late Cape Town drums nonpareil Louis Moholo-Moholo, his partnership with Ethiopian vocalist Sofia Jernberg or his trio with Charles and Davis. Willow shows his skills and orchestrating with a larger ensemble and his ability to create a fusion of collective sonic power with shared solo virtuosity.

His new album, pointedly named No Nation But Imagination in a rabid era of Maga and Reform UK is not only a riposte to the odious Trump and Farage, but a testimony of smaller group unity and cosmopolitan musical brilliance: Hamid Drake’s Louisiana drums, Nicole Mitchell’s Chicago flute, Rhodri Davies’s Welsh harp with the piano, synthesiser and sampling of Hawkins and Matthew Wright.

The night before this recording was made at Fish Factory Studios, Willesden, north-west London, this very same ensemble played a session at Cafe Oto, and truth to tell, it has that venue’s Dalston ambiance running through its soundstream. Deliciously cross-worldly, its sounds are like the paintboxes that used to be made in Oto’s buildings a century ago when it was the Reeves Paints Factory. The power of Drake’s strident drums that signal every phrase of the second track, Resolution Each and Every, is balanced by the Lake Michigan birdsong of Mitchell’s flute. Hawkins pounds his keys through Mirror No Border as if he were another drummer. The counterpoint of Mitchell’s soulful flutesong and Davies’s simmering strings make a blissful duo in Celestial Garden. I had to look up the meaning of “hocket” during the track called Hocket Fierce Peaceful. Perhaps its definition embraces the fundamentals of Hawkins’s music: “A spasmodic or interrupted effect in medieval and contemporary music, produced by dividing a melody between two parts, notes in one part coinciding with rests in the other.”

For perhaps that’s what he and his bandmates do all through the album, how they make their imaginations take fire as inventive musicians have been doing all over the world for centuries. And when the band moves into the track called Joy Beyond Blazing, all five of them create that too, for here is a new music of intrigue and delight, grounded in long, long history with striking and immediate meaning for now-times.

No Nation but Imagination is released by Intakt Records

For further live dates see: alexanderhawkinsmusic.com