Comedy and jazz have much in common. The freeform creativity. The fondness for returning to themes. The tendency for performers to be viewed as outcasts. Timing. So it made sense that host-for-a-night Stewart Lee set up a funpacked fundraiser to save his neighbourhood jazz club, Stoke Newington's Vortex.
On the other hand, hardly any of the high-calibre contributors, who mostly opted for greatest-hits packages, mentioned the link. Canada's Tony Law was preoccupied explaining that it is easy to train mice to play ice hockey, "just difficult to get them to play as a cohesive unit". Jenny Eclair did her manic menopausal routine. Simon Day roadtested his Bermondsey bard Billy Bleach. Veteran John Dowie recited brilliantly embittered poetry. Big Train's Kevin Eldon recited stupidly avant-garde poetry.
The musical turns made an understandably better fist of reconciling melody and mirth. John Hegley workshopped thoughts about the wandering thirsty audience around a rolling bass motif, while anarchic guitar supremo Billy Jenkins wreaked harmonic havoc over a dissipated refrain of "woke up this morning, fell asleep in my own sick". Harry Hill's irreverent segueing of Louis Armstrong into X-Press 2 kept jazz just about on the map. He was splendid, gesticulating wildly while proving scientifically that Jesus was a duck. But just when it looked as if Hill was the peak, a man mountain arrived.
With his ITV Digital deal decidedly pear-shaped, it is back to the day job for Johnny Vegas, which means heckling hecklers, bemoaning his sorry love life, stripping topless and begging women to embrace his portly torso. It was somehow apt that he elicited belly laughs, closing proceedings by picking raffle tickets with his teeth. Then eating them. To borrow a famous jazz phrase, Vegas was not just leader of the comic pack, he was miles ahead.
Send donations to The Vortex Jazz Foundation, PO Box 25879, N5 2WJ.
Vortex Comedy Night
