The Paul Towndrow Quartet play youthful, fresh and powerful music with a firm grounding in the jazz tradition, says Mike Gordon, whose resident trio will back both visitors.

It showcases Paul’s compositional talent alongside virtuosic and emotionally driven soloing from some of the country’s top improvisers: Steve Hamilton on piano, Mark Hodgson on bass and Alyn Cosker on drums.

Paul’s career has skyrocketed since his success in the world saxophone competition at Montreux jazz festival in 2003, 2004 and 2007.

Still in his twenties, he won an international scholarship in 1999 and went on to study in Boston, USA, with sax icons George Garzone and Joe Lovano.

The quartet’s music is “a turbo-charged amalgam of all your saxophone heroes”, according to the Guardian.

Chris Hodgkins, who played for the jazz club last August, is a versatile and swinging jazz trumpeter, and a big name on the jazz scene.

Trumpeter and broadcaster Digby Fairweather says: “Chris has spent the majority of his time elevating the causes of British jazz as the director of Jazz Services, the powerful national organisation which has done most to cement the image of jazz in Britain as something more than a poor artistic relation”.

Digby says of Chris’s 2007 CD: “This album is an unqualified triumph. Apart from the creative quality of the improvised music you’ll find here, he’s planned its settings with a master’s degree. It’s a stylistic span of compositions, from connoisseur standards to contemporary delights; neat, sweet originals and arrangements by all three participants; with regular use of all the tonal opportunities including mutes.

“It’s an intriguing but entirely convincing meld of stylistic influences in which you can regularly spot echoes of Miles, Sweets, Clark, Chet, Cootie, Roy, Louis, Ruby and our very own and very dear Humphrey Lyttelton”.