The Matosinhos Jazz Orchestra will play on Sunday at the Madrid jazz festival with pianists Ethan Iverson and David Virelles, in a tribute concert to the "emblematic" album 'Jazz in the Space Age', by George Russell
According to the organization of the International JAZZMADRID 2022 Festival, it will be "a very suggestive day dedicated to remember the publication in 1961 of George Russell's emblematic record 'Jazz in the Space Age'".
"This is a colossal concert in which the musical direction of the Orquestra de Matosinhos by Portuguese Pedro Guedes endows the original music with fervour and vivacity," the festival organisation also says.
The Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos thus brings to the Spanish capital 'Jazz in the Space Age', with which it has been celebrating the legacy of George Russell and which it recorded live in 2019.
On its website, the Matosinhos Jazz Orchestra explains that "on 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched [satellite] Sputnik, the first object put by humanity in orbit around a celestial body, thus inaugurating the era of the space race", and "inevitably composers also found themselves imbued by the new adventurous spirit that this era seemed to contain".
This was how, "in 1960, George Russell and a group of jazz stars recorded 'Jazz in the Space Age', a historical record with some ideas from the composer's revolutionary treatise 'Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization'", continues the same text, signed by Liliana Marinho.
George Russell developed the first musical theory born from jazz, by establishing a "treatise" of harmony based on tonal and chromatic specificities that differentiated it from the music of European tradition, in studies such as 'Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization'.
The new approach to music-making was revolutionary and changed the path of figures such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.
"Russell wrote the score for 'Jazz In the Space Age' and intentionally left an open space for free improvisation -- he fixed the satellites in their orbits and the imagination of their celestial bodies did the rest", explains the same text published on the Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos website.
The International JAZZMADRID 2022 Festival started on the 2nd of November and will take place in the Spanish capital until the 1st of December.
The presence of the Matosinhos Jazz Orchestra in Madrid is also part of the 20th edition of Cultura Portugal, organised annually by the Portuguese Embassy in Spain, in collaboration with entities from both countries.
Cultura Portugal, with events scheduled between September and December in various parts of Spain, "celebrates Portuguese culture through its literature, music, theatre, dance and other various artistic disciplines," according to the Portuguese embassy.
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