Led Bib, Puzzle Hall Inn, Sowerby Bridge, 15 September 2025

‘It’s fucking fantastic, this’. These words rang out somewhat incongruously to my left in amongst the dying notes of Led Bib’s opening track, resonating around a hushed, packed Puzzle Inn. But looking around me, I could see little disagreement.

Promoting their new album ‘Hotel Puplik’, Led Bib were playing the Puzzle as part of a short UK tour, an intimate venue, a proper old boozer, with its monthly jazz gigs, characterised by a pass-the-hat policy rather than entrance fee, augmented by this unscheduled Monday night performance, one of the finest I’ve seen in recent years. I’d most recently been at the Puzzle for a superb Gary Boyle gig where post-gig he related some slightly scurrilous stories about the Bilzen festival back in 1969 that he’d played at with Brian Auger (alongside Soft Machine). Since then Chris Martin had dropped in for a solo set a few weeks previously, prior to a few dates in somewhat larger arenas with Coldplay.

I’ve seen a number of the Led Bib’s members in the past few years as hired hands within Jack Hues’ extended bands, most memorably performing ‘Facelift’, in appropriate septet mode at the Westgate Hall in Canterbury alongside two of Syd Arthur’s Magill brothers, plus pianist Sam Bailey. But this was the first time I’d heard the band as a single entity. 5 albums in and I’m regretting that.

The band are a Mercury-nominated outfit, recently reduced to a four piece containing two saxophonists, electric bass and drummer. Instrumentation is minimal – Mark Holub, (who makes the announcements, or at least spoke wryly between sets), deftly operates on a basic kit with Cutler-like omnipresence, and the two reed players play solely baritone and alto respectively. One might worry about the ‘middle’ vacated by their erstwhile keyboard player – but great washes of echoed sounds often permeates between the opposing saxes Chris Williams and Pete Grogan – think a less manicured Delta Saxophone Quartet. Their collective collages are as much a part of the palette as the presence of the astonishing Liran Donin – often using the bass as a lead instrument: high up on the fret board crafting melody, or grinding out memorably dexterous rhythms.

This is music of high pedigree: improvised material played with sensitivity, freedom and tempo but never losing sight of a pre-ordained core: whether returning to the root of a driving bass theme or etching out anthemic lines between the saxophonists. There are folky hints here, North African rhythms even. It’s jazz, but not as you know it.