So industrious and productive (his discography is prodigious) is British pianist Alexander Hawkins that it's remarkable to note that he's not yet celebrated his fortieth birthday. Released to commemorate the big four-o (on 3 May this year), this remarkable new album is proof positive that Hawkins is a major figure in the global improv scene, both as a composer and instrumentalist.

The roots of this latest project – a lengthy single 50-minute piece of six wildly different ‘movements’ – lie in two commissions, from Peggy Sutton for BBC Radio 3 and from Aaron Holloway-Nahum for the Riot Ensemble. Togetherness Music consists of reworkings of that material, with the addition of new compositions, played live and recorded in one day.

It opens in the strongest possible way with ‘Indistinguishable From Magic’, a shimmering, mesmerising improvisation by long-term collaborator Evan Parker, made still more compelling with electronic interventions by Matthew Wright. The following ‘Sea No Shore’ and ‘Ensemble Equals Together’ feature some absolutely beautiful playing by trumpeter Pursglove and reedists Arben and Musson respectively. Tension is ramped up with the dissonant blues ‘Leaving The Classroom of a Beloved Teacher’ on which Neil Charles' powerful walking bass and Hawkins' dissonant cascades dominate. Next, ‘Ecstatic Baobabs’, the underlying bedrock of strings giving the piece a cinematic, spacious feel. The suite wraps with ‘Optimism of the Will’, a strident workout (reminiscent, perhaps of Miles' At Fillmore) that threatens to collapse into chaos but somehow never does.

Meshing classical music and jazz is a difficult trick to pull off, especially when your raw ingredients are as ‘tricky’ and as diverse as Olivier Messaien, Steve Reich, Pierre Boulez, Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner, Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, but Hawkins and his collaborators do just that. A fascinating pointer to Hawkins' and one suspects, UK jazz's possible future.