An essentially self-taught musician, Manuel de Oliveira (1978, Guimarães) learned to play the guitar with his father and soon began to search for contact with foreign musical cultures centered on guitars, such as Spanish flamenco, South-American music and fado. Throughout his career as composer, guitarist and producer, Oliveira was the author, among other projects, of the opening show of the international event Guimarães 2021 – European Capital of Culture, in the context of which he collaborated with some influential names of the landscape of Portuguese music such as singer Cristina Branco, Chico César and Rão Kyao, and has performed at several European music festivals. In recent years, the work of Manuel de Oliveira has been focused on the composition for guitar solo and in collaborations with celloist Sandra Martins and accordionist João Frade.

Jorge Pardo and Carles Benavent are unanimously considered two of the most important musicians of the movement of jazz fusion with Spanish traditional music, in particular the flamenco form developed in the region of Andaluzia. Despite their different upbringings (Pardo, a saxophonist and flautist from Madrid, and Benavent, a bassist native of Barcelona), both share not only the same generational affiliation but also multiple musical affiliations, namely their mutual relation of artistic complicity with worldwide famous guitarist Paco de Lúcia. Both instrumentals of stellar skills, Pardo and Benavent express through their artform the ambition to transcend cultural cartographies, thereby defining an identity marked by the confluence of other geographic and musical identities. The singularity of their artistic voices allowed them to pursue an international career working with several luminaries of contemporary music such as Chick Corea, with whom Pardo collaborated extensively, and, in the case of Benavent, with Pat Metheny, Randy Brecker or Gil Goldstein, among many others.

Carlos Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, composer and teacher with an extensive and diversified curriculum of collaborations with influential names of Portuguese music, some more closely associated with jazz such as João Paulo Esteves da Silva or Pedro Moreira, others from other musical styles. In parallel Garcia composes classical pieces and arrangements for different ensembles.

The reinterpretation of “Ibéria” that will take place at Guimarães Jazz twenty years after its original release, will offer the audience of the festival a unique musical proposal that, while centered around Manuel de Oliveira’s compositions, is mainly distinguished by its ability to imagine possibilities for the revitalization of the traditional music from the Iberian Peninsula, nowadays often reduced to an anthropologic curiosity, through the matrix of contemporary jazz.