SEVEN nights ago, Cheryl Chadha could be glimpsed sitting at the back of her basement jazz club, sipping red wine and, like the dozens of patrons in front of her, their heads nodding in time to the beat, she was enjoying the live music.

The musicians up on the stage - Andrew Bain’s Embodied Hope Quartet (drums, double bass, sax, piano) - were launching their new album. It sounded pretty good, too.

The Blue Arrow Club was opened in February, taking its place amidst the teeming mass of pubs, takeaways, restaurants and clubs that is Sauchiehall Street. In its previous incarnations this venue has been a taproom, a cocktail and burger joint, a beer hall, and the Rio Pop-Up club, amongst other things. Now it’s a jazz club: a slender downstairs space with red theatre lights illuminating the brick walls and the cabaret tables with candles in red glass holders. It has a capacity of around 120.

The club’s logo bears the Blue Arrow name and a downwards-pointing blue arrow: the lower-case typeface and the arrow bring to mind a handful of irrepressibly cool sixties album covers from the legendary jazz label, Blue Note. Among the acts who have played here so far is Kurt Rosenwinkel, the great American jazz guitarist and keyboard player.

The club’s three owners are Chadha, Iain Maclean and Willie Knox. All three have backgrounds in the event, entertainment and music businesses. Chadha herself played the sax in her teens, having been taught by none other than Tommy Smith, the great, Edinburgh-born sax player who himself recorded his very first album at the age of 16.

The club’s core nights for live jazz are Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Other nights are sprinkled with such events as the Embodied Hope album launch. In an interview a few hours before that gig, Maclean said he and his partners had been at pains not to “pack the place seven nights a week and thus allow the quality to diminish. Part of what we’re trying to do is build the audience in Glasgow. It’s a city overflowing with talent and there’s lots of live music on all the time: you really are fighting for an audience a lot of the time.” But he says that when he first saw these premises, “it just shouted out ‘jazz club’ - for me it had that speakeasy vibe.”

Jazz seems to be experiencing a renaissance. A London Sunday newspaper at the weekend, listing seven influential musicians in the genre, put it neatly: for many people, it said, jazz has seemed like something that others listened to but it has seen a serious overhaul in the last few years. Kendrick Lamar’s much-feted 2015 album, To Pimp a Butterfly, the article added, made “liberal use of jazz, which dovetailed with hip-hop and opened it for a new generation.”

“Glasgow has kind of been without a jazz club for quite a long time.” Maclean adds. “Iain Copeland was doing the Basement Jazz stuff in Glasgow in the nineties at the Ramshorn and Blackfriars [venues]. Willie and I did the Rio Club pop-ups here for the [Glasgow] Jazz Festival for two or three years, and they were fantastic, and people were saying, you should do a permanent venue, this should be a full-time thing.

“But we’ve seen it happen so often - you start out and you put on a few events and you get a core audience in, but if you’ve got too many things on, that core diminishes rather than grows, because you’re diluting that core audience. It’s something we have been considering for a while.

“Willie and I work in live music and event production as well as having had hotels and bars and restaurants over many years. You look at a project and think, how do you make something like this sustainable in the long term? There is a difficulty especially as there’s so free live music just now. We were part of that culture for quite a while at the Rio Cafe, and Cheryl ran very successful Scat 23 jazz nights at Dukes Bar, which were largely free gigs. As a bit of a socialist at heart, I think, how do you pay musicians a wage commensurate with their talent? So it was a challenge.”

Many fans of live jazz, he adds, maybe only attend one gig a week. But on the other hand Sauchiehall Street is within a half-hour of 3,000 hotel rooms. That’s a lot of visitors. A lot of potential jazz fans, too.

“You ask people, have you ever been to a jazz club? Eight times out of 10, they’ll say they have, at a great place in Copenhagen, or New York, or Berlin. It’s because when you’re away from home, and you want to go out for a drink, there’s an air of respectability, of safety, at a jazz club, You know you’re not going to have somebody bumping into you, causing trouble.”

Thus there was scope for a late-night venue that appeals to visitors and to local jazz fans. It helps that there’s also an emerging audience of young jazz fans.

“Jazz for me is a passion,” says Chadha. Now 49, she is originally from Glasgow and studied at Stirling University. “I started out in jazz when I was really young. Growing up in the seventies, I realised that a lot of popular music had a lot of brass section in it, so I did my research and moved to the history of it all, and where it all began. As I got out of my teens I got more into club culture, dance culture, but jazz was always there, because jazz for me is the beginning of western popular music. Without jazz, you wouldn’t have disco or dance music.

“I rediscovered it again a few years ago. I was promoting a night under my Scat23 label and we were tapping into the [music] undergraduates at the Conservatoire [the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland]. I gave them a space and said, I don’t want you to play standards, I want you to play experimental, to push the boundaries. And they did. It totally re-engaged me. At my age, having listened to so much music, you’re always searching for something that’s going to make you excited again, and that was the moment where I thought, there’s something going on here.

“There’s a renaissance,” Chadha affirms. “Young kids are referencing grime, jungle, r ‘n’ b, hip-hop, and as jazz should be, it’s an evolving genre. It’s the new kids who are adding something new and pushing the genre forward. I just find it all incredibly exciting right now. I want to be part of the zeitgeist.”

The club has been going well so far, says Knox, seated next to Chadha. “We’re still in the early stages. We still haven’t got a second show on at night, which we’re hoping to do - that is subject to our licence being expanded to allow us to do that. So it’s a work in progress. We’re really pleased - “ he breaks off as something heavy crashes to the floor of the stage, just 20 feet away - “we’re really pleased, apart from the loud noise behind us, with how things have gone.

“It’s interesting to see how many young people have been coming here so far,” he adds. “That’s what surprises a lot of people when they come into the place, that the audience is so youthful.” How young are they? “Mid-twenties, I think,” he says. “I think it’s a mid-twenties thing, that people have to go through a little bit of awareness training before they get an ear, necessarily, for jazz, you know?”

“Saying that, though,” says Maclean, “there’s a lot of the first-year students from the Conservatoire - 18, 19 - coming through and playing on the stage, and coming in for the sessions we’re starting to do later at night. There’s one of the performers who’s just [old enough to be] allowed to come into the place and no more, but I would say that he’s one of the best drummers that Scotland has ever produced.” Chadha says the audiences have included “foreign students, visitors, older people - we get the parents of the young people who’re performing. It’s really wide, and I love that.”

The club opened just a few months ahead of the city’s jazz festival, whose headliners this June are Mr Jukes, The Georgie Fame Family Trio and Orchestre Poly-Rythmo. “We’ve always been big supporters of the jazz festival,” says Knox. “Although there are, and have been for many years, pubs that have helped keep jazz going, it doesn’t build an audience, because it’s something that is incidental to your night out, rather than something that you’re supposed to feel like going to see. So the fact that there’s a club staging high-quality jazz three nights a week will help build the audience for the jazz festival.”

By 9pm, the place has been transformed. The largely youthful audience is in place, sitting at the tables. The flickering candles in their red holders give the venue an intimate feel. Fairy lights lend sparkle to the bar. Chadha recalls that, according to her father, her love of jazz may stem from the fact that her childminder, when she was three, was heavily into Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, and played their music constantly. At length, she excuses herself to go up onto the stage and, standing at the mic, tells the assembled fans that it may be a miserable spring evening outside but she’s delighted to introduce the Embodied Hope Quartet. The band - Edinburgh-born Andrew Bain on drums, George Colligan on piano, Jon Irabagon on tenor sax, Michael Janisch on double bass - are in terrific form. One critic said of their album that it is “expertly executed with first rate playing and shimmering moments of sheer brilliance.” Which seems, to these distinctly non-jazz ears, to be praise indeed.