March is the most wonderful time of the year in East London: just after the East Festival, and just before the East End Film Festival, lies the magical, fantasy land of the London Word Festival, a celebration of alternative literature, theatre, visual arts and music, which started last week and will continue in various, more or less quirky East End venues until the end of the month.

To understand the spirit of the London Word Festival, think of a concentrated, evening-only and miniature version of August in Edinburgh, mixed with that amazing party your coolest friend once threw in his Victorian house off the Roman Road: there is an amused buzz in the air, everyone is relaxedly enthusiastic, the room is full of people that you either know or would like to know, and while nobody is ever there at the supposed starting time, nobody really minds having to wait. Last Friday, in the sparingly art deco theatre of the Toynbee Studios, the Festival gave all fans of noir the alternative ride of their life in Avant! Noir, a combination of jazz music, modern criminal fiction, and graphic novels.

We started off with a set by Bristol-based quartet Get The Blessing, who took the stage as a musical version of the Reservoir Dogs gang, and who then accompanied Cathi Unsworth and Courttia Newland in their readings of two short stories. Unsworth’s was a classically noir, Whitechapel-based episode of criminal low-life, smeared lipstick and dirty pavements, read with velvet voice and Some Like it Hot hairdo. Newland built the hallucinatory tale of six friends who are off to a rave in the middle of a field, with an undercurrent of danger and imminent precipitation of control; Get The Blessing’s rhythm section (which used to be the Portishead’s rhythm section) sustained the wild feeling of Newland’s story with powerful suggestions of flailing arms and steam rising from human bodies. Between the two authors, the music punctuated a projection of comic strips from Huzzah! Noir, a sequential project in which a group of graphic artists take turns to complete a graphic novel, each one having only three days to continue the story on the basis of the last strip.

After an interval (which I slightly regretted, as it stopped the build-up of an out-of-time atmosphere), Get the Blessing left the scene to jazz quintet Led Bib, who provided the soundtrack to the following two short stories. The first, a vertiginous trip from an Ikea mock-up bathroom into the credit crunch by Ray Banks, occasionally felt oppressed by Led Bib’s sound, not exactly pushed along, but certainly over-exposed. The collaboration was happier with the second story,  Toby Litt’s nightmarish, deliciously ironic tale of girlfriend’s revenge hidden in the dark Clerkenwell mist. Led Bib also played for the continuation of the graphic story, in a rockier style,  surprisingly well-fitted for the turn of the plot towards Nazi-infested France, with a maybe fortuitous but still definite hat tip to Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. The evening ended with an improvised set,  both bands quite literally facing each other on the stage.

Avant! Noir happily managed a smooth equilibrium of media and styles, music and words and images all melting into each other, suggesting further shapes and colours, stretching the genre without straining it. It would have been interesting to have more female perspectives and voices (the femme fatale of noir movies and stories seldom speaks for herself, and yet one is always very curious as to what she would have to say), and a less circumstantial lighting would have been the cherry on the cake - but the complicit smiles of the audience at the end of the show were an unmistakable indication of the success of the party.

One-off performance