The Kings Place launch for this album is a frontrunner for notable 2018 gigs. A jointly led ensemble in the true sense of the term, the Hawkins-Mitchener band has achieved impressive balance all the while accommodating not just two, but four very strong musical personalities. As with many outfits that manage to carve out their own individual space within a continuum of composed and improvised music, there is an intriguing ambiguity with regard to both the size and shape of the sound. The dark-to-light ‘broken ballad’ character of some of the material, whereby certain players draw right down to a hushed, almost hurt intimacy, while the others punch out boldly, is brilliantly executed, group chemistry kept well intact. Above all, Hawkins' crystalline voicings flow seamlessly into Mitchener's piercing but controlled flights of vocal fancy, as Charles and Kane rumble and ripple carefully, not so much keeping the time suitably fluid as providing accents to jolt and jar the pulse without entirely destroying it. That sense of turbulence as well as tension gripped tight and then teasingly released hits a creative peak on the engrossing ‘The Miracle/You’, where the arrangement synthesises a wide range of vocabularies. If there is an avant-garde slant to this suite then its embrace and intelligent extension of both Monk and Abbey Lincoln's modernism is a major part of its appeal. The Hawkins-Mitchener quartet captures and personalises something of the weary, ‘world falling down’ sigh of the latter, all the while conveying a particularly British sense of place and point of view. At the aforementioned gig Mitchener wore an Adidas-style T-shirt, but the lettering was actually that of supermarket Asda.