Jazz at Progress
Friday 2 January 2026

Alex Hitchcock Quartet: Alex Hitchcock, tenor saxophone; Will Barry, keys; Freddie Jensen, bass, James Maddren, drums

A warm festive welcome from a full house greeted Alex Hitchcock and his fellow musicians as they took to the stage on 2 January to open a new year of Jazz at Progress. It brought back memories of Hitchcock’s first appearance as a band leader at Progress in September 2017. Then as now, Bob Draper promoted the gig and served as MC. ‘This is going to be a special evening,’ he announced on that occasion. ‘This young man really impressed me when I saw him playing a short while ago and I thought, “We must have him play at Reading”. Ladies and gentlemen, he’ll have you on the edge of your seats … Alex Hitchcock!’

Alex lived up to the promise and more, enthralling the audience with his virtuosity and the range of his musical imagination and capturing their hearts with the quiet, self-effacing qualities of his stage manner. His career took off at a pace and by the time of his next visit to Progress in 2022, with a brilliant quartet featuring the remarkable drumming of Myele Manzanza, he was firmly established as one of the leading players/composers on the contemporary jazz scene, having notched up a clutch of nominations for his compositions and recordings in the Novello and Parliamentary Jazz awards, as well as winning the Peter Whittingham Award in 2018 and a major prize at the 2019 Umbria Jazz Festival.

Wider horizons beckoned and in 2023 Alex relocated to further hone his skills in the ultimate testing ground of the jazz world – New York. Since his return home last summer he has packed-in an astonishing amount of activity in a very short space of time: the launch of a new album, ‘Letters from Afar’ at Ronnie Scott’s, three appearances in a variety of formats at the EFG London Jazz Festival, as well as (would you believe?), flights to the other side of the world to play at the Wellington Jazz Festival, New Zealand and the Melbourne Jazz Festival, Australia with Myele Manzanza and the international band LVDF … not to mention gigs in Portugal. It’s a measure of the man that he accepted Bob’s invitation to play at Reading, good fortune that he was free and a source of great pride to us all at Jazz at Progress that we’ve borne witness over the years to a flourishing talent of ‘world class stature.

And what a great band Alex assembled for the date – kindred souls in the form of Will Barry, the ‘wizard of the keyboard’, the ‘mighty’ Freddie Jensen on bass and the ‘masterful’ James Maddren on drums. The Progress Theatre is a near-perfect listening environment; whether a band is playing at full throttle or in a gentle whisper, you can discern every sound and immerse yourself in its beauty.

‘Timelessness’, a composition by South African composer and multi-instrumentalist, the late Bheki Mseleku, made an ideal choice to open the gig; a joyful evocation of the sunlit expanses of his South African homeland, spiced with the vitality of the townships, but tinged with the sadness of exile and loss.

‘Units’, the first of six Hitchcock original compositions, immediately put me in mind of Stan Tracey’s classic number ‘Starless and Bible Black’ from his celebrated ‘Under Milk Wood Jazz Suite’. It had similar qualities of stillness and calm, with Hitchcock’s breathy sustained notes and Will Barry’s delicate touch achieving a tremendous emotional effect.

Wayne Shorter’s ‘Toy Tune’ came from the album ‘ETC’, recorded in the fruitful period of the mid-sixties when the saxophonist had just joined Miles Davis and was also recording prolifically under his own name for Blue Note. For reasons best known to Blue Note executives it gathered dust in the label’s vault for fifteen years until its eventual release in 1980. ‘Toy Tune’ is an absolute gem, spacious and airy, a number that gathers an irresistible momentum punctuated by James Maddren’s explosive percussion.

The final number of the first set offered Alex Hitchcock with the opportunity to present his own humorous take on the appointment of Kathleen Corradi as the ‘Rat Tzar’, New York’s first Director of Rodent Migration, a notable event which took place at about the time he arrived in the ‘Big Apple’ in 2023. Will Barry excelled in his role as King Rat.

As one member of the audience commented as he made his way to the bar at the interval, ‘This music takes you into a dream world’. Little did he, or any of us, know what was in store for the second set; forty-five minutes of sublime, timeless invention. With no title announcements to influence your imagination, you literally followed your ear. Yes, you could sense structure and cohesion, but for the most part the music was freely expressed, improvised and utterly compelling.

Perhaps a selection of words and phrases that I noted at the time will convey some impression of how it felt to be immersed in this process of creation:
A maelstrom of sound; sweeping; undulating; jarring; haunting; soulful; the mournful dirge conjured by Freddie Jensen on a single string of his bass; exotic hand drumming; a crisp drum roll that would set a New Orleans street parade in motion; reflective; restful; exquisite; floating; telepathic understanding between the musicians; no hint of competition; driving beat; reaching for the sky!

I departed from the evening with a profound feeling that Alex Hitchcock and his fellow musicians had touched the deepest roots of humanity, expressing the reality of the world as they see it, while offering a vision of hope of how it could be. What better way could there be of starting a new year!

As ever, our thanks to the Progress team for their warm hospitality and continued support for Jazz at Progress.

For the record, after the gig Alex was kind enough to give me the titles of the four pieces that made up the second set:
‘With Love’/ ‘Pull of Line’/ ‘Bright White Light’ and ‘Rio’.

TREVOR BANNISTER

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