The formidably skilful and idiosyncratically receptive pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins last made a solo album in 2013, and his experiences since have been immensely varied – from playing Ethiopian world-jazz with Mulatu Astatke, to South African jazz with Louis Moholo-Moholo and Jason Yarde, to free-improv, contemporary-classical and much else between. Those resources have brought Hawkins back to the solo hot seat with a wealth of fresh ideas, and a new confidence about the use of restraint as well as virtuosity in interpreting them. Hawkins named this session after a book on the late Basque artist Eduardo Chillida's sculptures, including the huge coastal steel structure, ‘The Comb of the Wind’. Richard Williams' liner note report Hawkins' attraction to “the transience of improvisation and a fascination with solid material”, and a sense of ruggedly solid raw materials that are constantly melting into air is a hallmark of the session. Hawkins suggests an arrhythmically mercurial Abdullah Ibrahim on the fitfully rolling, avant-gospelly ‘Congregational’; takes soft-stroked opening motifs and slow-building rumble of ‘Pleasant Constellation’ from a Sun Ra inspiration and mixes a steadily descending melody and skittering free surges on ‘It Should Be A Song’. And in the astonishing, fast-minimalist ‘Etude’ (deploying a five-note cell he was shown by Veryan Weston) demonstrates an intensity, clarity and melodic expressiveness within flinty repeating figures that shows up all over this scholarly and personal, yet spellbinding, set.