To the Islington Bar Academy last night (which, in spite of its name and conspicuous sponsorship by Carling, appeared to have schooled its single pint jockey very poorly indeed). The reason? To see rising jazz band the Portico Quartet and influential scenesters Partisans launch the Time Out-sponsored bit of the London Jazz Festival.

The first signings to Babel-Vortex, the label newly set up by Will Gresford, manager of the Vortex in Dalston as an offshoot of Babel, the Portico Quartet are notable, initially at least, for their unusual line up: bass, drums, soprano sax, yes, but steel pans too (or "hang" as they seem to call the thing on their website). For a second, as they appeared on stage, I imagined they perpetuating a cruel joke, forming a perverse supergroup in tribute to the buskers of Kensington High Street, whose squawks and bashes on three of those very instruments frequently assault the hard-working journalists in the Associated Newspapers HQ. Happily the steel pan was put to better use than knocking out an arrhythmic version of Take Five, and the soprano player had a much clearer tone than the blind fellow outside Gap, whose maudlin racket has brought me near suicide oh how often of a Friday afternoon.

Yes the Portico Quartet were pretty good - melodic and occasionally rather funky, at their best I thought when they ditched pretensions to breakbeat, loosened up and allowed said steel pan took a more percussive role, playing polyrhythms against the drums. But what intrigued me most was the snippet of information that, when not playing the sax, the band's reedman goes around cheese trade shows in the west country selling Raclette cheese and the kit for melting it for a living. This, it seems to me, is the very thing - the best music/dairy product crossover since Blur's Alex James set up as a cheeswright! If only all musicians had such interesting day jobs; picture Johnny Borrell injecting bacteria into a wheel of Stilton, Phil Collins manfully stacking great slabs of Wensleydale, Kate Nash devising ways of marketing Yarg. It would give hope to us all - and perhaps add a new dimension to the pop lyric.