Patrick Bartley Jr, Knats and Claire Martin among highlights at Brighton Jazz Festival

Over four evenings, this year’s Brighton Jazz Festival gives us themes and moods to match the moment. On a stormy Thursday, bop lived, with two young acts reinvigorating a time-hallowed era with such joie de vivre and pleasure in display that history isn’t so much reenacted as transcended.

An untiringly fluent 23, altoist Sean Payne cuts an urbane figure in shades as his quartet Yellow Cab us downtown in tunes by Tony Williams and Freddie Hubbard. Keith Jarrett’s ‘So Tender’ slows things down but they excel at higher tempo, Michael Brecker’s wonky clockwork toy ‘Delta City Blues’ a showstopper, with drummer Darren Beckett outstanding throughout.

From the Shetlands, fellow altoist Rachael Cohen teams up with New York’s Miki Yamanaka Trio to ‘Bounce With Bud’, remember Benny Golson and plumb the depths of Geri Allen’s ‘Unconditional Love’ displaying Miki at her most pianistically florid.

Friday night’s for dancers, and a young crowd burned shoe leather to rising stars Knats. Clearly in thrall to Ezra Collective, despite less developed material there’s no resisting Newcastle’s co-founders King David Ike-Elechi on drums and electric bassist Stan Woodward whose jaw-dropping brilliance evokes Jack Bruce (and more contemporary players such as Thundercat and Hadrien Feraud - Ed).

Sensational on record, NTBM (Not To Be Missed) led by Hong Kong guitar ace and composer Tjoe Man Cheung can’t match Knats’ live drive but tenorist Marco Marotta shines on ‘Caribbean Sunset’, and ‘Starlight’ stands out among Tjoe’s tunes melodically seesawing between catchy and oblique.

Sell-out Saturday gets a terrific double-header of the homegrown and a big noise from Florida. The tri-generational QOW Trio ease us into carpet slippers with Jackie McLean and Big John Patton classics then pull the rug from under our feet with musical wit and attack. Every Spike Wells cymbal splash shouts panache and bashful young saxophone colossus Riley Stone-Lonergan (pictured above) thrillingly summons peak calypso Rollins on QOW’s own ‘Now Here’.

Dovetailing seamlessly with London’s Deschanel Gordon Trio led by a prodigy of heavy swing and lyrically expansive pianism, Patrick Bartley Jr’s alto is a high-wire act, capering, prancing and pirouetting along the melody line, earning cheer after cheer for his bravado and wit. Inspired by his synaesthesia, ‘Tapestry’ is all rippling ivories and saxophonic dawn chorus, the Nintendo classic ‘Song Of Storms’ morphs into Trane’s versions of ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘My Favorite Things’, and Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’ insightfully half-mocks its own romanticism.

Sunday eases us back to the working week in warmly intimate fashion, the 30-year-friendship and collaboration of pianist Jason Rebello and saxophonist Tim Garland giving us a set of chamber jazz at its most beautifully telepathic. Chestnuts ‘Moon River’ and ‘How Deep Is The Ocean?’ span their emotional range, Rebello’s ‘Fire Of Benevolence’ bobs along on life’s eddies, flows and tides — why rage? — and Garland's  ‘Samaii For Peace’ showcases his old friend’s dazzling technique for this evening’s biggest wow moment.

Local heroine Claire Martin (pictured above) is the perma-glam queen of swing, not a big voice but nonpareil for nuance and timing, her seductive lush life razzle-dazzle styling out heartache in Gershwin’s ‘The Man I Love’ — “What a feminist anthem!” — rendered as a rumba, Blossom Dearie’s ‘Bye Bye Country Boy’ which swings like a shire horse’s unmentionables and Vernon Duke’s ‘Autumn In New York’ sung straight and vulnerable to usher us back to a seasonal South Coast gale.