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p 23
 Tucked away in
an alcove of the Pizza Express in Dean Street, we compare two excellent jazz venues - the
Pizza Express that attracts international stars to its gently formal setting in Soho, and
the Vortex that brings Britain's most creative musicians to the edge of Stoke Newington
Church Street. The latter is where police sirens often spill into the spontaneous flow of
music, their blue lights making frenzied tracks across the ceiling. And it is this more
raw and urgent setting that has drawn us together.
John Fordham is dapper and self-effacing. He embodies his notion of the jazz critic as
conduit for the music, not for his or her ego. Writing mainly for the Guardian, he offers
consistently vivid plaudits to the succession of musicians who appear in venues the length
and breadth of Britain. Yet, until the Pizza Express manager reassures us, he doesn't
assume that we are welcome to stay and talk before the club opens for the gig he is there
to review. His words, which appear two days later, work a characteristic and inimitable
magic.
We are discussing the beleaguered Vortex. Unless its manager David Mossman finds a million
quid before March, it will have to close. We agree that its informality provides a natural
setting for the creation of jazz, and the intermingling of musicians with a knowing
open-minded audience. Fordham enthuses, 'It's like the extra room in my house I'd love to
have -just as familiarly shambolic, even more full of music, a place where you'll find
some of the most exciting musicians in Europe, arriving announced and unannounced.'
Its importance for musicians is inestimable. As Fordham says, it's somewhere that local
musicians can play in a sympathetic environment, 'It's a kind of cultural public service
to a non- mainstream art-form, and so it needs a mixture of subsidy and box office to
work, as you'd find in Holland or France.' Where else over the last ten years could you
have found New York's avant- garde finest lim Berne with a specially assembled British
band and Billie Holiday's last piano accompanist Mal Waldron playing with UK's George
Haslam?
On David Mossman... 'He's a hero, there's no other word for it. All adventurous art, not
just jazz, has always depended on a chemistry between the artists and the rare people like
him who devote their lives to supporting the work.' It's Mossman who organises bands that
draw queues and bands that occasionally outnumber the audience, it's Mossman who cleans
the windows of his own club, climbing out onto the ledge over the traffic while everyone
looks on horrified. And no doubt it's Mossman who maintains the club's only two loos that
serve the punters, regardless of gender.
An ironic benefit for Elton John recently united the heroes. David Mossman tirelessly
dispensed food and drink. Django Bates shattered jazz and pop classics, such as 'New York,
New York' and 'My Way', into auditory splinters all over the club's floor, only to
re-assemble them in the most startling manner. John Fordham, whose livelihood also depends
on the music, paid tribute as only he can: 'If the late lamented jazz-fusion superband
Weather Report was a hypertuned Ferrari, Django Bates' Human Chain is a handpainted hotrod
with alternately misfiring sparkplugs and a throttle stuck wide open.'
For art's sake let's keep them all, where they belong, in the Vortex.
Vortex's website, www.palay.ndirect.co.uk/vortex.jazz
for news.
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