Mané Fernandes "Matriz Motriz"

Singers and especially fado singers who appeal exceptionally well to Finnish nostalgia are by far the best known Portuguese musicians in Finland. Over the past ten years, at least Claudia Aurora, Cristina Branco, Carminho, Sara Correia, Gisela João, Mariza, Mísia, Ana Moura, Teresa Salgueiro, Dulce Pontes and António Zambujo have performed in Finland with their respective ensembles.

The list of Portuguese jazz musicians visiting Finland is much shorter, almost non-existent. Some may vaguely remember the guitarist André Fernandes who has recorded with Alexi Tuomarila, or the tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado and drummer Mario Costa. Or maybe the trumpeter Susana Santos Silva who has visited Finland on several occasions, including three times in Tampere Jazz Happening, but not as the first Portuguese musician.

That musician is perhaps the most international jazz musician in Portugal, singer Maria João, who performed at Jazz Happening already in October 1987 with the pianist Aki Takase. “There were a lot of people in the crowded room who were not that familiar with jazz. The rounds of applause at the end showed that the secrets of free and modernism had been revealed.” This is what the critic Jukka Hauru wrote about the concert in Helsingin Sanomat, the foremost newspaper in Finland.

This year, as many as fifteen Portuguese instrumentalists and singers are revealing the same secrets in Tampere. The spotlight country for the free concerts, which have already become a habit of Jazz Happening, is now Portugal.

However, national and musical generalisations should be avoided, and Artistic Director Juhamatti Kauppinen, who has chosen all the bands, does not aim to perceive the whole picture. Most of the musicians coming to Tampere live in Porto in northern Portugal, and most of them record for the Carimbo label of the local Porta-Jazz association. It has released over 100 albums in ten years, runs its own Porta-Jazz club and organises its own annual festival. In February, there is already the fifteenth Festival Porta-Jazz in Porto.

So, on Thursday the Spotlight evening in Pakkahuone focuses on one loose community.

The first artist on Thursday is Mané Fernandes (born in 1990), a guitarist and composer from Porto who has studied at the Copenhagen Rhythmic Music Conservatory. He has titled his music as “Post-Beat Aesthetics” and thinks that the “music of the rapper Busta Rhymes and the music of John Coltrane have more shared than distinguishing features”. Fernandes is dedicated to finding out about them.

However, Fernandes’ work in Tampere is far from both of them, at least on the basis of the album matriz_motriz (2023). The musicians on the album as in the concert – guitarist, keyboard player, and three singers –  perform pieces which sound more like minimalist modern music, both composed and improvised.