When London's F-ire Collective won the Innovations category at the 2004 BBC British Jazz Awards, and longterm F-ire artists like drummer Seb Rochford and guitarist David Okumu were beginning to make waves, it was the first time most UK music fans had even heard of the outfit. By that time F-ire (which took its name from American M-base sax star Steve Coleman's advice that you needed a weird meaningless acronym to get remembered) was already 10 years old. But founder-members and newcomers alike were all devoted to an adventurously inclusive attitude to world music and new jazz, and to doing things differently.
F-ire's seven-date national tour begins next week, and a fine Vortex performance on Tuesday by Robert Mitchell's piano trio acted as a good working definition of many of the things F-ire is about. This Mitchell was almost unrecognisable as the artist who had launched the slow, abstract-soul vocals and mysteriously convoluted melodies of his Trust album last month.
Accompanied by two young and typically F-ire-equipped rhythm-section players - the metronomic but awesomely complex drummer Richard Spaven and the ingenious electric and acoustic bassist Tom Mason - Mitchell played the kind of flat-out improv set his dominant composer's muse rarely allows him to do.
Mitchell improvises in Herbie Hancockish sweeps but with more input from free-improv and contemporary classical music. Rippling, romantic figures are steamrollered by brittle, zigzagging lines, flickering treble repeats ascending to almost horn-like squeals - then muscular, grooving vamps return for the bass and drums to lock on to. When the excellent Mason switched to upright bass, the group came closer to a sharp-end conception of orthodox swing, Spaven's seething percussion churning like a constant solo. Sometimes it was eerily like a hip-hop version of the Modern Jazz Quartet, sometimes like a raw-power guitar band, with Mitchell's seamless hammering of a chord pattern against Spaven's intensifying thrash. Like a lot of things F-ire members do, it's all about rhythm-based improvisation.
· At Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester (0161-907 5555) on October 15. Then touring.
