This 3-day event was a meeting of 10 musicians, where five from the UK were invited to work with five musicians living in Portugal, as part of the annual festival organised by Jazz ao Centro Clube Coimbra. The event’s imaginative jazz venue/promoter is a not-for-profit association, in Coimbra, the old university town of Portugal, and not wholly dissimilar in concept to the Vortex. It has its own characterful venue and great year-round programming.
This mini-festival showed how top local musicians can ‘meet’ some top improvisers from the UK and can immediately find common bonds. The concept of musicians coming together like this and audiences getting to hear them really developing through dialogue and performance is a luxury all too rare in the jazz scene. In London, there have been variants over the years, here most famously Derek Bailey’s Company Week and John Russell’s Fete QuaQua at The Vortex.
The improvised music scene in Portugal, both in terms of its own musicians and imaginative venues and festivals, matches other highlights of the country, be it in terms of food, wine and weather. It has more than a match for the rest of Europe, perhaps partly influenced by having a great record label for this music, Clean Feed, based in Lisbon.
The impetus for the event came in part from live-wire trumpeter Luis Vicente, on tour earlier this year with Olie Brice and Mark Sanders. He then got into discussion with Tony Dudley-Evans and, together, they put together the line up. It was an intriguing instrumentation, but all the better for that.
The first night started with all the musicians in a tentet. Generally, it was a free improvised set, but there were a few hooks by Vicente and Brice to build from. They had a “warm-up day” playing together and this already could be felt in the power of the work from the start. So as not to tread on the toes of the other pianist in the group, Karoline Leblanc, Pat Thomas showed off his abilities on electronics, which subtly enhanced what was going on, apart from a ‘solo’ towards the end. This performance acted as a great start because from then on, all the lineups in the concerts over the next days had a cohesion. There was a total lack of tentativeness and the musicians interacted imaginatively.
While the main venue, the Salao de Brasil, always acted as the main focus for the gigs each night, some other spaces around the town were used for smaller groups. By having performances in different locations in Coimbra, that too helped the atmosphere. For each set, one was able to find some similar marvellous moments given the empathy that had developed. Sometimes sonic, sometimes contrapuntal, as much because the musicians could interact in the (creative) hothouse environment. A few particular examples can just give a small snapshot of the dynamism of the festival. In the museum, we had a gig with guitar, cello and piano. Here, Hannah Marshall and guitarist Marcelo dos Rios played off each other to create sounds where it was impossible to say which instrument they came from!
Similarly, when Ziv Taubenfeld played with Rachel Musson, earlier that day in a cellar, we had two instruments with very similar ranges, which intertwined most imaginatively, but where we could still hear the differences in timbre.
The ‘wild card’ gig of the festival was a solo by Pat Thomas on a chamber pipe organ in the Seminario, which, astonishingly, was his first ever public appearance on a church organ. He found some truly remarkable sounds on it, before switching over to the nearby grand piano for a smart version based around “All The Things You Are”.
The three days climaxed beautifully. During an energetic last concert on Saturday night, you felt that Taubenfeld might start a phrase,and Marcelo dos Reis on guitar would seamlessly continue it. It felt very much as though we had just experienced the start of some great collaborations.
Musicians:
Gonçalo Almeida – bass, Olie Brice – bass, Marcelo dos Reis – guitar, Karoline Leblanc – piano
Hannah Marshall – cello, Rachel Musson – saxophone, Mark Sanders – drums
Ziv Taubenfeld – bass clarinet, Pat Thomas – piano, organ, electronics, Luis Vicente – trumpet
Programme:
26 September: Tentet
27 September:
Gonçalo Almeida / Rachel Musson / Ziv Taubenfeld
Karoline Leblanc / Hannah Marshall / Marcelo dos Reis
Luís Vicente / Olie Brice / Mark Sanders + Pat Thomas
28 September:
Hannah Marshall/Luis Vicente/Olie Brice/Rachel Musson
Pat Thomas
Karoline Leblanc / Gonçalo Almeida / Ziv Taubenfeld / Marcelo dos Reis / Mark Sanders
