In the big, wide tooth-and-claw world, it's hard to imagine one beleaguered company going out of its way to help raise money for a rival. In jazz, where arguments over philosophies can be intense but people fundamentally believe they're on the same side, such an occurrence isn't so surprising. Fulham's 606 Club, one of the oldest dedicated jazz venues in the city, staged a benefit on Sunday for north-east London's famous Vortex - raising cash for its projected reopening in the spring. The night was intended to be a rally for the great and good - and rich -who have declared an interest in the Vortex and in jazz.

Perhaps inevitably, few of them made it in the end - but a raft of ordinary punters packed the house, and one of them even pledged £10,000 to the project.

Trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and saxophonist Stan Sulzmann ran the gig, featuring some of the tunes they play in the trio Ordesa with guitarist John Parricelli. Here they delivered more robust music, the group expanded by piano, bass and drums, and briefly by singer Christine Tobin.

Benefit gigs are traditionally raucous and rousing affairs, but, appropriately, this one underscored what the Vortex built its reputation on - uncommercial, personal, improvisational, contemporary music-making, in which the only message is the pursuit itself.

Beginning with what sounded like a repeating loop of guitar harmonics, the trio danced gently through its repertoire, with Wheeler on flugelhorn pitching soft squeals and shapely figures against Sulzmann's smoky sax lines as the music grew brisker by the third piece. Tobin injected an earthier, soulful sound into the atmosphere of private rumination, and delivered an eloquent account of Embraceable You, in which pianist Huw Warren echoed Wheeler's favourite curling phrases, and Sulzmann played deep and lustrous tenor sax.

Oblique angles on Latin music and a beautiful version of Carla Bley's Sing Me Softly of the Blues brought intuitions ever closer together: a working definition of what Vortex music is all about.