Rodrigo Pinheiro

This was a project we were planning for some time. The idea was to invite a musician we admire so we could shift our music and push our limits as musicians. We were invited to play at Culturgest at the “Isto é Jazz?” cycle (“is this Jazz?”) at Abril 2010 so we used this event as a landmark for the project.

Photo by Helio Gomes

We all choose John Butcher as the musician we would like to play. John is one of the leading figures in today’s free improvisation music and probably the most unique and cutting edge saxophonist playing today. His focus on sound exploration and his use of a wide range of extended techniques on the tenor and soprano saxophone was perfect to what we wanted to get on the quartet’s sound. So, we were very happy when John accepted out invitation.

The plan was to do several concerts in Portugal so we had to start booking them. We had JACC (thanks Pedro, Zé Miguel and Marcelo!) to help us on the logistics and specially on most of the bureaucracies involved when dealing with venues. We managed to book four concerts including the one at Culturgest, Lisboa (7th April) which was the first one. The next day we would play at Portalegre’s CAEP, the next day at Serralves at Porto and finally at Oeiras near Lisboa.

We also wanted to record a studio session. Ideally we should do this at the end of the tour but unfortunately because of calendar problems we had to do it at the beginning so we were afraid that this recording session would be like an “expensive rehearsal” as John said. During the session we had a hard time adapting to the extremely dry acoustics at the studio. The feeling was really strange as we were also trying to fit our playing to John’s music. Nevertheless the recordings were impressive and with really strong music.

All the concerts went really well and the public reaction was very positive and enthusiastic. Well, at Portalegre’s concert we were “competing” with a major football game (Liverpool vs Benfica) happening at the same time so we had very few people listening to us. Nevertheless this was one of my favorite concerts of the tour. On the other concerts we had always lots of public (Culturgest concert sold out). As the days passed playing and traveling around Portugal we got much closed as a quartet and this feeling kept growing till the last concert at Oeiras.

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On all the concerts I was lucky to always have very good pianos tuned before the concert. At Serralves I played an impressive Steinway model D. All the other venues had very good C series Yamaha‘s.

We had a great time with John and everything worked fine. Musically I’ve learn a lot from him and I think that this experience changed our music: we are even more focused on sound exploration and more further away from Jazz.

This quartet will play again at Imaxinasons on Vigo, Spain next 2th July and a new CD will eventually be released next year.