Vortex Jazz Club, London
The Vortex Jazz Club has begun a programme of collaborations between authors and jazz musicians called WordPlay. It could hardly have picked a more apposite guest for the scheme's debut, since novelist and columnist Geoff Dyer is a jazz fan to the core.
Wisely, the participants didn't attempt to merge their contributions. Dyer read semi-fictionalised episodes from his acclaimed But Beautiful novel, and pianist Tom Cawley's trio, Curios, played short sets in between. The virtues of amalgamating a literary reading and a jazz gig were certainly heightened here, and the deeper impact came from the way the music and the words helped illuminate each other's meaning.
Dyer risked a familiar form of jazz stereotyping in concentrating on such troubled figures as Chet Baker and Bud Powell in his readings ? but his obvious love of jazzmaking as a mirror to the impulses, misunderstandings and revelations of life swept away those anxieties. Baker's horrific yet absurd submission to the violence of his smack-dealer, Powell's humiliation at losing it mid-solo, Ben Webster's touching depiction as a strange form of wild-life while on a country walk in England were all testimonies to how deeply the fluidity of jazz has influenced Dyer.
In between, Cawley's group joined yearning ballads and brooding tempo-mixing pieces, in which repeating notes and plucked piano strings would segue into hypnotic improvisations of Brad Mehldauesque invention. But, like the human interplays Dyer was evoking in words, theirs is a high-wire act of interdependence. Bassist Sam Burgess and drummer Joshua Blackmore ? the latter on devastatingly ingenious form ? made that abundantly plain.
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