November 28th Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos goes on tour with the great American saxophone player.

Mark Turner has become a top reference of contemporary jazz in the turning of the century, with several seminal albums and intense collaborations with a generation of musicians that include names such as Brad Mehldau, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Joshua Redman and Chris Potter, among others. His expressive personality merges with the tenor saxophone in an admirable way, knowing as few how to transform a network of inevitable influences – Coltrane, Henderson, Shorter – in a pure and original language. He is a calm and reflexive musical personality, but also adventurous making good use of the plain technical domain of the instrument. His last album, produced last year, became a happening: after 13 years without recording as leader, he joined the mythic ECM to present Lathe of Heaven, enthusiastically celebrated by the critic.

The year of 2008 marked the first meeting of Mark Tuner and OJM as one of the three guest saxophone players of the project 3 Tenores [Tenors]. Already then we had the opportunity to listen to his performance of the original music of Pedro Guedes and Carlos Azevedo. Actually, one should recall that it was with that same music that everything began for the Matosinhos big bang, a decade and a half ago. The compositions of the two directors of the orchestra were a milestone in the national jazz creation, and several of those titles are now revisited side by side with recent compositions by both of them.

The reunion of OJM with Mark Tuner marks another important step in the internationalisation of the group, after trips to Brussels, Milan, New York, France and Barcelona. It takes place in the room Auditori as part of the prestigious Voll Damm Barcelona International Jazz Festival, an enormous festival that happens between the 26th September and the 11th December and of which this year’s programme includes names such as Diana Krall, Chick Corea, Chucho Valdés, Marc Ribot and Kurt Rosenwinkel.