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Vortex brings British jazz renaissance to East End
By Mike Zwerin
The Vortex Jazz Club, which is central to what some people are calling a renaissance of British jazz, is celebrating a successful first year in its shiny new location overlooking a parking lot in Dalston, in the north-eastern London borough of Hackney.
There is no tube service to Dalston and the birthday is not exactly a national holiday, though there will be performances by, among others, jazz doyens John Dankworth and Cleo Laine.
The Vortex is well-programmed; it has excellent sound; it is smoke-free; there is no minimum charge and you can order in a pizza from next door. The renaissance involves a new generation, including the talented pianists Zoe Rahman and Andrew McCormack, bassist Orlando le Fleming and drummers Chris Higginbottom and Gene Calderazzo.
There are also some well-honed bands with names like Acoustic Ladyland, Polar Bear, Partisans, Squash Recipe and Orchestra Mahatma that sound as though they really mean business.
Many of them record for Babel Label, run by Oliver Weindling, who is also the director of the Vortex. He compares the rebirth to other fertile U.K. jazz greats and eras -- John McLaughlin, John Surman and Soft Machine in the late 1960s and early 1970s; Loose Tubes, Courtney Pine and Andy Sheppard in the 1980s.
'Sax Appeal'
In a recent feature article called 'How Jazz Is Giving the Kids Sax Appeal'' in the London Evening Standard, Fiona Maddocks wrote that the Vortex illustrates a trend.
Applications for jazz courses in U.K. music colleges have doubled in the past four years. Charlie Beale, once a Cambridge organ scholar, teaches jazz piano at the Royal College of Music. Maddocks quotes Simon Purcell, who heads Trinity College of Music's "fast growing jazz department,'' as saying: "You can now learn jazz from zero to doctoral level'' in the U.K.
The first Vortex, which opened in Stoke Newington in 1987, was an essential small venue where musicians wanted to play and hang out, something like the 55 or Smalls in New York. But then people who could no longer afford to live in nearby Islington began to move to Stoke Newington, which became unaffordable in turn. The club was forced to vacate its original premises because of what Weindling calls, "an unsympathetic landlord and a ridiculous rent increase.''
This article first appeared on the www.bloomberg.com website.
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The Vortex brings jazz renaissance to East End
The Vortex party 14 March 2000
The Vortex Jazz Foundation was set up in 2001 to help secure the future of live jazz in London and to develop a programme of jazz education and audience development.
For further information on the the work of the Foundation please visit their website at www.vortexjf.org
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