Gigs
Alex Hitchcock Quartet
“Tumbling with ideas, impulsive improvisations and swinging, left-field energy” - MOJO Magazine
We are delighted to welcome Alex Hitchcock back to the Marr’s Bar for the third time on our program. He first appeared with Resolution 88 in November 2022 and, as a mentor for Dan Lockheart on the Jazz Central Mentoring Scheme, he performed with Dan’s quintet in September the following year. This time, following sold-out album launches in New York and London, he’s back with his own cutting edge quartet performing music from his new album, Letters From Afar, a sonic correspondence across emotional, geographic, and artistic distances.
Described as “leading the charge of new jazz music being created in the UK” (BBC Jazz World), “an astonishingly quick thinking virtuoso”(Jazzwise magazine) and “tumbling with ideas, impulsive improvisations and swinging, left-field energy” (MOJO Magazine), saxophonist and Ivor Novello-nominated composer Hitchcock is a leading voice on the international jazz stage. Emerging from London’s fertile jazz scene and shaped by inventive collaborations across Europe, the US, and further afield, he has built an international reputation for music that balances real-world urgency with formal and stylistic exploration.
The group’s sound draws as much from film and visual art as from music itself: shimmering bitonal harmonies that bloom and fracture; layered textures of colour, density, and rhythmic asymmetry; loops and motifs that build, collide, and dissolve. Hitchcock has carved out a distinctive space in contemporary jazz - at times intense and chaotic, at others disarmingly sparse and direct. Beneath the surface of the quartet’s notated forms lies a deep commitment to free improvisation, creating music both tightly sculpted and thrillingly fluid.
This is music for curious, open-minded listeners drawn to art at the edge of beauty and disruption. Fans of Caroline Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, or Peter Evans will find familiar terrain, though this is a group never content to stay in one place for long.
The quartet features Will Barry on piano, Freddie Jensen on bass Ananda Brandão on drums.