Lisbon’s Jazz em Agosto festival hits its 40th anniversary with Darius Jones, Pat Thomas, Peter Evans and the Fire! Orchestra

The newest Portuguese combo in town are Move, a trio of tenor saxophone, bass and drums, keeping it focused on the power explosion of a sculpted, almost-free jazz. Two-thirds of the membership are from Brazil, transplanted to Portugal, and the Clean Feed label just made a timely release of their live album, Free Baile - Live At Shenzhen, recorded on a Chinese tour. This outdoor Gulbenkian set is arguably superior, getting to the roughshod heart of excitement, glorying in differing tonalities and textures, particularly via the manipulation of jolting bass effects. Drums scuttle, tenor rips, the three members making tight twists of togetherness, with Yedo Gibson changing to Morse code soprano, prancing over Felipe Zenicola’s hot-sands block-strummed bass. Indeed, it’s often Zenicola who shifts the band palette, by utilising a radically different pedal unit. Gibson is meanwhile stuffing both tenor and soprano in his mouth simultaneously. Move succeed by prompting a steady exodus of audience members throughout their riled-up performance..!

The Selva (Jungle) last played here during the 2020 all-Portuguese lockdown edition, and it was exciting to have them return. A moderately unusual line-up of Ricardo Jacinto(cello), Gonçalo Almeida (bass) and Nuno Morão (drums) reveal an approach that has evolved, now concentrating on longer, rhythmically-centred pieces, awash with electronic surfaces and dense with cumulative atmosphere. This trio began what turned out to be the festival’s strongest run of 9.30pm sets, Jazz em Agosto’s first five days substantial enough, but its second run of six days reverberating to deeply meaningful showings by (amongst others) Darius Jones, Peter Evans and Fire! Orchestra. Jacinto and Almeida bow together, switching to fingers, ranging from gloomy to doomy, finding progressing figures of melancholy, interfered with by electro-subversions, Jacinto in particular seeking out guitar-type lines, or straining into a violin register, his cello lying on a horizontal frame. Everyone is using mallets. Such steady pulse-development calls up The Necks as a prior experience. Ultimately, all three Selvas are bowing mournfully, whether on strings or cymbals.

Brandon Seabrook deliberately keeps his voice microphone’s heavy reverb, coming on like an empty-ballroom emcee, but the sounds of this Brooklynite’s banjo and guitar are contrastingly clear and sharp. All the better to define Seabrook’s unrelenting cyclic picking marathons. This is another trio whose tactics have changed. Abstract space has been replaced by dense spiral-spinning. Bassist Pascal Niggenkemper and drummer Gerald Cleaver have the luxury of extra room, although the latter pushes the limits of skeletal time-keeping with his robo-groove metronome strikes, absolutely shorn of reverb. Replacing Cooper-Moore in this trio, Niggenkemper is busier, slopping up waves of twisting phrases into his affixed silver headlamp bass-attachments.

Darius Jones (pictured above) opts for heavy composition, he and Cleaver (him again) effectively adding on a string quartet, although bassist James Meger has mixed allegiances with them, and with the inset ‘jazz trio’ of Jones and Cleaver. ‘FluXkit Vancouver’ has sour violins and cello matching thin-reed alto saxophone cutting-precision, as Jones races and the others chase. It’s a relief to witness Cleaver in a lighter-touch polyrhythmic jazz mode, in radical contrast to his adopted style with Seabrook, cymbals flashing, sticks skittering lightly. Meanwhile, the strings saw disconnectedly, until deciding on sheer energised tension, while Jones pauses in his flow. Starkness, coldness and hardness inform the second part, and Jones bides his time with his stair-climbing alto development. The strings become more conventionally harmonious for the third part, a dirge with alto, until the bass stands alone for a solo of full-hand strumming. A groove emerges, strings sweeping and alto keening up at its highest range, almost hitting sopranino peaks. The determinist march of the fourth movement finds strings sluicing, cutting to an alto yowl, Jones taking it all right to the top, then dropping down for a more morose sway. He proceeds to stroll around out front of his microphone, sounding better in the fresh air, investing emotional intensity on a cerebral plane of toughened extremity.

Anthony Braxton as a member of Defunkt? Was this in the brain of pianist Pat Thomaswhen he assembled The Locals? Alex Ward contorts clarinet in a spread of heavily syncopated drums, bass and guitar, Thomas diving into the disruptive James Chance role with his chiming big-hand-splay scatter-runs. Yes, this funk is an obsessive no-wave version, sprung from the very earliest 1980s NYC alleyways. Crackling and cracking snare marks the frying tight-time, with wriggling noir clarinet and atonal strafe-guitar. Our only quibble might spring  from the singularity of approach, although there is a lone reggae reading towards the end, with Thomas under his lid: Braxton in Brixton, momentarily…

Peter Evans has long harboured an interest in the combination of old school jazz and new-fangled tactics, as heard in his startling work with Mostly Other People Do The Killing. But the trumpeter shoves it all a few yards further with Being & Becoming, a new band that could just about almost play on the NYC Greenwich Village club run. Evans has invited players that hail from the funkier, cooler and sometimes even smoother zones: Joel Ross (vibraphone and discreet keyboards) and Michael Shekwoaga Ode (massive drumkit with tall-drooping curly cymbals). Your scribe would go as far as suggesting that this crew have created something genuinely unheard. The music is already far advanced from the work captured on their 2023 album. Evans sculpts pieces that head for at least 20 minutes, traversing slick clubland licks and nonchalant proficiency, then having so much room for change that they covertly step into slightly awry structures, the live experience even introducing the extreme horn acrobatics encountered in an Evans solo set. There’s a particular strangeness to the precise cocktail that they stir up, a sort of jazz that we’ve never quite heard before. It’s galvanising at length, loaded with dramatic tension, but strangely relaxed into a lubricated, sophisticated groove.

Ross springs in with abandon, opening the set as a vibes trio, bass pulsing (Nick Jozwiakis a major discovery here), Evans waiting to the side. When he does enter, it’s with an extended trumpet solo, investigating logically and at length. He’s the Miles that didn’t take the horn out of his mouth. It’s not uncommon for the vibes and bass to be soloing simultaneously, the game of this group being to derail common jazz structure. Ode’s drums are also competing heavily. After what must be 30 minutes, there might or might not be a second number beginning, but it’s very much in the shape of the first. This might be a single mammoth composition. Jozwiak is left completely alone, relishing space, and the chance for silence-framed enunciation. Evans and Ross set up a rivulet-repeat shower sequence, as the bass and drums throw shapes of sudden scrabbles. Ode finally blows up the set with a totally solo explosiveness, his raging rotary scatters topped by Evans, leaping in on spiked pocket trumpet. Being & Becoming played long and always interestingly, holding onto the energies for the full distance.

Topping the final night, Mats Gustafsson is set on refreshing the line-up of his Fire! Orchestra, presenting new collections of compositions that nevertheless possess the spirit of improvisation. Gradually escalating themes of manic celebration peppered with individual statements that rise up organically from the collective human brew. Here we have Susana Santos Silva (trumpet) and Julien Desprez (guitar), sidestepping the Scandinavian lineage. Gustafsson remains a central honker, especially when brandishing his baritone saxophone, but he’s also a physical key to the composite sound, with his vigorous conducting and prompting style. He blasts nimbly, and then other horns underscore. Fire! are driven in massed strength, but also open to delicate personal toppings. Gustafsson loves to march, but he also includes a canter-for-cowboys country hoedown, one of the most snagging riffs of this long set. Drummer David Sandstrom and violinist Josefin Runsteen complete a run of unlikely vocal stylists that have populated this year’s festival, avoiding the slick and smooth jazz tradition for interpretations that arrive from other vocal climates, less obviously tutored and more personal.

Sold out and satiating fully with a range of carefully expanding themes, Fire! delivered a fitting climax to this expansive 40th edition of Jazz em Agosto.