Alex Hitchcock is a London-born saxophonist, composer, arranger, and producer based in New York. He draws inspiration politically as much as musically from artists in the radical tradition of Black American music, including Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Hazel Scott, Ma Rainey, and Max Roach. His work reckons with the politics embedded in both the history and form of this music—and the struggle, resistance, and reinvention that have shaped it.

Since emerging as a leader, Hitchcock has released four solo albums to widespread critical acclaim. The Guardian described him as a “virtuoso” saxophonist, while BBC Jazz World hailed him as “leading the charge in terms of new jazz music being created in the UK.” His work has been featured on the BBC, France Musique, WDR, JazzFM, Worldwide FM, and in leading publications such as Downbeat, MOJO, Jazzwise, Musica Jazz, Stereogum, and Uncut.

Hitchcock is a two-time Ivor Novello Composer Award nominee (2020, 2022), Parliamentary Jazz Awards nominee for Best Album (2023), winner of the Peter Whittingham Award (2018), and recipient of a major prize at the 2019 Umbria Jazz Festival. His writing foregrounds musical form as a site of both freedom and resistance, rejecting the co-opting of jazz as a neat synthesis of difference. He says: “I don’t want compositions to be containers that the band just fills up—we can explode the container.” Dissonance and difference exist less to be resolved than to be explored, honouring the music’s historical role as a vehicle for dissent—always inviting the listener into that negotiation.

His compositions often begin with forms designed to be dismantled: grooves that fray, harmonies that warp, structures that appear in unexpected places before disintegrating under collective pressure. The palette is drawn as much from film and visual art as from elsewhere in music—shimmering bitonal harmonies that bloom and fracture; layers of colour, density, and rhythmic asymmetry; loops and textures that build, combine, and dissolve. Hitchcock has carved out a distinctive space in contemporary jazz: at times intense and chaotic, at others disarmingly sparse and emotionally direct. He approaches the Black American tradition as a set of formal and ethical challenges to be continually addressed, asking: Do the structures we create on stage and on record reflect the kind of world we want to live in?

He tours globally with his own quartet, performing at major venues and festivals including Ronnie Scott’s, the Barbican, Royal Albert Hall, Glastonbury, Bimhuis, North Sea Jazz Festival, Jazz à Vienne, Umbria Jazz Festival, Rochester International Jazz Festival, and Love Supreme. He is co-founder of LVDF, described by Soweto Kinch on BBC Radio 3 as “shifting gears and inverting time signatures on a hairpin, with so much soul and synergy.” His SAME MOON project with guitarist Ant Law was described by Jazzwise as “world-class original music making”.

A frequent collaborator with forward-thinking improvisers, Hitchcock created and premiered new work with artists including Cherise, Chris Cheek, Harish Raghavan, Jeff Ballard, Shai Maestro, and Sun-Mi Hong. He was a featured guest on UK cult heroes Empirical’s 2024 album Wonder Is The Beginning, and wrote and performed new arrangements of trailblazing bassist Jasper Høiby’s compositions for his 2025 release We Must Fight. Most recently, he has appeared in the working quartet of Detroit piano legend (and Dexter Gordon side musician) Kirk Lightsey, touring across the UK, France, Germany, and Switzerland. He also appears regularly in recordings and performances by contemporaries of his own generation, including Alice Leggett, Dabin Ryu, Dave Adewumi, Lex Korten, Maria Chiara Argirò, and Myele Manzanza.

His acclaimed DREAM BAND series, celebrated for its boundary-pushing combinations, brings together musicians from across generations and geographies. MOJO Magazine wrote: “Tumbling with ideas, impulsive improvisations and swinging, left-field energy, Hitchcock’s storytelling intent is the unifying thread.” Uncut added that the “intrepid tenor saxophonist corrals an astonishing array of UK & EU jazz talent.”

The second volume in the series was recorded over three nights in 2022 at a sold-out Vortex Jazz Club, and was Jazzwise Editor’s Album of the Year 2023. In the liner notes, Kevin Le Gendre wrote: “The packed house became intimately small. The heritage of the players was English, Irish, African, Caribbean and European, so to a large extent they embody something quintessentially British, a broad cultural canvas that can be traced back to the ‘50s heyday of Jamaicans, Canadians, Indians and English coming together through jazz. Maybe Dream Band: Live in London is a snapshot of who we are, for real.” 

His upcoming album Letters From Afar (New Soil, September 2025) is shaped by Hitchcock’s transatlantic perspective—made in New York, rooted in his London upbringing. As Le Gendre writes in the liner notes, its eight tracks feel like “wordless voice notes across the water, all penned very frankly.”