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SATURDAY 20 NOVEMBER, 16H00
Samuel
Blaser & Marc Ducret
The growing attention that Guimarães Jazz, in its most
recent editions, has dedicated to its secondary auditorium, where more
low-profile concerts take place, is based on arguments which are intimately
connected to the current mechanisms that determine the functioning of the field
of music, and jazz in particular. If, on the one hand, the principles
advocating the market’s self-regulation, principles extracted from supposed
preferences of the public that seem increasingly detached from reality and
almost obsolete, still prevail, on the other hand it is clear that the
frontiers between what is called mainstream and independent seem
also to be fading and in process emptying themselves out of meaning. In that
sense, the realization of concerts in the secondary auditorium, in the context
of a festival committed to embrace every artistically relevant trends in modern
jazz, opens up the potentially expansive possibility of presenting to the
public musicians and projects which, despite or as result of its elements of
marginality or heterodoxy, are considered so unique that end up being
uniformized by the passage of time and its transformative effect on the
public’s preferences and mentalities.
The duo formed by Samuel Blaser and Marc Ducret fits
perfectly into the idea of that we intend to develop when programming for the
secondary auditorium. Despite their differences, in terms of both age and
creative experience, Blaser and Ducret are highly-skilled and highly-educated
musicians who share the attraction towards risk and the disruption of the
musical formulas imposed by the industry, creative qualities that are intensely
explored through an expansive sound and body performance in which the
narrative’s irregularity is sublimed and the sacrifice of the convention’s
predictability.
Born in 1981 in Switzerland, trombonist and composer
Samuel Blaser embodies the spirit of the European music of the third
millennium, characterized essentially by the incorporation into the creative
act of a vast spectrum of influences and by the fluidity of discourses
generated by globalization’s new musical Esperanto. Throughout the last twenty
years of his activity in jazz and adjacent territories, Blaser has always
guided is artistic work by a constant search for the relational dimensions of
music, manifested in collaborations with important names of avant-garde
contemporary music such as Pierre Favre, Gerry Hemingway or Paul Motian, while
at the same time exploring the limits of his instrument in solo performances
and recordings, where he operates sound according to the different
architectural and acoustic qualities of its specific context.
After more than thirty years since he was regarded as
one of the emerging musicians from the nouvelle vague of French jazz of
the 1980’s and 90’s, guitarist Marc Ducret is currently considered, due to his
remarkable trajectory of ethical integrity and aesthetical audacity in jazz,
one of the most influential names in the field of improvised and experimental
music. A self-taught musician, Ducret was, in the beginning of his career, a
member of the prestigious French National Jazz Orchestra, which he later left
to pursue his work solo, as leader or as sideman, in seminal projects of
avant-jazz such as, among other, the group Bloodcount founded by great
saxophonist Tim Berne, with whom Ducret has collaborated intensively throughout
time.