Convergence: Live In China captures William Hooker at full voltage, deep into a career where every concert is both a performance and a test of how far sound can still be pushed. Recorded on October 25, 2024 at the B10 Festival in Shenzhen, the album presents a single, expansive set with guitarist John King, whose serrated, heavily processed tone meets Hooker’s elemental drumming head‑on. The recording, drawn directly from the soundboard and presented without studio polish, preserves the music as it happened: an hour‑long arc shaped as much by the energy in the room as by the musicians’ long-honed instincts.
From the opening moments, Hooker establishes a broad palette: rolling toms and thunderous bass drum figures, splintered cymbal patterns, sudden drops into almost pointillist detail. His playing remains unmistakable - an orchestral approach to the kit where rhythm, colour and gesture are inseparable. King answers with “walls” of guitar that are never just volume for its own sake. Distorted chords spread like weather fronts across the stereo field, feedback is bent into long, keening lines, and brief clear-toned fragments flare up inside the noise before being swallowed again. Rather than soloist and accompanist, the two operate as intersecting fields, each capable of leading, shadowing or abruptly undercutting the other.
The performance moves through a series of distinct yet organically linked sections. There are stretches where Hooker drives the music with torrential, pulse-splintering drumming while King stacks dense grids of sound above him, creating a sensation of near-overwhelm. Elsewhere, the dynamic drops sharply: rimshots, cymbal whispers and brushed textures open space for smeared chords, chiming harmonics or single feedback tones that hang in the air like questions. Structure and spontaneity coexist. Hooker’s long experience as a composer is audible in the way arcs of intensity are shaped - how climaxes are prepared rather than simply erupted into, how recurrent rhythmic cells and textural returns act as markers across the journey - yet in the moment everything remains negotiable, responsive, alive.
The setting matters. As a live document from Shenzhen’s B10 Festival, Convergence stands as a small but telling node in Hooker’s long history of cross‑cultural dialogue. The audience’s presence can be felt in the pacing: in how long a silence is allowed to resonate, in the way certain surges of energy seem to answer something beyond the stage. It is music that refuses borders - between free jazz and noise, composition and improvisation, American avant‑garde traditions and a Chinese context that shapes the encounter simply by being there. That sense of exchange is underlined by the credits: produced by Andrew Rossiter, engineered and recorded by the B10 staff and assistants, then mastered by Dave Gardner to preserve both impact and detail, the album is the result of a collective effort around two fiercely individual voices.
All compositions are by Hooker, published by William Hooker Music (BMI), and they reaffirm his position as a drummer‑composer for whom the kit is a compositional instrument, not just a timekeeping device. Convergence: Live In China doesn’t aim for tidy themes or easy catharsis. Instead, it offers an hour inside a process: two musicians meeting in real time, feeling out the edges of volume and restraint, testing how much meaning can be generated from the collision of sticks on skins and electricity on steel. For longtime followers, it slots naturally into Hooker’s decades‑long continuum of radical music; for new listeners, it’s a bracing entry point, a reminder that, in the right hands, free improvisation can still feel dangerous, necessary and fiercely, stubbornly alive.
