Hooligan romantics woo open-eared jazz fans

Choosing a band name is a tricky science at the best of times. You want something that looks good, something that rolls easily off the tongue, to help that all important word of mouth reputation, something that maybe gives an idea of what you sound like and who you are, something that draws people in and doesn't alienate the people you want to attract.

When you're working at the adventurous end of jazz, those two final points are crucial. Take Led Bib. When their drummer-leader Mark Holub was thinking of names, he wanted to get away from the Joe Bloggs Quintet style of titles that proliferate in jazz so people who might like the band wouldn't be put off by any preconceptions of what a jazz quintet sounds like.

In the end, Holub decided that, since he was promoting a band comprising a set line-up - a situation not always guaranteed in jazz - he would go with Led Bib and suffer the consequences, which so far have seen the band attracting audiences both young and hip and more mature and open-eared.

"The point about our music is that it wouldn't sound the same if we had someone deputising for, say, one of the saxophone players and it's actually very rare, the last resort, really, that we would play a gig without the five players as advertised," he says. "So there's that side of it. Plus, every gig we do is different, depending on how we respond to the venue and where we take the music once we've played the themes. If you come to hear Led Bib, you're getting something there no other audience will ever hear."

Holub is a classic case of someone travelling a long way to find something that was on his doorstep. An American from New Jersey, he studied jazz in Leeds before settling in London and is now leading a band that wouldn't sound out of place on the downtown New York scene and whose record company, Maryland-based Cuneiform label, is based a few hours' drive down America's eastern seaboard from his home state.

"I did study on the jazz course at Berklee School of Music in Boston and then did my degree at the University of Southern Maine," he says. "But the trouble with jazz education in the States is that there's such a weight of tradition that you're expected to conform to. I'd gone from listening to the Grateful Dead in my teens to trying more outside' jazz like Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy before getting into Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. So I knew a bit about the history but what I thought was important about jazz was that the musicians were individuals, and I kept getting told I couldn't do this or couldn't do that."

With a BA from Leeds, he moved on to Middlesex University to take an MA, and once there began to gather musicians who would bring the sound he heard in his mind to fruition. As a fan of saxophonist John Zorn, especially his Masada group, Holub wanted to play music with plenty of passion and freedom but lots of punch.

With a line-up of saxophonists Pete Grogan and Chris Williams, keyboardist Toby McLaren and bassist Liran Donin alongside Holub, Led Bib released their first album, Arboretum, on the Slam label in 2005 to a small but enthusiastic audience. Ironically, this was also their introduction to their current label, whose founder, Steve Feigenbaum, is particularly keen on English bands and musicians, including Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt and Keith Tippett, and was already aware of Arboretum and its successor, Sizewell Tea, when Holub approached him about releasing the recent, highly impressive Sensible Shoes.

If Holub is uncomfortable with terms such as punk jazz and death jazz that have been used to describe Led Bib's music, he might look to a description his fellow Cuneiform Records artist, the former Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper, gave to his favourite kind of musicians, those able to play the hairiest solos yet bring tears to the eyes and a lump to the throat. Hopper calls them "hooligan romantics" and with the blend of ferocity and disarming pastoralism Sensible Shoes boasts, Led Bib qualify.

"Yeah, hooligan romantics, that sums us up."