Hard-bop jazz concert by Five-Way Split, a band led by Quentin Collins and Vasilis Xenopoulos, at the Albemarle Music Centre during the Hull Jazz Festival.
Five-Way Split play the Albemarle Music Centre on Saturday 21 November, as part of the Hull Jazz Festival. It's a contemporary hard-bop set fronted by trumpet player Quentin Collins and tenor saxophonist Vasilis Xenopoulos, with Rob Barron on piano, Matyas Hofecker on bass and Matt Home on drums.
The band formed in 2020 as a jointly-led group, and they describe their sound as drawing on Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and the New York contemporary-bop scene. That hard-bop tradition sits alongside their own original compositions and standards by Jimmy Heath, Cedar Walton and Horace Silver, so the set mixes the songwriters they admire with their own writing.
They've been working their way through a couple of records by now. Their debut, All The Way, was recorded at Livingston Studio and released in 2023 on Ubuntu Music by the late Martin Hummel; it made Jazzwise's top 20 Jazz Albums of 2023, and the band was nominated for best band at the 2024 Parliamentary Jazz Awards. Their latest, Modus Operandi, was cut in February 2025 and released in March 2026, so there's new material in the mix alongside the older stuff.
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Individually, the five have played with Al Jarreau, Kyle Eastwood, Stacey Kent, Gary Smulyan, Harold Mabern and Barry Harris, and have appeared at Ronnie Scott's, 606 Jazz Club and Pizza Express Live, as well as the London, Swansea and Swanage Jazz Festivals. The show is part of the Hull Jazz Festival, produced by J-Night since 1992, which has staged over 1,300 shows and worked with more than 7,000 musicians. It runs from 7:30pm to 10:45pm at the Albemarle Music Centre, 60 Ferensway, HU2 8LN, with tickets at £15, or £6 for students and under 26s.
