We consider supersonic compressible vortex sheets for the isentropic Euler equations of gas dynamics in two space dimensions. The problem is a free boundary nonlinear hyperbolic problem with two main difficulties: the free boundary is characteristic, and the so-called Lopatinskii condition holds only in a weak sense, which yields losses of derivatives. Nevertheless, we prove the local existence of such piecewise smooth solutions to the Euler equations. Since the a priori estimates for the linearized...