At the Vortex jazz club in Dalston the other night, a young bass player found to his consternation that the crucial supporting spike from the bottom of his instrument had dropped out and disappeared into a crack between the baggage-lift and the wall. He was about to go onstage, so he was understandably a shade perturbed. Anxious to let the establishment's management in on the problem, he lent over to a young woman working behind the bar.
"Excuse me, the thing out the bottom of my bass has fallen out in the lift," he explained.
"You mean the spike," said the young woman, helpfully. It's like that at the Vortex. People pouring your drink or doing the washing up are likely to be on their way to postgraduate music degrees.
"That's it," the bass player said. Pretty soon a throng of willing assistants - including club manager Oliver Weindling, also proprietor of the Babel Label, home to innovative bands Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland - were on their hands and knees in the search for the missing implement. It's all in a night's work for Weindling. Often you see him shuttling between the bar, the mixing-desk and the stage to make announcements, and the mini-market round the corner to pick up the milk.
Finally the bassist's bandleader, the young Courtney Pine and Soweto Kinch sax protege Shabaka Hutchings, made the spike breakthrough. Hutchings is designed like one of the Harlem Globetrotters, so the length of his arm did the trick. Punching the air in triumph, and accompanied by cheers, he made his way to the bandstand.
That episode seems to symbolise something about the kind of location that jazz and other informally structured, enthusiast-driven creative music seems to thrive in. That particular night was a reduced-price special, for young and little-known bands. The groups played everything from a bouncy mix of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and EST, and a kind of cool, Ellington and Art Blakey-tinged postbop jazz, and the audience was young, plentiful, voluble, and keen. Regulars at this venue would never buy the frequently recycled story that jazz has become only an old person's music. In fact, a more mature chap getting a beer had to ask the spike-aware young woman for a glass: "Sorry, I'm over 50, I can't drink out of the bottle." Django Bates, the Dalston-resident keyboard and composing star, told me recently: "It's my kind of place. I can look round at the audience, and see this group of people I wouldn't have come across at any other venue. Open-minded, ethnically mixed, age-mixed, great sense of humour - a quintessentially eccentric English audience."
Support your local jazz club, wherever it is. The Vortex is a thriving example - despite having been pretty firmly sidestepped by the public funding bodies throughout its life - but there are many more, all over the UK. They're where some of the most exotic blooms of new music are grown, surrounded by those who tend them, understand them, and cheer for them. They're where you catch tomorrow's music news today.
