If you've been keeping an ear to the ground (as well as to jazz on the radio) in the past year or two, you're likely to have come across the name of Alexander Hawkins at some point. The London-based pianist-composer is the brightest young thing on the leftfield London scene, and his work doesn't lack ambition. He has fully embraced acoustic solo piano as well as trio, and transatlantic collaboration as co-leader of the Convergence Quartet. He also plays Hammond organ in the band Decoy as well as impressing as sideman for legendary South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo. Hawkins employs a different line up here to that of his previous sextet, aside from the guitarist Otto Fischer, that released the 2012 CD All There Ever Out also on Babel. He is joined by a group with a close rapport that includes Sons of Kemet's Shabaka Hutchings and Tom Skinner, the double bassist Neil Charles, who along with Hawkins, are members of the celebrated ethio-jazz leader Mulatu Astatke's ensemble. On Step Wide, Step Deep his acoustic ensemble demonstrate a firm grasp of the more progressive idiomatic languages of jazz as well as the world of abstract European free improv while continuing to negotiate its boundaries. Hawkins directs with his sly use of compositional devices as well as themes. On the opener the leader's harmonically skewed Charlie Parker-like head dissolves into an In a Silent Way-type collective dreamscape before Charles and Skinner pick things up with a hustling jazz-rock groove. Otherwise the set shifts from a more abstract floating avant jazz context to free jazz scrums fired up by Hawkins' exciting, densely charged Matthew Shipp-like percussive improv. The mood shifts again as violinist Dylan Bates' solos on top of Hawkins' calmly lilting country-blues piano vamp. On perhaps his best release so far, Alexander Hawkins' new ensemble will have you on the edge of your seat.