AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS
EDITION: (CD Liner Notes) Tone of a Pitch Records DATA: September 2014
The partnership between Guimarães Jazz and the Tone of a Pitch label has been, through their successive
reincarnations, developing an important work of creation of spaces for visibility, recognition and valorization of
Portuguese jazz musicians, both in collaboration with renowned foreigner musicians and in a format of
independent projects. This is the case of the 2013 edition, in which we invited the young saxophone player and
composer João Guimarães to reunite, with total autonomy, an ensemble to interpret on stage and record themes
of his own. This strategy is the result of the merge of both the unique vocation of a label with the identity of TOAP
but also of the way as we project the role of a festival such as Guimarães Jazz in the context of Portuguese music.
This is also an undeniable sign of the existence, today, of a generation of musicians in Portugal more prepared,
more competent, and with an artistic work more relevant to the jazz area, that demands from all mediators and
agents the biggest attention and commitment in order to allow them sustained processes of growth and
consolidation of their work.
The path of João Guimarães was marked by an initial phase, very precocious and fast, of an ascension and
affirmation in the Portuguese jazz scene, having collaborated with some historic names of this style, followed by
an intense period of learning in New York. Currently this young musician is experiencing a crucial moment
defining his musical identity, which seems to pass by an experimentation of tangent and adjacent territories to
jazz without relinquishing a modernist classicism engraved in the memory of foundational jazz and the vanguard
movements that helped building its history. This is probably the map through which we can enter this work, that
presents compositions of the saxophone player interpreted by an idiosyncratic and odd musician’s alignment,
which merges side by side emergent names of the Brooklyn jazz scene with established Portuguese
instrumentalists. Reserved and subtle, the themes here presented reveal an artistic vision departing from the
coordinates of a post-bop jazz and that expands by more abstract and lyric landscapes and places in the margins
of all contemporary musical languages that show the personal search for a syncretic and auratic music that faces
a risk element but does not abdicate of setting the path of its own irreducible singularity.
