Avant Music News

A few words about the London Jazz Festival:

The booker at Dalston’s doughty Vortex club introduces the opening night of London Jazz Festival-sponsored events defensively: “It’s business as usual here at the Vortex.” The club crowns the bend in an underground river of London jazz venues that once surfaced in the back room of the Red Rose, in Finsbury Park, but now wends from pub cellars in Stoke Newington down to the self-consciously cutting-edge space of Dalston Junction’s Cafe Oto, nurturing jazz’s experimental wing all year long. Tonight, this tiny glass attic is packed with discerning twentysomethings and radical pensioners for a trio that seems hand-picked to appease them, representing a Venn diagram of distinct but overlapping schools.