| Jazz |
Brodie Laird-Jarvie, Deceptive Lizard: Unapologetic, High-Energy Jazz From One of Scotland’s Brightest Bandleaders
Some album titles ask a question before you’ve even pressed play. Deceptive Lizard, the literal English translation of “Apatosaurus,” the long-necked Jurassic giant once mistakenly confused with a different dinosaur entirely and saddled with the wrong name for decades, is exactly that kind of title, and it turns out to be a genuinely clever one. Because there is nothing accidental or misnamed about this record. It’s the sound of a young Scottish bandleader stepping fully into his own identity, at the head of a band that refuses to sit still inside any one genre. If the Apatosaurus is deceptively named, the album’s own kind of “deception” is the good sort: it wrongfoots your expectations about what a “jazz record” is supposed to sound like, then wins you over completely.
Brodie Laird-Jarvie is, by any measure, one of the most in-demand bass players working in Scotland today, and Deceptive Lizard is the project where his own musical voice as a composer and bandleader gets to run free. His route here has been anything but conventional: after cutting his teeth on the Scottish jazz circuit, he crossed the North Sea for a master’s degree at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, working alongside major names of the European jazz scene like Jasper Blom, Reinier Baas, Ben van Gelder, Joris Roelofs and Ernst Glerum, playing North Sea Jazz Festival and Amsterdam Jazz Fest along the way, and twice reaching the final of the Bimhuis’s prestigious “Keep An Eye” competition. It was in Amsterdam, in fact, that the seeds of his current band were sown, a detail that becomes clear once you look closer at his collaborators here.
Back home in Glasgow, Laird-Jarvie has become one of the city’s most versatile players: a permanent member of the Brian Molley Quartet (selected for the Made in Scotland programme at the Edinburgh Fringe, and taken as far afield as jazz festivals in Jodhpur and Chennai), a member of pianist Paul Harrison’s band Act Shy, a composer commissioned by Symphony Hall Birmingham for its Jazzlines programme, and co-curator of a monthly improvised-music series at Glasgow’s Glad Café. Deceptive Lizard sits alongside his other project, the riotously named Fine Men With Foul Tongues, as one of the two vehicles for his own writing, but where that band leans hard into swagger, Deceptive Lizard is the more exploratory, genre-blurring of the two, closer in spirit to the “high-energy jazz-rock” billing it’s earned live: sharp forms and driving grooves that connect as naturally with alternative prog-rock audiences as with contemporary jazz crowds.
Crucially, this isn’t a leader-plus-sidemen record. As the promotional text around the release puts it, Deceptive Lizard is about all five musicians bringing their own voices and personalities to the table, taking Laird-Jarvie’s compositions “by the horns” and reshaping them into something fresh every time out. That’s not press-release flattery, the band’s individual pedigrees back it up. Guitarist Ben MacDonald is a fixture of Glasgow’s jazz underground, hosting the Glasgow Jazz Festival’s free Late Night Jam Sessions and curating his own improv-driven LEGIT Sessions residency at The Jazz Bar in Edinburgh. He’s also a member of the acclaimed Ubuntu Records world-jazz ensemble Mezcla, alongside fellow Deceptive Lizard bandmate Michael Butcher on tenor saxophone. Butcher, a Royal Conservatoire of Scotland graduate, has crossed paths with Laird-Jarvie for years already, playing together in both Act Shy and Fine Men With Foul Tongues, the kind of long-standing musical friendship you can hear in how tightly this band locks together.
On alto saxophone and keyboards, Norman Willmore brings a background all his own: a Shetland Islander raised on Scandinavian and Nordic folk traditions as much as jazz, twice nominated for Scottish Jazz Awards (including a 2025 Best Album nomination for Twa Double Doubles with drummer Corrie Dick), and a musician whose records fuse free jazz with the melodic language of his island upbringing. Behind the kit, Glasgow-based drummer Alex Palmer brings his own restless, genre-hopping CV, a member of Azamiah, Nimbus Sextet (signed to Acid Jazz Records) and a string of other Glasgow projects, drawing on influences from Mark Guiliana to Hiatus Kaiyote, exactly the kind of elastic, groove-forward drumming this material needs.
Then there are the two guests who complete the picture, and they’re where that Amsterdam connection pays off. Italian vocalist Marta Arpini, who studied jazz vocals at the same Conservatorium van Amsterdam around the same years as Laird-Jarjie, has since built her own acclaimed career as a songwriter, with an Edison Award nomination for her debut Forest Light and further albums blending jazz with indie folk songcraft. Her voice adds a completely different colour to four of this album’s ten tracks. And on “Rabbit Hole,” Catalan pianist Xavi Torres Vicente, another Amsterdam-trained musician, whose trio won the Bimhuis’s Keep An Eye Jazz Award back in 2015, steps in for a guest appearance that brings the album’s title full circle: it’s the one track where every strand of this band’s international, cross-genre story converges at once.
The album opens with “Adventures,” Marta Arpini’s voice arriving early to set an exploratory, scene-setting tone that lives up to the title. “Axis” and the terrific “Apato” – surely no coincidence, given the album’s Jurassic namesake – let the core quintet stretch out instrumentally, all sharp unison lines and shifting rhythmic ground. “The Islander” brings Arpini’s voice back for one of the record’s most atmospheric moments, while “Kitchen Kumquat” is pure unapologetic fun, a title as playful as the tune’s tightly wound grooves promise. “Rabbit Hole” is the emotional and structural centrepiece, the only track to combine Arpini’s vocals with Xavi Torres Vicente’s piano alongside the full band, and it earns its title, pulling the listener down into denser, more winding territory than anything before it.
“Skelf” and the two-part “Sketch” (Part 2 bringing Arpini’s voice back one last time) show off the band’s compositional range, moving from thorny, splinter-sharp interplay to something more impressionistic, before “Swimming” closes the record on a wide-open, driving note that sends the album out exactly the way it came in: unapologetically, on its own terms.
Deceptive Lizard is exactly what its cast of musicians promised: a genuinely collective statement, not a solo showcase, built by five (plus two) players who clearly relish pulling Brodie Laird-Jarvie’s compositions in unexpected directions. It’s high-energy, unpretentious, cross-genre jazz-rock played by some of the sharpest young talent currently coming out of Scotland, and whatever its dinosaur namesake might suggest, there’s nothing extinct about this sound. A great, confident step forward from one of the scene’s most exciting bandleaders.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 29th, 2026
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To order the album (CD & vinyl)
Tracklisting:
- Adventures (*)
- Axis
- The Islander (*)
- Apato
- Kitchen Kumquat
- Rabbit Hole (*)
- Skelf
- Sketch Part 1
- Sketch Part 2 (*)
- Swimming
All compositions by Brodie Laird-Jarvie.
Musicians:
Brodie Laird-Jarvie: electric bass, keyboards
Ben MacDonald: electric and acoustic guitars
Norman Willmore: alto saxophone, keyboards
Michael Butcher: tenor saxophone
Alex Palmer: drums
(*) Guests:
Marta Arpini – vocals (tracks 1, 3, 6, 9)
Xavi Torres Vicente – piano (track 6)