Carlos Martins surprises with an approach that combines Cante Alentejano with Mediterranean sounds.
The work results from collaboration with writer José Luís Peixoto, photographer José Manuel Rodrigues and singers Hugo Bentes, and Pedro Calado, among many others.
This time, jazz musician Carlos Martins (from Alentejo) thought differently and came up with a project that combines, for the first time in the history of our culture, Cante Alentejano and the sounds of the Mediterranean with Jazz, creating an original approach.
The new work is presented and launched in a big show at CCB on May 17th, with a live projection of photographs by José Manuel Rodrigues, and tickets are now on sale, on-site and on Ticketline.
However, Vagar is the result of the work of a collective, which Carlos Martins was unresting and gathering around him.
The musical writing was closely monitored by two renowned Alentejo singers, Hugo Bentes (Serpa) and Pedro Calado (Évora), by the writer José Luís Peixoto, who wrote some of the lyrics and texts and by the photographer José Manuel Rodrigues (Prémio Pessoa), who illustrates music and words creating a visual field where languages connect.
These artists, all from Alentejo, thought together about what it means to be from Alentejo in the world today, transposing a contemporary approach to Cante into music, words and images. Jazz is used as an element that inhibits normality to reinvent tradition, without fear of taking risks, creating space for freedom in composition and arrangements.
We can say that this pioneering project paves the way for other perspectives on the possibilities of working on music that is highly sedimented by time and space.
Singing, Intangible Heritage of Humanity, is a collective art par excellence, just like Jazz. In this sense, this proposal creatively addresses the dialogue between the ego and the community, so complex in our days, building bridges between composition, improvisation and Cante.
Vagar is born from the desire to leave a global work that proposes a new approach to Cante Alentejano with all its influences, in its geographical and spiritual reach. The project will serve as a laboratory for the construction of a new repertoire based on the roots of Cante Alentejano.
The central idea of the composition comes from a cosmopolitan vision of the Alentejo tradition of breathing spaces and times, in a certain lassitude, in extreme light and shadow contrasts, in generosity and in soundscapes that bring us closer to a life conscious of different ecologies.
The ambition is assumed: it is intended that this disruptive project will be recorded for future memory, through a CD and a documentary record (textual, video and photographic online), to be shared also through live shows, which allow the flash of eye and capture new audiences and new practitioners of Cante and Jazz.
For Carlos Martins,
“the biggest challenge was to write music that contained clues to ancestral human codes from the perspective of improvisation or a certain interpretative and democratic freedom that comes from it.
Vagar is the result of the desire to leave a work that is geoculturally referenced and yet still aspires to universalism, which proposes a new approach to Cante Alentejano, in its Mediterranean framework, taking into account its geographic and spiritual reach, with all its influences, as inspiration for the construction of a repertoire in which, through tradition, new paths can be taken.
The central idea of composition is inspired by the Alentejo tradition of the breath that sustains the wandering, of vast spaces, of the sea, of the plain, of the times of the people, of light and contrasts of shadow, of fraternity and the humanist and creative construction of the world.”
And José Luís Peixoto adds:
“…we were born within this landscape, this pronunciation, this time. The earth has a voice, we can listen to it. Cork oaks, under the weight of their age, have a voice. The dead, linked generations, have a voice. We can distinguish all these voices, they are carried away by the breeze that also carries the silence.
But we went to other places, we went far away, we crossed the horizon. We crossed the plain and then crossed the sea. We took what we had learned here, but we did not reject what they had to teach us there. And we returned. We see the world through the filter of Alentejo and we see Alentejo through the filter of the world. We are a choir of words, we have used for ancestral wisdom and for the now of improvisation, of instinct. We know that the sea continues the plain, and vice versa, one does not exist without the other, they are the same thing.”
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