Standing room only when we made it upstairs to a blacked out Vortex walking through Gillett Square in off the Kingsland Road where there was the usual very busy milling around of coffee drinkers and locals coming and going on a typical Friday night in Dalston. You would have no idea that anything was going on inside and yet climb the stairs and the place was full. Faces in the audience included 33 label boss free-jazz saxist Paul Jolly of the People Band and Andrew Plummer, the Kurt Schwitters loving singer with World Sanguine Report. This Vortex gig was notable in that we heard trumpeter Alex Bonney live for the first time - Bonney known as an influential studio engineer enjoyed down the years particularly as a player on Dakiz Davis classic Being Human (Babel, 2013) and for his mastering on the 5-star Hanamichi. Bonney even advised on the new acoustics impression of the Vortex when it got a new sound desk (above) after Lockdown.

Dakiz contributor Matthew Bourne - the Bourne/Davis/Kane legend and Tippettian who is one of the UK's foremost free-improvisers - is definitely singer-photographer Paula Rae Gibson's most significant primus inter pares collaborator. He does not comp in a jazz manner - rather he responds and takes things into his own space, there is a difference. Gibson's work Loving in Real Time that had original video and photography back projected found the whispery, noir-ish, avant-garde singer with the avant Memorymoog synth innovator pianist and improviser Bourne collaborating in response to PRG's No More Tiptoes released just over 15 years ago. Certainly live the north London based singer, widow of the acclaimed What's Love Got To Do with It director Brian Gibson, is beginning to enter her prime and Loving in Real Time is her best work. A spectral gleam in the mind's eye burns.