David Helbock (b. 1984, Austria) is currently one of the most promising musicians of Austrian music due to his international recognition and the several prizes he won, including the piano-solo competition of the mythical jazz festival of Montreux. After a period of academic formation, including lessons with the reputed pianist Peter Madsen, a musician with whom Helbock would collaborate in the context of Madsen’s project CIA, the musical career of the Austrian composer is mainly focused on his own projects, namely the David Helbock Trio, Random/Control and solo – one of the few exceptions was his contribution as soloist to Michael Mantler’s The Jazz Composers Orchestra. A technically gifted pianist and a restless and iconoclast composer, Helbock’s work shows a strong conceptual component (one of his projects was the composition of one piece per day during a whole year) and based on a wide stylistic amplitude, reinterpreting the works of different composers, such as Beethoven, Monk or Joe Zawinul, from unpredicted angles.

In Random/Control, Helbock, alongside with multi-instrumentalists Johannes Bär and Andreas Broger, develops a peculiar approach to music, specific of this band’s sound, from such diverse sources such as the pianist’s own compositions, jazz standards or Austrian folklore. Their most recent album, entitled Tour d’Horizon, is focused on the interpretation of piano compositions which have influenced Helbock’s artistic vision, which means that the group’s concert in Guimarães Jazz will propose a musical journey through the canon of piano-jazz through the expansive reinterpretations of the works Duke Ellington, Keith Jarrett or Carla Bley’s pieces, performed by a band of idiosyncratic features and led by one of the most promising musicians of European jazz.