Claire Martin, Tony Kofi, Ian Shaw and Liane Carroll on song for Jazz for Labour concert

Inspired by Herbie Hancock’s Jazz for Obama, percussionist (and one of Jazzwise's founding team) Jon Newey and keyboardist Terry Seabrook gathered a great house band and four of this country’s greatest jazz talents to shake the tin for the Labour Party. A night of one-last-push pre-celebration was tempered with the mood that while things can only get better, don’t expect miracles. Brighton Pavilion Labour candidate Tom Gray — a musician himself with the rock band Gomez — admitted as much in an almost downbeat speech within an evening upbeat with what jazz does best: freeing the spirit of creativity, community and, that underrated concept, pleasure.

Setting the mood, Oscar Pettiford’s swinging showcase ‘Bohemia After Dark’ introduces the evening’s house band, being local stalwarts Seabrook and Newey, Nigel Thomas (bass), Tony Shepherd (drums), Luke Rattenbury (guitar) and Dan Cartwright (tenor sax) before introducing our first star.

Bossing the evening before heading back to London early in the teeth of rail cancellations, Tony Kofi on alto (pictured above with the house band) tonight is the Rolls Royce of saxophonists, having the two qualities that distinguish the great from the merely very good: effortlessly fluid invention with many a nod to Sonny Rollins’ calypso lilt and a signature sound as unmistakably individual as a human face. Mingus’s ‘Nostalgia In Times Square’ leads into the evening’s first highlight, Joe Zawinul’s soul-jazz evergreen ‘Mercy Mercy Mercy’, where, with everyone warmed up and in the groove, Kofi takes it to the church and then the heart of Saturday night, fire in his belly and improvisatory brain aflame.

Visiting from just along the coast — “I’m from Hastings, a big drug town with a small fishing problem” — Liane Carroll is an artist whose every performance screams the unspoken question: how the hell is she not a Dame of the Realm and certified national treasure with her own long-running BBC1 show broadcast at peak time Saturday nights? Sat at the piano, when she speaks she has you in stitches but when she sings she harrows your soul; it’s as if a switch is thrown from Jo Brand to Sarah Vaughan, neither identity a mask for the other but true to a person who feels life widely and deeply and has the talent to voice the entire spectrum from comedy to tragedy.

She mines raw emotional gold in the overworked classics ‘Love For Sale’ and ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is’ before sliding her own composition ‘Seaside’ into the gilded repertoire, a pattern of old and new her fellow songbirds repeat in their own sets, the ever-ebullient Ian Shaw delightfully sparring with Tony Kofi on ‘Night In Tunisia’ like two vintage car enthusiasts putting a Packard through its paces. Like Carroll, Shaw is a wonderful singer hiding behind a first-rate comic entertainer — and vice versa. Visually a refugee from CBeebies and hilariously holding his own bantz-wise with Liane (pictured together above) on Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got A Friend’, he can also do gravitas, as in his heartfelt speech and song about asylum seekers.

Of her regular repertoire, ‘Everything Must Change’ is Claire Martin’s on-message song of the evening, her phrasing of “hummingbirds do fly” a blissful echo of Joni Mitchell, another being her duet with Ian Shaw on the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross classic ‘Centerpiece’, familiar to Joni fans from The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. Though she has performed many a time with Shaw and Carroll, Claire Martin casts a more fragile spell, not having their end-of-pier comedy showmanship to grab the crowd and tickle their tummies. She comes fully into her own on Shirley Horn’s ‘Forget Me’, crackling and sighing like a late-night phone call to a confidante. And, crowning an evening of delights, an all-star finale of Bill Withers’ ‘Use Me’ sends us out in happy expectation of better days to come.