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This collective trio was born when the late (and greatly missed) Ken Pickering, co-founder and artistic director of Vancouver’s jazz festival, recommended Alexander Hawkins for the piano chair in a new Houle project for the 2014 festival. Houle already had Brooklyn-based fellow Canadian Harris Eisenstadt in mind – Harris had recently toured and recorded in his 5+1 project (Genera, Songlines 2012). And Eisenstadt and Hawkins had played together for years in the collective Convergence Quartet. The Oxford-based Hawkins however was unknown to François, but the latter agreed on the spot, such was his trust in Ken’s judgement. After two exciting, rather free-form performances at the festival the project lay dormant until the opportunity to record in Vancouver just after the 2016 festival. Everyone brought some different compositions of their own to the session, and it was decided to add tunes by Steve Lacy and Andrew Hill and an improvisational version of a Charles Ives clarinet/violin/piano piece. The feeling in the studio was relaxed; the music that resulted has a spacious, poised quality. You Have Options represents another step in Songlines’ 26-year relationship with François Houle, starting with our very first release in 1992 – his septet François Houle Et Cetera – right up to last year’s Ghost Lights collective, and including three duo records with French pianist Benoît Delbecq and one with Norwegian pianist Håvard Wiik – projects which also owe their existence in various ways to Ken Pickering. There’s been a shorter but equally important relationship with Harris Eisenstadt, from Canada Day II in 2011 to Recent Developments in 2017. Houle Hawkins Eisenstadt are eager to take things further; as François says: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, regardless of geography. I’d like to think that there is lots of room and willingness on this planet to listen to this kind of musicmaking.”