AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS TRANSLATION: SCOTT M. CULP
EDITION: (CD Liner Notes) Tone of a Pitch Records DATE: November 2011
In the 20th anniversary year of Guimarães Jazz, we present the fifth recording of the concert which brings
together a collective of musicians in a performance which transforms and renews itself with those new members
appearing at each new edition of the Festival. Over the years, the TOAP/Guimarães Jazz Project, in its broad
range of forms, has embraced dozens of artists who represent the breadth, evolution and indisputable eclecticism
of the unique artistic moment which we all experience. Specifically, this recording presents the TOAP/Guimarães
Jazz Collective of André Fernandes, Mário Laginha, Julian Argüelles, Nelson Cascais and Marco Cavaleiro. These
musicians have created and brought to the public a concert program which enables listeners to understand the
progression and individual qualities of each musician's performance in this recording, allowing us to appreciate
the remarkable feeling of conceptual firmness accompanying the entire concept-construction process, one taking
place in a clearly contemporary and European-based sound matrix and creating a totality within the result
achieved and presented to us by the artists. The musicians chosen to perform on this CD were part of the 2010
Festival and comprise the "the most Portuguese group" in the history of the project. This commemorative
moment thus becomes an opportunity for us to effect a strategic change in the correlation of forces existing
within the group of artists we select to participate, rethinking the trend in seasons past in which the presence of
American musicians was so keenly felt. This change has allowed us to establish partnerships, affording us other
musical perspectives, new concepts and interactions, and other types of collaboration, resulting in a concert
performance of remarkable consistency and closeness in which each performer and long-time invited artist can
express the many facets of his musical language and the various forms of musical structure. In addition to the
new original compositions offered by André Fernandes and Nelson Cascais are those by Mário Laginha and
Julian Argüelles, whose longstanding collaboration dates back to Guimarães Jazz 1998 when they performed in a
commissioned work for the Festival, led by Mário Laginha himself.
