It’s a clear, cold night in Melbourne, and the Paris end of Little Lonsdale St has taken on a decidedly Manhattan-esque hue. I can’t work out whether it’s the foggy moonlight, construction frames arching over laneways, sewer stench, or the conceit one harbours on the way to an experimental jazz album launch – of an old friend, no less – at a celebrated jazz club. I am walking briskly through the gloom of a Sunday night, with hands jammed stubbornly in black jacketed pockets. Passers-by elicit inward glares as a sort of urban psychic self-defence strategy. My destination is Bennett’s Lane, the ‘best jazz club in the world’ and known haunt of Bob Dylan and Prince during their Southern Hemisphere sojourns.

The album is ‘Polar’, the friend and composer Marc Hannaford, and as I pick my way over the cobblestoned laneway to the club, imagining myself as an unholy combination of Woody Allen, Yoko Ono and Carrie Bradshaw, I spot the promo poster at the lane’s end. A murmured exchange with the bouncer heralds my entrée into the venue, and I feel the weight of a low-lidded jaded gaze fall on me as I briefly hover at the door before sliding onto a vinyl stool, right at the back.

The mood lighting inside is, well, moody, and as I arrive I hear the rich, yet brittle tones of a well-broken in stage piano – in this case, a glossy Kawai stallion. Settling in for what I know won’t exactly be the easy-listening hour on 774, I scan the crowd and identify the usual suspects: a couple of hipsters standing loosely at the back, Coopers in hand; a grey nomad-ish couple at a front table, sipping red wine; the requisite jazz fiend fruitloop, who’s already swaying back and forth as though in a Bacchanalian trance.

It’s impossible to avoid making comparisons with the album title. The sparcity and atonality of the solo piano’s narrative – more spoken word than melody – evokes arctic landscapes as it traverses the octaves like an oxygen-starved mountain climber, scaling frost-spiked mountaintops and plunging into glassy crevices. The rhythm is unpredictable as the weather and I struggle joyously in the face of it.

Then, silence.

In some ways, jazz crowds are worse than classical ones. At any onstage pause of more than a second, you can feel the crowd silently willing for someone, anyone, to commit the ultimate taboo – to clap in the middle of a set. Inevitably, someone will, and you can hear the rest of the audience breathe an inward sigh of relief that not only was it not them, but that everyone else knew that they knew better than that. They’ve passed the test. The jazz fiend, blissfully unaware that such an assessment exists, lets out an ecstatic whoop and a few weighty claps. Marc, who seems to be in a trance of his own, presses on like a Sherpa who’s glimpsed the mountainpeak, now almost within reaching distance. Snowstorms appear as flurries of demisemiquavers that are seemingly random but brilliantly executed.

Between sets, I order a gin and tonic, and the cool clarity of the drink seems to suit the night’s ambience. Marc is joined onstage by a double bassist in a ‘Bass Busters’ T-shirt and a wiry drummer in a paperboy cap. The bassist takes the lead with thick, strong fingers that scuttle across the strings like well-built spiders. The drummer attacks his kit with gusto, using a varied artillery of sticks, brushes, wires and kicks. After the crystalline monologue of the piano’s solo, the room seems to reverberate with the blend of timbres and interwoven rhythmic textures, and with ‘daga-da-daga-da-da!’.

The final set ends, and as the last notes settle, the crowd nods vigorously (the jazz version of a standing ovation) and offers a listless handful of claps (the equivalent of a hearty round of applause). The air becomes electrified with the buzz of a dozen amateur reviews being executed – the acoustic version of Twitter, I suppose – and people start drifting to the bar like thirsty icebergs.