Hopes for peace and harmony were undoubtedly being shared as enthusiastically in the Vortex club on New Year's Day as everywhere else - it was just that a good many of the musicians on the third incarnation of this mostly free-improvisational all-dayer chose to celebrate them in a ferociously dissonant manner.
It's one of the lesser-known symbols of human independence that virtuosi who can play the daylights out of conventional music choose to travel such off-the-wall routes, and at the start of a new century the Vortex's now established new year improv-party had an even more anti-monolithic vibe than usual.
Pianist and architect of the day's events, Veryan Weston, promised that the opening duo of Alan Tomlinson (trombone) and Dave Tucker (guitar) would blow the morning-after cobwebs away. The words had barely left his lips before Tomlinson unleashed a bone-rattling blast that rivalled the celebratory detonations of a few hours before.
If the first salvo had set the audience rocking backwards in their chairs, it was soon clear that Tomlinson's remarkable range and musicality stretches way beyond noise-making. It was also clear that the resourceful guitarist Tucker was as likely to slip in bluesy chord patterns, bottleneck effects or gallumphing Munsters-rhythms as the abstract, Derek Bailey-like approach to melody he also favours.
Veryan Weston and the great South African drummer Louis Moholo played an exquisite short set of sweeping, liquid chordal effects backed by lightly rustling mallet patterns, and the saxophone virtuoso John Butcher - a highly individual descendant of the multilinear sax school of Evan Parker - delivered two completely different free ruminations on soprano and then on tenor.
The Thelonious Monkish melodic ideas and coolly grooving jazzy vocals of pianist Steve Beresford's larger ensemble Signals for Tea at first sounded like a band in the wrong room after so much activity away from the beaten track, but the fine drummer Mark Sanders kept it light and graceful, and there were engagingly circuitous solos from the inventive Beresford and saxophonist Jason Yarde, and increasingly affable ones from trumpeter Harry Beckett once he warmed to the task. Only Beresford's singing might have been economised on a little.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
