Vijay Iyer returned to the Vortex last night for the third time this year and in many ways he is an ideal artist for the club.

He manages to unleash a sense of pure improvisatory abstraction that can cross over into the realms of contemporary classical music as well as responding to the historical demands of jazz piano. In terms of the latter he almost brought the house down with his still, crepuscular interpretation of Bubber Miley and Duke Ellington’s ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’.

Iyer’s method seems to be to wash his improvisations with thick layers of heavy clusters, bubbling compulsively as on ‘Autoscopy’, another standout last night, or more intricately on another of his own songs, ‘Patterns’, a homage both to his academic interest in mathematics and as a nod to his south Indian heritage.

He seems to have moved beyond the MBASE-isms that characterised him early in his career and instead plays without the scaffolding of set routines and signature licks. Iyer told the packed room that he sometimes felt as if he was alone with his heroes, as he talked about first of all Monk (having earlier playing the spring-loaded ‘Epistrophy’) or Sun Ra, from the “planet Saturn” or... as he deadpanned “... also Alabama”, a line that received some dry laughs from the back of the bar before he played the closing track from Solo his latest superb album.

The Vortex is a small enough place to really feel you are part of the action. The sheer power of the Steinway in the hands of a pianist at the top of his game in a completely acoustic setting was a fitting way to end a great year at the club. From Wynton Marsalis jamming there on a summer’s night, to the incendiary visceral pull of The Thing tinged with the first chill of the winter more recently, the club’s longstanding creative profile has received wider recognition than ever before over the last 12 months and crucially found an audience that keeps on coming back.

– Stephen Graham