Forget tidy genre boxes and Wikipedia timelines—the Brian Molley Quartet grab jazz, spun it through a ceilidh, baptised it in a Hebridean storm, and let it loose to dance across the Atlantic. For an hour in the subterranean hush of The Jazz Bar, history is a jam session.

Molley’s saxophone doesn’t so much play notes as send telegrams from another century—sometimes plaintive, sometimes cheeky, sometimes full of whisky-soaked bravado. Tom Gibbs answers at the piano like a witty conspirator, throwing in chords that wink and ripple, a trickster’s commentary on Molley’s sermons. David Bowden’s double bass is the tectonic plate beneath it all, a pulse that both steadies and threatens to break free. Stephen Henderson’s drums are pure time-travel: one moment a Jacobite march, the next a Harlem swing, then suddenly flicking into a Lalo Schifrin groove like a car chase in a jazz-fuelled spy film.

What makes this more than clever pastiche is the way themes shape-shift in real time. A Highland lament mutates into a gospel moan; a jig becomes a hoedown, which mutates again into a syncopated shuffle, until suddenly the whole thing feels like Dizzy and Bird wandered into a Bothy. It’s musical migration in miniature—Scotland as a seedbed, America as an amplifier, jazz as the unruly offspring.

And the room—tight, dim, and alive with the clink of pint glasses—soaks it all in. There are no screens, no filters, no Spotify algorithms smoothing the edges. Just four musicians, eyeballing each other, daring each other, pushing and pulling until the air itself vibrates with possibility. It feels like a séance, a wrestling match, and a ceilidh all at once.

By the end, you don’t just applaud— you consume a history that was never written, only played. Molley hints at a recording to come in 2026. If it captures even a fraction of tonight’s sorcery, it will be essential.

****

Reviewed by Steve H

Venue  Jazz Bar

Time 14.30

Until date 17th Aug