London's Vortex Club, which needs to clinch £100,000 by this spring in order to stay afloat, means a great deal to its devotees, as well as to some of the country's most inventive jazz musicians. And a Vortex New Year's Day is one of the venue's most cherished events: an extended show of spiky, unsentimental improv just at that point in the year when people are nursing headaches and reeling from good intentions.
But the Vortex New Year's Day show isn't just purgative. It's a timely message of hope, and a celebration of the virtues of collaboration, flexibility, intuition and imagination. In a manner reminiscent of pioneering free-improvising repertory ensemble Company, Evan Parker chose eight non-idiomatic jazz musicians and let them figure out which groupings they wanted to work in as the show unfolded. He began with a quartet for tenor sax and Steve Beresford's piano, with John Edwards on bass and Mark Sanders on drums - a premier-league British free-jazz rhythm section. But the group began with what sounded suspiciously like a tune, albeit a Monkish percussive one - a beat with notes rather than a song. Parker then wheeled off into bursts of guttural variations. His tone was big and muscular, and his phrasing opened with a low, explosive sound that spiralled upwards into rubbed-balloon squeaks and unlubricated runs.
A high-energy set was delivered at scalding heat, not just because of Parker's dark fire, but also because of the contrast between his staccato exclamations and the slippery, fluid drive of the trio. Beresford produced a mixture of waterfall runs and sturdy, punctuating chords; the remarkable Edwards sustained a flying pizzicato countermelody all over the instrument, and sometimes a drumlike effect from bouncing the bow on the strings; and Sanders delivered as powerful a blend of propulsion and accommodation as ever.
In a long show, there were plenty of highlights of an improvisational kind. Soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill's duet with pianist Veryan Weston moved from slurs and mutterings to a patient and needling minimalism (to which one woman engagingly bounced a baby). Elton Dean played a superb set on alto sax with Edwards and Sanders: his singing sound and the alertness of the others at times suggested an Ornette Coleman band.
Parker and Coxhill then demonstrated the difference of their approaches - Parker more keening and lament-like; Coxhill more indignantly spluttery - while intertwined by the common wavelength of spontaneous intuitions. If the Vortex's future hung only on such questing musicality, the club would have absolutely nothing to worry about.
