A FESTIVAL


a) “History” as a problem

All ideas require concrete examples which can shed light on and spark discoveries: thus we analyze Guimarães Jazz in order to consider those sets of conditions in which the festival exists, with some of them inherent to its customary practices for survival and consolidation, while other factors are totally outside this sphere. The stronger and more intensely felt the ideas are, the deeper the mark they leave on people, appearing as representations full of meaning, and thus, easily shared by those who appreciate and are attracted by them. In our efforts to provide for an experience which has its quite subjective and intangible side, we must often seek out the most effective formulas for publicizing and disseminating the event. To fictionally formulate a discourse which ponders the event presupposes the adoption of a certain cinematographic writing technique, as if we were dealing with a film script. Its register facilitates communication and creates more operational narrative and descriptive mechanisms. However, it is not easy to involve people in a narrative which seeks to show what happens behind the scenes of the ‘making of Guimarães Jazz.’ This year, we have opted to take up and illustrate the myriad artistic expressions of the multidisciplinary artistry on offer by presenting the images you are about to read in the following pages. We will go beyond what is seen on the surface, delving into some of the abstract structures of the festival and looking at it as the hypertext of a metaphor amassed within a set of concepts meant to unfold during the running of the event.

It is difficult to describe the history of Guimarães Jazz given the lack of proper distance in time from the event, and because any such attempt to do so would result in the simple enumeration of certain high points, ones selected for nostalgia’s sake, thus ending up as a heap of information. When we revisit the historical archives of an event, we are placed before the illusion of having the absolute knowledge of its essence, with what really remains being a partial synthesis of an object which is, in most cases, a confirmation of our own emotional response and convictions. A historical reading is always contaminated by the interpretive process, one which prevents us from reading the facts and yet impels us to be read by them.


b) Between memory and history

To describe Guimarães Jazz will always be a failed narrative, a text with many gaps, since it is impossible to translate the wealth of emotions felt by those who have participated in the event. Therefore, to understand the festival is to live it from the inside, to feel what goes on during the concerts and during the variety of concurrent activities taking place in the ten days of the festival. The best way to observe the festival is to comment on and expand upon those fleeting memories in an attempt to cast a personal feeling on them as a way to solidify these memories. A simple recounting of the timetable of these past moments gives no indication of their true meaning; it reveals nothing of the subtext nor of the awe contained in the impressions experienced. A camera lens should be set up in some dark, hidden location and focused on the gaps – those still to be written about – filming the audiences, the producers and the performers, those who mysteriously attend each year’s event.
But to return to the aforementioned subject and its polemic, it is difficult for us to attain the proper levels of distancing and neutrality with respect to that which are attempting to analyze. To decompose the structure of a certain event requires a detachment and a negation of possession in order to create a posture that is unbiased and devoid of subjective values, and necessary to arrive at an overview of the event. This exercise allows for a differentiated reading of its parts, where each concert is represented as a possibility for amplifying and extending what exists and what is communicated to us when the events occur.


c) The beginning – moving from thought to act

A probable methodology to apply to this description would be to adopt the classical and temporal perspective of organization. The first festival was basically an experiment, a founding act. The foundation, because it is set upon an empty space, implies the mobilization of extreme loads of meaning – as if we had just gone from a state of almost absolute insignificance to a small point of identification, the first step in the difficult process of acquiring identity. Creation implies the commitment to construction and symbolic robustness, and in being such, takes on a fundamental importance, since it is through creation that the way is made clear for the work of conception to be set on the path to its materialization. To conceive of and to define a profile for the festival has as its premise the simultaneous and parallel juxtaposition of its ongoing renewal and the affirmation of its own identity. It is our desire to find an aesthetic model which reflects the idea of differentiation from that of other festivals in existence and which anticipates future circumstances and shifts.

All creative endeavors must endure moments of doubt and reaffirmation throughout their history, causing crises in growth, casting innumerable uncertainties and motivating people to action against the indifference and inertia generated by these perils. Dealing with problems as they have appeared has been the principal way used to face them. Guimarães Jazz has evolved in a positive way. It has taken on a body and an identity, and has brought about some ambiguous responses, some in confirmation of its genuineness, and others calling its convictions into question and at times wandering into the confusing territory of atrophy. In the ambivalence of the paths we have taken and the observations we have made, we have faced all types of obstacles and complicated situations and have succeeded in maintaining a constructive relationship with all sides. By balancing ourselves between artistic and organizational interests and always striving for the utmost in quality, we have achieved a level of reliable interaction with the reality which surrounds us and have discovered tools for objective evaluation. The coming together of artistic concerns and technical production quality has made responsive and flexible management possible, one able to adapt to any problems or needs which may arise. It bears recalling that this event was born within a certain context (there were few festivals at the time and the music was viewed as an art form geared to a minority audience, in some cases seen as elite), and it has shown a capacity for growing on its own in a natural way.

To organize a festival is an action, not a thought. It is the work of the artisan, radically opposed to that of intellectual and aesthetic pursuits based on the subjectivity of creative minds. However, the doubts and the problematization of festival content must not, and cannot, be expressed by the choices which are made, in that they aspire fundamentally to the concept of consensus and acceptance in a duality made possible only when any reading is made or any end result achieved in a personal way, free of noise or dispersion. At the farthest horizon of a festival, or at least that of the pure experience of attending a concert, is the association with the concept of absolute enjoyment coming from the contact with Beauty through sound, and with the eternal pleasure of music – something which is only attainable through the absence of intermediaries and sterile conceptualizations which relegate art to the cloister of rational, speculative and emotional enclaves, ones which destroy the possibility that this singular moment can manifest itself as ecstasy and elevation via the communication and the understanding of specific content which an encounter with music affords. The event is something which, at the moment which it takes place, is cast out into the world without any ties to pull it back, a precarious attempt to attain a balance which can only survive if all doubts and uncertainties are left behind. It offers itself up to time in order to be assessed in retrospect, taking with it the very clear knowledge that one day it will also be a resounding echo, containing the information and historical weight known as the past.


d) The spirit of the artisan

When people behave as consumers, they cease to think as artisans. The work of the artisan gives strength to a particular attitude and a special relationship with the world; in acting like a consumer, the artisan carries out more than a mechanical task since the ambition is to understand the reasons behind the functionality of what he achieves and deepen its eventual practicality. He is interested in acquiring knowledge and wishes to become involved with the mechanisms of the exchange of information, becoming less passive and more critical with respect to his choices. The ability to understand and process this information decreases at the same time as his volume increases. These factors make levels of consensus necessary, constricting the freedom to produce antagonistic discourses. Thus, as a model for the realization of the project, the festival must incentivize free and disinterested relationships. There is a climate of trust and credibility in getting the word out to those in the concert-going public, one which brings the artisan to a posture of seriousness, reflection and rigor. Invisible bonds are formed among the participants, ones later transformed into the symbology of affection and sensitivity reflected in a historical event and a memory.


e) The festival and the system of art

The doubts and problems occurring from the structuring of the festival have revealed, with extreme clarity, its need to become established, with an essential condition being programming choices and a reasonable distance from the various interests at play – an aspect that is as important as it is evident is the current atmosphere of ethical disorientation which is influencing all the actors moving about within the sphere of jazz at present. The change of status of these agents may well constitute one of the signs of disintegration of a stable and ethically delimited system. These imprudent shifts in various forms of intervention (the creative process of the artist, programming, media critiques, the production of shows, commercial promotions and the recording industry) and even the fluid swing from creation to promotion, have shaken things up, leading to unpredictable consequences, in a medium which is nourished by the symbolic legitimacy of principles and artistic values, causing a vampire-like draining of its effects on all levels. How curious it is to note the extent to which these alterations have favored the accumulation of tasks, in some cases incompatible, for being subject to irreconcilable counter-interests. There have been cases in which sponsorship from prestigious public institutions was received, and they were given free rein without there being the least bit of disagreement voiced. The systemic effects of the hand of transformation on these operations proved to be particularly serious given the opaque nature of the discourse coming from the parties involved: it was never truly clear in what capacity people were speaking when they made their opinions public knowledge. These circumstances produced strange feelings of doubt about what was being said and written with respect to jazz, making it more difficult to execute any serious and independent work on the dissemination and performance of jazz. The aforementioned practices lessen the prestige of the music and raise the issue of whether there is any good in continuing to try effective and consistent promotional efforts given the fact that incoherence and weakness in behavior is seen in this area. It is fitting the call into question the ethical existence of a system when its agents neither define themselves nor identify themselves in a clear way; in addition, the transparency of its “criticism” is questionable for not corresponding seriously to the demands of legitimation vis-à-vis the comprehensive practice of the music. Those involved in the dissemination of jazz should be neither exempt nor impervious to the floating and molding interests which exist in the medium, as is the case with other areas as well. We must, therefore, not cave in to the temptation of attracting attention to events which are not and cannot be representative of their definition. We must learn how to survive in an arena where interests proliferate, and given the fact that they are unclear in how they manifest themselves, everything which takes place is immediately under the threat of commonness and banality. A festival must be an exclusive and uncompromised space, open to allow the public understanding and free individual enjoyment, thus elevating the prestige of jazz, its credibility and that of all of those involved. In this sense, the essence of our responses is found in the concerts – the performance of the musicians and the listening from the audience.


f) Programming and subjectivity

Recent years have seen changes which confirm the ever-growing importance of the Festival Programmer, a role which has been granted a certain type of protagonism and relevance as recourse to the legitimation and identity-making affirmation of the events. This is perhaps the result of the multiplication of similar events (festivals, concerts, exhibition, cycles, etc.) and of the competition among them, from which it is necessary to determine the depth of their differentiating features and to sift through its aesthetic coherence. Another aspect contributing to the emergence of the figure of Programmer appears to be the idea of an increasingly techno-savvy and professionalized cultural context which currently demands greater specialization in the production and dissemination of shows. The role of Programmer is wrapped up in a decisive relevance and contains an elevated degree of media-based visibility, making the job an appealing position to hold, one with ample exposure to a confluence of interests and marginal pressures on artistic values.

Those who select the program must have the proper technical, intellectual and ethical qualifications which allow for an acceptable level of imperviousness and skill in order to make the best program decisions in the unyielding defense of integrity and the worth of the project. The Programmer’s commitment requires a strategic vision and a keen eye for understanding reality, which will serve him in good stead for the sake of optimizing and decomposing the error, as well as for making himself aware of inevitability, and allowing for the mediation between the extremes, which will be managed and interacted: that is to say, the musicians, the musical work and the audience. More crucial than the choices which the programming necessitates is the rejection of elements which may introduce unwanted noise into the relationship. Mentioned previously was the conflict caused by outside interests, ones with prejudicial and eventually destructive elements for the programming, yet we must still bear in mind the internal factor of this task, which is subjectivity. The Programmer should not renounce his own personal taste; to do so would be to do away with his obligation to mediate. Personal tastes cannot be interpreted as one conceives of a submarine, like some enclave which neither evolves nor creates communicative vessels with the relationship-based weight of the event. However, subjectivity must still set out on a path outside itself and project itself toward an exterior reality and be sensitive to the signals which it receives from itself, juxtaposing itself onto the consideration of interests of a commercial nature and processes of hierarchization and recognition, structured upon values and criteria of an order which is (re)defined by the self- and mutual certification of the work itself and on whom the evaluation occurs. Thus, we must disconnect ourselves from the pre-defined and exclusive positions of aesthetic criteria because analyses based on apriorism of the musical act cannot help but affect the disposition of those who attend the concerts as well as their later interpretation of the musical event. This resulting contagion of confusion generated by the various agents operating within the context of jazz imposes a critique prior to the performance of the event, restricting those involved in value judgments and kidnapping the Programmer and making him a hostage to himself, condemned to the attitude of a solipsist who cannot fulfill the task which he has been handed – to promote the disinterested focus on contact with this music.



THE FESTIVAL AS AN EVENT – format and identity


a) A concept of a festival

A festival is not an unconnected set of events in a void but a logical whole, an organic body which cannot be analyzed without bearing in mind its unity. It is impossible to present and disseminate something while erasing its rear-guard and its past, and by uprooting its history and its connection to the present. When we plan the Program, the same questions always come to mind: What does it mean to have a jazz festival these days? Is there a specific method that allows us to identify the spot for this music and achieve (through an event) some identifying, safe and universal hallmark which helps to disseminate and legitimize it and its performances?

Bearing in mind these doubts and some of the behaviors previously mentioned, we have come across many answers: from the possibility to orient alignment in a criterion which is inspired exclusively in the genres, types, styles and approaches to jazz along the various phases of the music’s history, up to the selection of musicians or songs which only seek to furnish the slightest basis of information on the phenomenon without any regard to history or stylistics. The program will be richer still if it succeeds in soliciting the greatest number of simultaneous and different readings, ones which reflect a varied musical structure which foment various points of view and incentivize the participation of audiences and their greater attendance at concerts. With this objective in mind, we have tried to add a wider range of stimuli and insinuations which will result directly in a variety of proposals. The diversity of styles and genres for each arrangement, and their multiple associations and ideas suggested by the artists present and by the innumerable parallel activities, have created an atmosphere of openness to the performance of the music, itself brought together in a coherent aesthetic profile in the consolidated and expressive production of the concerts on offer.

The festival is meant to be a free and spontaneous performance space where individuals are encouraged to discover a new feeling that impels them to undertake a spirit of inquiry and learning. Given these terms, the project is developed within a model of communality in which the public becomes quite involved and participates actively – something totally different from the stratagems used for marketing shows, ones set upon the simple scheme of supply and demand, which requires a mere passive consumer attitude.

All sales techniques are associated with a set of theatrical techniques which focuses on how well a consumer’s incredulity can be manipulated, which means producing a type of anxiety which causes him/her to buy more. There is a will to persuade, which dramatically distorts the perception of those things which will be purchased or acquired. The artistic foundation of certain cultural events comes dramatically close to the discourse of convincing, which exploits the desire to own or possess in a rather intense way. The illusion experienced by the purchase or acquisition of a product is related to the feeling of exacerbation of actually owning it, and thus it assumes a debilitating role in a society which incentivizes passivity and consigns its trust to the absence of critical spirit in favor of easy access to consumption. The instant feeling of satisfaction given by the ownership of the object is a detour with respect to the need to reconcile the knowledge of the psychological gaps seen in consumerism and the understanding of the world. We are, therefore, not interested in developing a sales or purchasing technique where later versions of the same, marketed to future relationships between the festival and its audience, will replace the already-attained human relationships which we enjoy. We have already come up with a set of artistic arguments which attest to our choices and which supply the programming guidelines with coherence, a minimal unity of understanding, and a noise-less discourse which is formalized in the concerts and texts which document it, and which frontally reject the manipulatory logic and rhetoric of sales of the event as a cultural product.


b) The definition of a format – a long path

The festival should be seen as an organization-based platform which is made up of core group of concerts performed in the Grand Auditorium which has lasted over the years with just a few occasional modifications. Guimarães Jazz has created a framework, a base structure upon which the worth of small objective differences has been noted, factors which allow changes to turn into something which may have symbolic significance and a unique identity. The fact that our planning comes with no obligatory recourse to a specific artistic format, and being more flexibly built because of this, makes a balanced program more possible and shows that consensus can be reached over a wide variety of tastes. It was when other similar events had stopped functioning, thus opening up the field for us, that we understood the best context for the performances and what should be the best way to proceed. Attention given to others and the broader programming scope have helped to expand the festival within its possible framework, thus creating commitments and new friendships which have since grown stronger and expressed themselves ever more clearly.

Before the confirmation of any line-up, the organization draws up some guidelines and the format to be followed. Guimarães Jazz has grown like the plant whose vines extend in different directions, affirming its presence with a multi-polar vision such that it creates focus-points which attract the widest possible attention, more so than with a simple hosting of a concert. Guimarães Jazz is laid out in a harmony of space and time with additional side events having different purposes and goals (of an educational, festive or convivial nature) and none overshadowing the other. It seeks to attract a variety of people, to appeal to various, unique interests and to discover reasons for the public to attend, thus avoiding the cloistering effect of elitist and militant ghettos as well as any marginalization from those around us. Its high points are the concerts given in the Grand Auditorium, which are indeed the pinnacle, serving to crystallize and individualize the artistic criteria and values which sustain the festival and identify it. Occupying the premiere spot within the jazz tradition are the Jam Sessions, musical performance moments in which our affection for the musicians grows, causing spontaneous moments of improvisation and pure competition to occur; this is collective ritualization processed through music. The Jazz Workshops constitute the essential pedagogical component of a festival of this kind – they offer young musicians the opportunity to have direct contact with prominent and experienced performers and are an indispensible element to the festival. The Guimarães Jazz/TOAP Project, begun in 2006, is based on the collaboration between the Tone of a Pitch recording label, whose objective it is to build closer ties among the jazz community in Portugal. Their recording of concerts is one of their most important activities, which affords the concert event the opportunity to document itself and build up an archive. Having gone through various transformations over the years, their Big Band project has evolved into a learning activity in partnership with the Big Band from the Escola Superior for Music and the Performing Arts, directed by a resident musician or musicians. Their concert is an end-product of a week of rehearsals which fulfill the learning expectations held by the participating musicians. This intervention creates a collective dynamic of interaction and allows for the exchange of experiences.

With the move to the Vila Flor Cultural Centre facilities in 2005, the history of Guimarães Jazz takes a momentous turn in its history. This move enabled the level of production, technical, communication and image support to improve dramatically. Nevertheless, the most important modification was felt in the fact that a new auditorium was now at our disposal, a larger, 800-seat space with an infrastructure whose quality would certainly assure greater audiences. The space restrictions felt at previous venues now being a thing of the past, the new facilities, with improved logistical and technical production values, allowed for expansion and growth of the festival, preventing it from falling into a state of fatigue. Faced with this change for the better, the festival redefined and reset its programming guidelines in order to optimize and make the advantages of the Vila Flor Cultural Centre more profitable. This constitutes just one among many possible examples which indicate how we must constantly adapt and define the festival with regard to its context, its advantages, or its internal/external limitations vis-à-vis the space, the people and the experiences which share the same nature and goals.

The final line-up for each Guimarães Jazz festival is the result of an arduous process of research, contacts and contracts carried out by a group of people broad in scope who work throughout the year previous to the festival year. There is always some project in mind, some idea to propose and put into practice, an idea which at times we ourselves do not completely control. After everyone has considered the list of artists for the program, new readings and understandings of the eventual program come into play, sparking new energies to participate and fueling curiosity about the instrumentalists. Often, the events themselves surpass the expectations formed at the outset. We have learned something over time, and we have understood that there is little interest in overusing the same performers; in the same way we have noted the importance of showcasing the great names of jazz at Guimarães Jazz, inscribing them in the Jazz Hall of Fame. The programming should spark interactions with the public such that there are greater means to attract and entice the public, ones able to create an atmosphere of overall confidence which can influence audiences. The programming organization must captivate all types of people, not only those who are the most attentive and informed about jazz, but also those who are less familiar with jazz and who might choose to have a first contact with the music. We have attempted to avoid an excessive degree of intellectual seriousness about the festival, for the sake of establishing the best conditions for having access and closeness to it. We do not negate the need for or the importance of the knowledge of art and art history; however, we deem that this is neither the opportune moment nor context for theoretical and more complex approaches about jazz. Everything should take place upon a terrain free of any noise and solicitations which might steal our attention away, since there is a risk of lessened impact for those who are in search of an experience. At the root of this construction is the pleasure in doing things well, that certain spirit of the artisan who is contrary to a world that is too movement-oriented. The desire to do things simply for the pleasure of having done them well is rooted in personal experience over time. When people acquire new products, without using any particular criteria, they are in fact looking for satisfaction and acting like an insatiable consumer, in opposition to the artisan who is both proud of and master of what he creates. He always knows how to exploit all the advantages of his professional abilities and rigorousness, with there being those who might affirm that the “me” of the artist could well lead to a feeling of possession that is deprived of generosity. Nevertheless, this spirit possesses a primordial virtue, increasingly lacking in today’s societies: commitment. The obsessive artisan believes in the objective value of what he creates, and it is only through rehearsals and successive errors that he improves. Underlying this attitude is the development of talent and specific skill for organization which unfolds in stages and in irregular impulses. Within the context of the festival, we would like to explore ideas and work with them to the very end, and in doing so, create an event that can grow and carry us along with it. If we were to cut back on the time spent putting Guimarães Jazz together, our learning experience would be much more difficult, causing us to sit back and merely ponder the questions instead of dealing with them. It is only from this disinterested posture that we can benefit, just as the artisans do, from the guarantees of survival. It is our wish to favor all types of collaboration on a personal and intimate level through mutual agreement, which, for its part, also signifies a type of cloistering and renouncement since, in fact, we are concentrating on a single unique focus point.


c) Identity and programming

As various shifts have verified for us, participation in a multi-cultural world calls for a strong and credible identity. Currently, the formation of hybrid and heterogeneous identities requires means of disseminations that are flexible and non-imposing in an anti-persuasive non-discourse. For decision-making purposes, individuals become actors with a certain cultural way of acting which does not suggest exaggerated levels of homogeneity and uniformity which allow for monolithic and generalist expressions in the manifestation of taste. We consider each audience to be unique and impossible to repeat, in contrast with the concept of mass society which would suppress the individualities of the subject. In this event/person duality, the intention is to preserve the individual with his idiosyncrasies and dissimilarities against all sorts of actions which might flatten and standardize the construction of identity and singularity.

Guimarães Jazz has assumed a broader space by providing those who enjoy this type of music, and those who are looking for their first contact with this music, with a concert and event cycle which offers opportunities to listen to various types of music. What we truly appreciate is the sense of satisfaction when our work is accomplished and when we see a participatory and relationship-centered reaction from the public at the performances. We refuse to accept the ‘fashion process’ in which one idea of brand reigns and does not allow the activities of the festival to blend into a singular media-based display. If we chose not to do this, it would be just one more concert or one more musician at the event to impress the audience, putting at risk all the differences agreed upon within the program guidelines, which would strip away all the diversity of a homogenous and uniform consumer product. The public should act like an artisan as well, magnifying the dissimilarities, thus comprehending the passion of the moment with nothing to distract them or to lessen how demanding it is. The challenge consists in describing what is different in each one of the musical moments, placing them within the unified artistic concept. To magnify the differences without the proper mindset to defend against not becoming a slave to the desire to participate is essentially a form of freedom that is only possible with authentic and spontaneous participation.

Time is an essential element which serves to solidify, facilitating the interpretations of a multiplicity of narratives which justify, explain and confirm the validity and the interest of the choices made. There are many factors which might jeopardize our line-up, and it is always difficult to reconcile the availability of the musicians with the festival calendar. The program is set a year in advance, and later the contracts are drawn up. The conception of the line-up needs time and creativity since it is necessary to have access to the performers’ European tour schedule to confirm the final set of options. It is only in this way that coherence can be maintained.

Nowadays, things have to be fast and have to show results and success. People do not like to experience abrupt changes in their lives especially when they occur without the proper justification; people feel anxious, insecure and ill-at-ease. Short-term thinking prevails over growth, and the greatest limitation for this type of event is the lack of time to mature; this is because growing requires that knowledge accumulate slowly, as if it were layers of sediment forming. For this to occur naturally, it is essential to have the time to take risks and to correct faults in order to ponder and find the most appropriate means to carry out ideas. Perhaps many of the questions discussed earlier might help to explain why Guimarães Jazz has had the necessary time to ponder and consolidate its identity, and at the same time, has achieved a constant upward trajectory. This might well be considered an unusual event given the speed with which things change in the world these days.

When jazz is linked to a strategy for dissemination and performance – a festival – its artistic center seeks out an affinity among the concerts, one accompanied by the arguments justifying the presence of the musicians in the line-up and by the differences underlying their singularity. The coherence of the program thus takes on a new direction and contour, brought about by an exercise in comparisons.

Guimarães Jazz has created a way for the concerts to understand each other, subjecting them to a pre-defined order via intuitive impulses which allow for the preservation of a spontaneity which cannot be touched should the line-up fall victim to exclusively rational criteria. This in no way excludes the specific particular nature of each contact with jazz since its unity is reconstructed from this conflict.

The range of hidden and complex relationships makes the festival a unique moment framed in a fabric of common points and diversities which unite with other external elements and do not cancel each other out. The history of each project appears as a factor of exteriorization, a search for topics which show substantial richness in the plurality of how they can be read and understood. A festival is a montage overflowing with meaning, a type of happening represented in the concerts proposed – the references, information and message which invades us and calls us to reflect on what is taking place. This montage can be felt by those who participate and discover a pull toward the program put together in this way. The public becomes a type of visitor conditioned to gather in knowledge, sound out the problems which arise from choice, and wrestle with and penetrate the endless number of occurrences which have power over and inundate it. The more information we add, the more exposed we are to ambiguities which may cause conflict. 



THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PUBLIC


a) Introductory notes

A program is thought of exclusively along the lines of establishing a fresh relationship with the public. At its origin is the need to correspond to the expectations of those who are interested in jazz. We have tried to bridge the gap, reaching out to a broader range of individuals who cannot be treated as a mass group of people, not even with a collective approach.
The declaration of a grand historical synthesis was a dangerous dream, and in regard to certain aspects, the revolution always operated in opposition to democracy. Modernity does not mean the triumph of one as a proposal for universal change, but rather its disappearance and its replacement with the difficult management of daily life. In the indispensible and complicated interaction between rationalization and individual liberty, the 20th century revealed exceedingly cruel violence, no longer allowing the slightest trust in the virtue of history or in the innocence of progress. The present beckons us to open up a clearing in the forest of technology, regulations and consumer-based bureaucracies in order to take greatest advantage of the primacy of freedom over everything else. A festival must be a space allowing for escape and moments of generalized revitalization which incentivize contentment through cultural experimentation.

The public which began to become interested in jazz at the beginning of the 20th century, sought in this music, and the cinema as well, a highly innovative art form deemed to be the mark of modernity and the avant-garde. At the same time, they wanted to be identified with a culturally-advanced elite eager to be seen atop the transformations and convulsions being felt in matters social, technological and artistic. This bestowed upon jazz the direct association with the idea of the tribe, an exclusive group in which the music would act as the symbolic device for access and acceptance – the emblem of the most cultured and enlightened. These statements highlight the two fundamental and apparently contradictory bonds between the public and jazz: on the one hand, it recognizes the artistic importance granted by the introduction of ruptures and innovations to the musical canon (an evolution seen in a short amount of time but not accompanied by aesthetic transformations in the plastic arts or literature although all these manifestations took place within the framework of osmosis of references and artistic practices: improvisation, increasingly complex rhythms, the discontinuity of musical phrasing, automatism, the use of non-conventional instrumentation); and on the other hand it singles out the relationship motivated by extra-musical reasons of affirmation of cultural status – the ideal of contesting something through scandal and confrontation with society and the path to assuming a radical political position. 


b) Cascais Jazz and the death of a paradigm for a festival

The political component so often associated with jazz in Portugal can be explained by taking into account the cultural phenomenon connected with the birth of the Cascais Jazz festival. This event became extremely representative because it brought together social, political, economic and artistic elements. Begun during the years of the dictatorship and cultural isolation in Portugal, the festival was transformed, much against its will and nature, and despite its extraordinary musical merit, into a political forum for protesting the regime masked as a cultural event dedicated to jazz performances. In fact, it is only in this way that we can understand to what extent a festival with such a character and organized under such adverse political conditions could have made a go of it and brought in more than 10,000 people per night, tearing down all sorts of walls of separation, itself even more meaningful an achievement given that this was the early 1970s where only a well-informed minority was aware of cultural events taking place in Europe, the USA and the world and where the majority was blocked from any such access.

Cascais Jazz is a crucial reference point in the cultural and music history in Portugal given its confluence of meanings, transformations and contacts which it set free, opening the door to other forms of learning and other festivals. Nevertheless, the fragile nature of the bonds (namely political ones) between the public and jazz became evident, and this led to the weakening of the climate of protest against the system given that the social reality was changing. These changes led to a re-thinking of the strategies underlying the festival.


c) The programmer and the Other

A festival is not just ‘invented’ by those who envision it, but also by those persons who have contact with it. The listener begins with his/her personal mind-set, one not as yet connected to the performances, and then after contact with the music, he/she shapes the festival like clay, molding it with the multiplicity of information and emotions being experienced. For this relationship to bear the most fruit, it is crucial that the conception of the event not impose itself but rather invite people to unfettered enjoyment within an atmosphere laid out as a space free of any constraint. It is in the complicit, sharing relationship that the constant renewal of stimuli is required. From the challenge in which the initial agreement is born – out of seduction, surprise and the presentation of the different readings of jazz presented – new forces of attraction for prolonging and reiterating the dialogue emerge.

A bond of this nature implies two presuppositions: the awareness of the other as an entity able to assess and judge, and the knowledge afforded those who attend the concerts – something which is only possible through effective conflict management and the pledge to sensitivity inherent to the signing of a mutual and radically differentiating agreement.


d) Mass society and global society

The public is the most important conduit to diffuse information, ecstatic in the way that various forms of received cultures are dealt with, and moving about in a complex interaction of the place where such occurrences comes from and the present moment. These two factors intermingle via the communication of creative, dynamic and constant composition, leading to open and hybrid formats for understanding. What is thus being created is a complex and heterogeneous community founded upon a multi-lingual collective, divided into groups which follow their own paths in life. Having left behind the community of the masses characterized by the anonymity of its members, by the absence of social reciprocity and by indifference felt toward individuals, the people who emerge from the ruins of this society define themselves by their desire to be near like-minded people, albeit assuming respective individual differences. This individual is the result of a new era of transition from the society of the masses to a global society. This person must survive the convergence of two phenomena: the acceleration and resulting globalization of the world and the decay of the post-war established order. The pro-democratic atmosphere favors mobility, proximity and confrontations. For this reason, man was obliged to subsist in a network structure, variable, dynamic and deprived of reference points. This atmosphere makes the application of actions influenced by the centralist/directionist criteria more difficult. If we compare the social, political and economic context in which the avant-garde emerged (considered the front-guard of artistic and aesthetic elaboration through which all cultural challenges were organized) with the current context, we note the non-existence of any conditions where the avant-garde might exercise any rejuvenating influence. At the time, the avant-garde needed a society organized along hierarchical and functional lines to manifest itself. Today, the world has changed, and there is no longer any need for that shocking, jolting action in order to change anything at all because we have gone from a monolithic society with an enormous capacity for consumption to another society much more eager to upset the idea of selfishness, indifference and the tendency for individual isolation and the breaking off into large groups. The network society has abandoned the pyramid organization in order to adopt a more complex form, structured upon a flat surface and intersected by crossroads and contacts, in myriad acts of communication. In this complex terrain, the most important cultural occurrences are seen at the moment when people, individually, interact with art; speaking more concretely, it would be in this first contact with jazz that each person would see him/herself reflected, and in doing so, be able to initiate those habits which would lead to a deeper perception and understanding of musical phenomena.


e) The public and subjectivity

People are the result of the balance between a project and memory, appearing to us as a distinctive whole, where life, thought, experience and conscience all combine. The ambivalence in this unity is reflected in the tension felt between two modes of articulation, necessitating constant movements of passage or transference from the spheres of self-consciousness to other spheres: from the state of the Subject, viewed in a more generalist manner and as part of a totality, to a state of the Individual which possesses a specific and profound knowledge of life. It is through the control exercised over life that the individual acquires his/her own personal path and is transformed into an agent and placed within various social relationships. This immersion into the social alters the individual and prevents him/her from identifying completely with a group or collectivity. Once immediate contact with jazz occurs, a proliferation of subjective judgments and evaluations is seen, which are in constant change, growing more complex and requiring communication models that are broad enough to spark curiosity and promote participation.
The relationship with the public inevitably requires a position where a certain distance is maintained. At the very least, this requires a type of reformulation of compromise in which the event constitutes the bridge which facilitates the affective, emotional and aesthetic passage between the musicians and the public. Yet it is only the public who should speak; they are the ones who should engage in discourse. The appearance of the proposer/programmer in this task of consensual change is what distracts and make the core motivation of the encounter impossible – the experiencing of the event and the subsequent emotional reaction caused by it. This is the true dialogue, and its transparency must be safeguarded against the noise caused by the excessive proximity of interests which spoil relationships and which may transform a pure and amenable proposal into a mark of imposition – the opinion or ephemeral impulse of the absolute affirmation of an ego which seeks to constrain the freedom and subjectivity of the public, which not only take possession of the event but also assume an exclusive dialogue with the public.



FROM THE AVANT-GARDE TO INNOVATION – the need for a new interpretation


a) Jazz and memory

We live in such global times that this fact escapes our capacity for assimilation, making us hostages to many problems which have no solution. As is happening with the environment, the artistic and cultural worlds are experiencing hardships within the framework of ideological devastation caused by growing consumerism. Culture is at the mercy of media and means of communication where zapping and sound-bites are entertainment; art has voluntarily handed itself over to the principle of “maximum impact and immediate obsolescence.” One’s attention can only be kept for only the smallest fraction of time, and via shock and scandal, and it is given this fact that we can say that artistic endeavors have been stripped of their subversive capital because they have surrendered to the dominant mindset of the system and of the market. As a symbolic authority of life, culture loses its influence, and in a parallel way, the audio-visual industry has developed through the proliferation of games and technological artifacts which invite us to discover new virtual worlds and to spend long hours in front of some type of screen, watching images pass by. We have left behind us the cycle of immortal works of art which elevated people in favor of an entrance to a reality where people only want to acquire an end-product, thus satisfying a need created by an ingenious system of advertising and marketing. Cultural industries are looking to increase the distraction and access to the cultural object, making entertainment and commercial exploitation easier within the surrounding space. The value of the spirit is replaced by indiscriminate consumption, and what is durable is exchanged for what is disposable, in the same way that money has destroyed the now by-gone prestige of thought, wiping out the universal human dimension structured upon meditation and reflection. We see nowadays a multiplication of silly cultural manifestations which do not appeal to any conscious level of the world and impose themselves on us against our will, often becoming quite obscene. We are confronted with a profusion of events and shows which pulverize any concept of beauty and a long-lasting work of art. The contemplative and aesthetically-oriented attitude is supplanted by the series of strobe-light flashing images meant to catch the eye and spark consumption. We must find a path that is contrary to the generalized lack of aesthetic concerns regarding culture, and interrupt, in an efficient manner, this overall promotion of superficiality. We must still learn to take advantage of sensory enrichment by embracing art, by keeping a critical distance and by being open to beauty despite the utilitarian perspectives of its manifestations. And it is increasingly difficult to establish an organic contact with the past while we all live in a type of perpetual present, with our history being written at high-speed.

The only way for us to have a total art experience requires emotion. It calls for us to disconnect from our principles, values and preconceived notions. The way that the avant-garde in the past was formulated and established was centered on the definition of an artistic object to which a certain symbology, a specific posture, and an iconography of scandal and confrontation were attributed – factors foreign to the relationship with art which is not reconciled with emotion. The excesses of avant-garde-ism and their successive innovative and new ideas lead to a social posture which translates into exhibitionism and sterile ostentations which limit the responses to the appeals of universality and inclusion which are constantly being thrown about by art.


b) “What are the limits of jazz?” – an unnecessary question

To reconfigure the contemporary space puts unavoidable questions before us on the subject of communication. The introduction of digital networks and virtual pathways for information transmission has called for new approaches to language, which have caused problems and raised certain solutions. With the consequent change in the communicative process, there has been a radical change in the paradigm of both reciprocity and living in society, and reflective perceptions on reality and, inseparably, art itself. Today, we attempt to describe and problematize unstable and uncertain categories from which only an accelerated transformation can be intuited. The stable representation of the world is, at this moment, unknown to us, and we should concentrate our efforts in the direction of decodifying its ciphered language in order for us to act upon what it real. Pressure coming from the fact that today we neither know how to read the world nor how to intervene within it infers the presence of doubt and anguish, thus generating more misunderstanding and more communication blockage.

As a public happening, the festival is an attempt to resolve conflicts of contemporaneity through consensus, comprehensive movements and commitments – something contrary to the sumptuous parade of exhibitionism sparked as much by scandal as by the most current avant-garde simulations. There are still people out there who consider art a central core in expansion, the result of tireless efforts to affirm the militant minority which, taking off from their origins in the elitist ghetto, worship art and appreciate it universally, continuing to ignore a world whose central core has been lost forever – everything is margin.
Creating topics of controversy and polemization on the definitions of jazz does not resolve any of its problems, nor does it help to construct a profile of the festival built upon an advantageous and wide-reaching dialogue with people. The programs must be utilitarian plans for musical performance and sources of pragmatic action which are not subjected to the images of propaganda and marketing but which assume the exclusive and free space for understanding and enjoyment. Reaction to the concerts constitutes an assertive response to the event planning – the musicians play and the audience listens – which has no interest in transforming the event into a ritualized forum or debate to ponder the limits of the music.

We do not deny how pertinent the discourse and critical questioning of art is, including the specific case of jazz. We prefer the dialogue wherein we may define the limits of its borders, its physical relationship with the world and with more recent transformations. Nevertheless, as a public act of performance with a relationship-based purpose, a festival is not the proper place to show anguish or put more-or-less internal assessments on display: in our opinion, it is place for doing things and not for pondering or arguing (these latter two should assume a lesser role). Between us and reality there are a multitude of obstacles to reading; the present is a vortex of storms, its center immaterial and confusing, about which we can only make simplified perceptive approximations, ones producing contradictory reflections; breaking the code requires time and distance with respect to the object.


c) The logic of disorientation and resentment

Social conflicts are caused by the reconfiguration of politics and economy. In the past, inequality provided people who were eager to find their saving moment with the energy which could transform the world. Today, new forces of pressure have emerged, obliging individuals to rapidly assimilate all types of incomprehensible, complex, uncontrollable and directionless changes. Out of this state of things a feeling of helplessness materializes, whose internal tensions within the system produce nothing if not massive doses of resentment. Today’s citizen is a man who is irritated because he feels, despite all his efforts to follow the rules of the game, cheated and unashamedly mistreated. Beyond the satisfaction achieved by the intense and indiscriminate consumption of things, we live in a society without a viable alternative, and for this reason the performance of a cultural event should avoid any type of agitation or uneasiness within the already worn-out and crushed social fabric in which we must find other points of reference able to furnish us with stabilizing elements of individual and collective identity.


d) Jazz and post-modernism

Scandal – the essential product for the affirmation of the avant-garde – today no longer holds the slightest sway when needing to achieve any type of disruption or apoplexy in the middle class, declared ‘the enemy’ for being the class holding power. Art was once used as a model causing impact and lack of understanding, shaking up the system and creating conditions for the expected revolution. One wonders if the term “post-modern,” coined to capture the entire contemporary age, has any justifiable use nowadays. At the end of the 1970s we began a new stage called hyper-modernity. This change did not occur because we overcame a previous phase but because the new cycle, one associated with greater potential than the former modernity and imbued with extreme power, took on a new superlative level where reality is being read in the triple metamorphosis which blends the democratic-individualist order, the market dynamics order and the techno-science order – a world in which structuring forces able to intervene in any modifications no longer exist. We live in an era of particularisms characterized by a hyperbolic spiral of behaviors and a final assault, in its death throes, of artistic manifestations reflected in the widest range of technological, economic, social and individual spheres. Erratic and fleeting in its temporal framework, the avant-garde deprived individuals of the sense of narrative movement since it was inspired in the randomness of the unconscious, in creation in real time and in the world of dreams. Today it is impossible to return to a strategy which from the outset refuses all formal innovation for the defense of the value of the unconscious as the place from which a contingent and uncertain world of words and symbols come from, in which imagination that is spontaneous and non-measured by systems of rational control is anchored, taking us to a visibly illogical, imaginary universe. With the objective of rejecting art itself, the avant-garde fed upon this destruction in a presupposition inscribed within the universal revolution, whose public tumultuousness was one of its main points of cohesion.  The more recent concept of “innovation in the context of art” transmits another meaning since the search for the new corresponds to a demand from the market and from the system disinterested with respect to the need for conflict and confrontation with society and its values. The avant-garde is today an anachronism because there is no “enemy” to do battle with; what remains is its formal reinvention, removed from any component having a political or anti-institutional slant or claim of redress.


f) Jazz, politics and the market

Every year there are innumerable festivals in regions far afield from the cities of Lisbon and Oporto, which is a positive and revealing sign of jazz’s appeal. However, this phenomenon may not necessarily be directly linked to the democratization of art.
When we blend thought, creativity and action, we run the risk of committing a dangerous mistake which affects previous cultural events. Action has a clear connotation with political activity and should not be confused with creativity and/or art. As a principle of egalitarian participation, democracy belongs to the field of action, and in this sense, there is no type of immediate bond with art and more thought-related activity. To speak of concepts as “to democratize through art” take us back to the time in which people believed it possible to build ideal societies formed by the elites in which the role of activists would be to make the lesser-civilized more refined, civilized and enlightened.

In our lack of respect for the differentiating features of thought, creativity and action, we put our ‘following the right path’ at risk via artistic commonness and the lack of quality, although we should not attribute this fact to the proliferation of festivals. The growing importance of the culture market has been seen by some as an expropriation, with their criticisms strongly pitched against this occasion of mass-expansion. The protest was against the invading forces of the market which had appropriated culture, earning profit and installing a uniformity of content upon us through the homogeneity of cultural products. The thought was that a new type of media-base was being formed in an insipid and uncharacteristic artistic practice with the possibility of cultural uniformity established in the monotonous indifference of the public in terms of taste and choice, impoverished by the inability to evaluate the events both ethically and culturally. Curiously, the cultural market of the globalization era seems to benefit from diversity and the accelerated rhythm of passing fashions. The banalization and the uniformization of taste have not been seen as might be expected, in the incurable loss of assessment criteria and the adoption of minimally predictable artistic formulas. The world created by the new cultural agents, deprived of ethical direction and given over exclusively to the commercial aspects of their business dealings, brings with it a whirlpool of products, often at loggerheads with each other, causing distortions and confusion for those who want to understand, obliging us to seek out new strategies to survive and resist the commonness of its manifestations.

Confronted with these questions, Guimarães Jazz has been making its organization more autonomous: it knows and directly contacts musicians and their agents, and it defends its artistic values and principles. This independence has been made possible only through the adoption of a deeply-rooted spirit of freedom based on the actions taken by independent organizations. The festival has transformed into a body with a mixed framework and integrated into an institutional status, based on and respecting relatively stable artistic codes. This organizational model is a risky bet since its survival is a precarious balancing act on an unstable and undefined borderland between the institutional and non-institutional (independent and/or alternative spaces). It has thus evolved through a progressive formula of affirmation, with a certain dose of marginal status with respect to the institutional, and yet formalized in a light and more flexible structure of the interaction of the partners who make up its organizational core. The rejection of hierarchical-functional logic has favored a team-based spirit of solidarity and multi-functioning which allows the festival to open itself up to a more dynamic level of participation in which the performer and the public are equals on the same playing field. It was this new reality, in fact, which caused this event to be born as an autonomous and free-intervention space to incentivize new approaches and new levels of participation adapted to the present time, to ephemerality, mobility and constant modification to the accelerated and head-spinning pace of the world today. The transformations seen in more recent cultural and social phenomena oblige us to rethink the definitions of paradigms for the holding of the festival, leading us to explore other formats for creating, adapting and receiving art which is more rightly adjusted to reality.



FINAL NOTES – a word of caution

Those who conceive of the festival program should give explanation of the roots underlying a sense of taste which is emotive, individual and collective all at the same time. When one reflects upon a choice, considering first its cultural origins, one rationalizes in private and acts like an individual who is not totally free because one is ethically and subjectively limited by a universal dimension of reason. The private space is one of idiosyncrasies, a place where wild creativity and imagination reign and where moral considerations are suspended; the public space is one of social interaction where we must obey the rules of living together in order not to harm others. The private space is one of irony and an opportunity for us to act critically in relation to ourselves, whereas the public space is one of solidarity, a door open to tolerance and relationships with others.
When this duality is forgotten and a festival program is elaborated upon, one representing the people who chose the concerts and each one’s individual taste, a type of short-circuit occurs in the relationship between the public and private components of the event. In this way, we can see the festival as a unique moment of mediation between the people and the place where all types of rationales are established and assessments are made about what is being heard. We will fail to reach the goals for construction if we are unable to balance these two fields of action because we are impeding the affirmation of will of the emancipatory universality living in every one of us, in the limits imposed by identity and position, individually considered within the social order.  

Stories, as well as knowledge, reading and listening, are endless topics for the foundation and perfection of ideas. They are constant points of reflection which are made up of a ceaseless stream of questions, discoveries and rejections. The programs offered by Guimarães Jazz have included many actions of selecting, and each option gets an identifying narrative rolling, one able to attribute an aesthetic profile to the immense artistic experience, in development and in operation since the beginning.