The myth that outer-limits jazz is all head and no heart has been around since the dawn of bebop—and it’s no more valid now than it was then. As creative musicians push back the frontiers of what’s possible, audiences generally follow—and if you want to follow what’s happening right now, a night out with Alexander Hawkins and his trio would be a fine adventure.

It’s not that the British pianist isn’t one of the most intellectually curious players on the scene. He peppers his conversation with references to classical composers old and new, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of arcane American improv from the 1970s and ’80s. But on the bandstand he’s very much a sweat-equity performer, fully aware that physical engagement is as much a part of the music as deep reflection.

“Even within what we think of as contemporary classical music, I gravitate towards the people who maintain some sort of visceral, rooted quality in the music,” he says in a telephone interview from his London home. “And I don’t mean that in some sort of louder-faster-higher, alpha-male sense; I mean just more in the folk or vernacular realm. I really love the music of [Iannis] Xenakis, for example, because it has that really elemental rhythmic drive to it as well.”

Structural complexity and a restless imagination play a large role in Hawkins’s music. On last year’s eponymous Alexander Hawkins Trio CD you can hear the 35-year-old musician exploding form with enthusiastic abandon; one favourite strategy is to abstract a melodic cell from a larger passage and then repeat it until it suggests a pathway into new terrain. But he also nods in the direction of jazz legends like Duke Ellington and Louis Moholo, his occasional employer and the last survivor of the great South African musicians who revolutionized British jazz in the 1960s.

“One of the things that Louis talks about is the vocal quality of what he’s trying to achieve, whether that’s in terms of using old South African hymns as blueprints, or just that human, folkloric element,” Hawkins says. “But I think one of the most profound things that I take from playing with him is just the urgency of making music.”

Moholo, of course, came of age at a time when music played a life-and-death part in the struggle against apartheid. The situation is less dire for today’s performers, but Hawkins never loses sight that he, too, is performing within a larger social context.

“Yes, there are hard days, and maybe we don’t get paid like some lines of work, but ultimately, it’s a real privilege and joy to do what we do,” he says. “So that’s why it’s even more crucial that, at all times, we play with nothing but 1,000 percent commitment and sincerity. There are people who work long days and come out to hear us for whom that ticket price is significant, and we need to remember that music is fundamentally a community enterprise. It’s great to play on your own, but it’s something special to play with, and for, other people.”

The Alexander Hawkins Trio plays the Ironworks on Tuesday (June 28), as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.