LISBON

photo: Guilherme Rodrigues, Udo schindler & Ernesto Rodrigues (München 2018)

Lisbon’s Hot Clube de Portugal, now more than 70 years old, is one of the world’s mythic jazz rooms. It’s an important stopping point for celebrated touring musicians, a vital space for Portuguese jazz artists and an anchoring center for jazz appreciation and education.
A school, Escola de Jazz Luís Villas-Boas, long has been part of the Hot Clube operation. “The Portuguese jazz scene is in fact surprisingly exciting,” said Inês Cunha, the club’s president since 2009. “There are now a few jazz schools, and a new generation of extraordinary musicians. But Portugal is a country in the ‘tail’ of Europe. It is harder for Portuguese musicians to play abroad. That is maybe why there are not that many Portuguese musicians known either in Europe or in the States.”
But the city’s a well-established hot spot for experimental jazz and free-improv, especially in August, thanks to Jazz em Agosto, a 35-yearold festival that has been run by Rui Neves— also a jazz broadcaster, critic and producer—for much of its history.
Regarding Lisbon’s jazz resources, Neves pointed to the improvisation-oriented Creative Sources label, run by violist Ernesto Rodriguez.
In Portugal, Neves said, “Jazz is learned at the university, and private schools are everywhere— but this is not making more creative musicians, only formatted musicians playing by the rules. However, there is in Lisbon a bunch of improvisers we can discover at the Creative Sources label who are getting some recognition.”
Additionally, the label Clean Feed, founded in Lisbon in 2001, is a prodigious supplier of recordings of improvisational and other
non-mainstream jazz albums. Josef Woodard (Down Beat)