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SATURDAY NOVEMBER 12, 05:00 PM
Benjamin Koppel, Anders Koppel and Martin Andersen Trio
In its most recent editions, the festival’s Small Auditorium has been used as preferential stage for the presentation of some of the most challenging and idiosyncratic projects of European contemporary jazz. Historically, Europe came in touch with jazz following the Second World War, period during which, a fact that is acknowledge by several icons of this genre such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker or Nina Simone, it became the adoptive continent of a musical genre whose artistic value was at the time still not fully recognized in its birth place. The Europeans, heirs of classical culture, soon understood that jazz was a crucial manifestation of modernity and that, though in certain ways it breaks with tradition, in others it used tradition in order to discover new formal patterns of expression. Throughout the following decades, jazz was not only celebrated, analyzed and understood in Europe as one of the dimensions of modern “high” culture, but it was also profusely played by countless musicians who adopted this new musical idiom in an attempt to find their own artistic identity. Taking these historic precedents into account, it is not surprising that one of the most distinctive features of European jazz is the interpretation of the formal principles of classic music, of jazz tradition and of other non-western musical traditions within the frame of a common (universal) language, and in this regard the Benjamin Koppel, Anders Koppel and Martin Andersen constitutes no exception to this general principle.
Similarly to what so often happens in jazz, Anders Koppel and Benjamin Koppel, respectively father and son, descend from a family of great musical tradition that includes Herman D.Koppel, a famous Danish classical composer. Anders Koppel is a peculiar musician and the author of a vast body of work of remarkable stylist amplitude. Throughout the last fifty years, and besides his activity in the context of groups such as the rock band Savage Rose and the jazz-folk trio Bazzar, the pianist was also the author of numerous pieces of concerts for classical and chamber music ensembles, having also composed profusely for ballet, theatre and cinema (with an impressive record of more than fifty soundtracks).
Benjamin Koppel is a multi-awarded saxophonist and composer with a solid career in jazz both as a sideman and as a leader, a trajectory that is condensed in several recordings and collaborations with great names of contemporary music, such as Joe Lovano, Randy Brecker, Kenny Werner or David Douglas. An artistic agent provocateur interested in engendering unexpected musical encounters and creative contexts susceptible to potentiating the intersection between different aesthetical universes, Benjamin Koppel is also the founder of the music label Cowbell, which he uses as the place of incubation for his collaborative projects with important musicians of contemporary jazz, such as Brian Blade or Jack DeJohnette, among others.
The trio that the two Danish musicians will present at Guimarães unites two different musical generations and will be complemented by the presence of the drummer Martin Andersen. In a recent project, this group attempts to conciliate the classical tradition with the deformalized expression of jazz, manifested in a versatile music in close dialogue with contemporaneity.
6+ years old
Benjamin Koppel saxophone
Anders Koppel Hammond organ
Martin Andersen drums