Oxford knows this time of year. Grey-faced students, quads illuminated by shafts of squared light from upstairs garrets and not a drop of midnight oil to be found anywhere - it’s deadline time.

What better way to beat those last-minute blues than to run a poetry competition? And then to bring in a smooth jazz fusion band and make their music the subject of the poems? Well, it’s an open question, but for Ruby Daley, from Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, it looked like the perfect combination. Beatin’ The Blues, the showcase event for the winners, proved that it was an ingenious and fascinating idea.

Daley invited Wandering Wires, Oxford’s excellent jazz funk fusion band, to be the subject of the competition. The competition was open to all, not just Oxford Brookes students. Entrants chose one of the band’s songs and wrote a poem inspired by the words and music. The six winners – Caio Fiocco, Georgina Lloyd-Owen, Ella Woodward, Chris Poole, Vincent Man and Scarlett Hockley – all came along to Café Tarifa on the Cowley Road to read their poems as preludes, or in one case as a finale, to the songs they had chosen.

A harsh critic might have found things somewhat shambolic: the audience perhaps showed less respect for the poets and musicians than you might expect, and actually hearing the poems was not always easy. But that critic would have failed to sense the mood and spirit of the evening. This was not about slick, earnest renditions of music and poems to a hushed and respectful gathering of the literati. It was a coming together of talented young people engaged in a remarkable piece of artistic collaboration. It was intriguing, moving and, above all, great fun in the best sense of the word.

It was a bit shambolic, but that only added to its charm. Sound issues and mindless audience chit-chat (why do they talk above the band they’ve paid money to see?) really did prevent any meaningful comment on the poems themselves. But there were moments, notably Georgina Lloyd-Owen’s interpretation of the song Recife, in which we saw how artists working in different media on the same core idea can meet on territory neither had discovered for themselves within the original theme.

Wandering Wires rose warmly to the occasion, with keyboardist John Young providing sympathetic accompaniment to the poems. They are currently a four-piece, with Young joined by Joe Bradley on bass, Tim Davies on drums and stylish singer Olivia Williams. It’s cool, smart and grooving music, harmonically rich and effortlessly tight, generating infectious funk, soul and Latin flavours even at low volume.

For jazz and poetry aficionados, the title Beatin’ The Blues might evoke memories of the Beat Generation poets and their jazz-accompanied readings. As it happens, the link was purely coincidental, which just goes to show that there are no truly original ideas. But Ruby Daley and her team proved that the good ones can come around time and again to the right people at the right moments, creating fresh versions of their magic to captivate a new generation.