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WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 16, 9:30 PM
Project Sonoscopia / Guimarães Jazz
The 1960’s are currently considered a historically revolutionary epoch which produced seismic effects that are to this day felt in many dimensions of our societies. In music, and in art in general, the consequences of the disruptive movements propelled by countless artists and musicians interested in opening new paths of creative expression generated, among other long-term consequences, the dilution of frontiers between musical genres and a specific focus on innovation and the invention of new artistic idioms. As we know, free jazz has played a decisive role in this process of redefinition of musical traditions by freeing it from the straightjacket of obsolete conventions. By promoting pure improvisation and real-time formats of artistic creation, the musicians responsible for such movement inaugurated an autonomous field of music in which the interpretation of the canon was replaced by experimentation and a progressive approximation to conceptualism, an aesthetical trend which was then in vogue in visual arts. The partnership between Guimarães Jazz and the artistic collective from Porto, Sonoscopia, initiated five years ago, aims at reflecting this interpenetration of musical practices and to present the public musical approaches that, while tangential to the jazz phenomenon, are nevertheless intimately connected to it because of the way in which they absorb and modulate the disruptive matrix of non-idiomatic forms of expression. In 2022 this partnership proposes the duo between Australian drummer Will Guthrie and keyboardist David Maranha, a project that represents a new stage of collaboration between two relevant musicians of the European improvised music circuit.
Currently living in France, Will Guthrie is a drummer and percussionist from Australia with a highly heterodox and multifaceted approach to its instrument, which he explores by means of expansive techniques of amplification and electroacoustic composition. With an impressive discography of more than fifty albums both solo as well as in a collaborative regime, Guthrie is the leader of the percussion and gamelan ensemble NIST-NAH and works regularly with influential musicians of the improvised and experimental music circuit, such as Anthony Pateras, Jean-Luc Guionnet or Ava Mendoza, among many others.
David Maranha is a prominent figure in the Lisbon music scene due to a body of work built for more than thirty years of permanent transit between different musical fields. Mainly known to the Portuguese audience for his activity with the experimental/psychedelic rock band Osso Exótico, an iconic band of the 1990’s of which he was one of the co-founders, Maranha has collaborated with important musicians of North-American and European improvised music, and is currently considered by the critics as one of the most influential names of the Portuguese exploratory music.
In the context of this duo, Will Guthrie and David Maranha attempt to challenge categories through the harmonization of different musical typologies (drone music, psychedelia, krautrock and, of course, jazz) in a common language. Using improvisation not as an end in itself but as a basic methodology, the two experienced musicians approach sound as a constant search for a state of flux, and that may be the main feature of a project whose main intention is the speculative exploration of new creative and idiomatic paths in the context of the absolute and irreducible musical fragmentation of music.
6+ years old
David Maranha organ
Will Guthrie drums