Evento
SATURDAY 13 NOVEMBER, 16H00
WHO
Trio
Michel Wintsch piano
Gerry
Hemingway bateria
Bänz Oester contrabaixo
One of the most distinguished features of Western’s
non-classical popular music of the twentieth century, and jazz’s origins
themselves are the living proof of such assumption, is the crucial influence of
the margins exerted upon the center. In the age of massification, art has been
democratized, therefore becoming uncontrollable, in the sense that it began to
favor spontaneous and non-classical forms of expression, freed finally from all
the constraints of the academy. Almost every single modern musical genre –
rock, hip-hop, funk, soul and all its derivatives – are clearly
non-institutional cultural manifestations (mainly urban) which were, at some
point or the other, absorbed by the economic system. If we accept this
assumption as true, we must logically conclude that, in a certain sense, the
musical narrative of the old century is in fact an history of rumors from the underground
which, considered outraged or incomprehensible at the time they make themselves
heard, end up almost inevitably becoming sooner or later the predominant
tendencies promoted by the economic cultural system.
In the last thirty years it has become normal within
the sphere of musical media critics to draw a clear distinction between two
major streams in contemporary art: the mainstream and the undergroundstream –
or, in other words, the art that generates economic value and the art that is
alien to the monetarization of the artistic creation. The WHO Trio fits
naturally into this second and more diffuse category of musicians
uncompromisingly anti-economic but whose ideas now begin to invade the
institutional circuit of jazz, now finally open to free improvisation and
wide-spectrum exploration of sound. Formed by three excellent musicians, this
group is one of the pioneers of the movement of spiritual reconnection between
formal radicalism and tradition, proposing a third-way between the free jazz from
the 1970’s and the tendencies of fusion predominant during the decades of 1980
and 1990.
In WHO trio’s highly resonant music, the original
matrix of jazz is evoked in a way that is expansively engaged in the search for
new horizons between composition and improvisation, permanently shifting and
merging the individual and collective dimensions of the creative act. Its
identity is inseparable from the style of its interpreters, three musicians
with a highly physical approach to their instruments, namely: North-American
drummer Gerry Hemingway, member of the band BassDrumBone and collaborator of
seminal jazz figures such as Anthony Braxton or Cecil Taylor, and Swiss
musicians Michael Wintsh and Bänz Oester, two important names of European’s
avant-jazz and improvisation scene. WHO’s most recent project, “Strell”, which
will expectably be at the center of their concert in Guimarães Jazz 2021, is
devoted to a reinterpretation of the music of Billy Strayhorn and Duke
Ellington’s, two fundamental composers of the twentieth century’s popular music
and whose legacy still exerts a crucial influence on contemporary music. At the
same time tense and delicate, abstract and organic, always focused on the
interactive dimension of music, the most salient feature of the group’s sound
is the search of new grammars in old idioms, new words that echo in our times
and whose rumor now begins to be heard.