Cath Roberts is a Guildhall-trained sax-playing composer from Northamptonshire, now working in London. Her Quadraceratops septet (an exciting genre-juggling outfit that sounds a lot bigger than it is) plays the EFG London Jazz Festival on 20 November. On the evidence of their performance of seven Roberts originals here, she’s a blossoming presence among the UK’s big-ensemble jazz composers, capable of a similar early-career impact to that of Django Bates in the 1980s, or more recently Laura Jurd. Cath Roberts’s declared inspirations include John Zorn, the Bad Plus’s Reid Anderson, hip-hop, and British Jarrett-meets-horror-movies group Porpoise Corpus (who share pianist Dave O’Brien with Quadraceratops), but the floating harmonies of Maria Schneider and the barging rhythm-shifts and melodic labyrinths of Loose Tubes or Darcy James Argue’s bands sound like they might have crossed Roberts’s radar, too. She steers melodic fragments through thickening harmonies and then abrasive electronics in Song for the Worker Bee with a driving dynamism, writes perky contrapuntalisms for brass and reeds on Chair-O-Planes, gets an elbowing, angular Bitches Brew feel on Open Sandwich, and winds up the set with the brass-pealing, drum-slamming finale Flying South. She’s one to watch.
