Decoy: Spirit/The Deep

(Bo' Weavil Records)In the hands of 60s hellfire preachers like Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff, the Hammond B3 organ has always sounded on the verge of mayhem, however tight the backbeat or gospelly the licks. But it's taken a former pipe-organ scholar, the young Oxford free-jazz ­pianist Alexander Hawkins, to let the monster loose in a flat-out improv context. Hawkins certainly draws on the classic Hammond lexicon here, in the familiar wild trills and stealthy, glowering low-end buildups. But...

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