Casa Fado ao Centro is a Cultural Centre – Fado House. Located in the city’s historic centre, it opens its doors every day of the year, without exception, to welcome anyone who wants to come and discover, remember and appreciate the genuine academic experience and traditions surrounding Coimbra’s Fado.
Every day, at 6pm, we hold our live show, a unique cultural experience and an opportunity to witness the magic of Coimbra’s Fado, performed by some of the city’s most renowned musicians. Book your place and visit us.

Casa de Fados – Centro Cultural a Capella presents a daily show/serenade of Fado, Song and Guitar from Coimbra. The show starts every day at 9.30pm.
Housed in a 14th century chapel, Casa de Fados aCapella offers visitors a pleasant terrace, bar and tapas service and free Wi-Fi.
The Capella is located in Coimbra’s Jewish quarter, on the site of the ancient medieval synagogue.
Open every day.

Daily tickets:
Friday (September 20): €20
Saturday (September 21st): €25

Synopsis:
“Action Packed” is a music festival organized by a local cultural association, “Boppin’ Coimbra”, being an important platform for the promotion and dissemination of Rockabilly music and similar music, one of the largest of its kind nationally.
The Festival is back in Coimbra, with its 4th edition – “Action Packed#4”, on the 20th and 21st of September 2024.
The event will take place at “O Teatrão – Oficina Municipal de Teatro”, in Coimbra, and will feature performances by live bands, DJs, a car show, the sale of period items, among other activities.

Barca dos Castiços is back at Liquidâmbar to celebrate the autumn equinox! After a summer full of activities, we’re returning to this emblematic space of culture and conviviality in Coimbra’s Praça da República. Book the date now and stop by on 20 September. Come and browse with us, we’ll be delighted to meet you.

Hugo Ferreira – guitar
Gonçalo Sarmento – double bass
Anton Iglésias – drums

This has been a busy year for guitarist, composer and producer Hugo Ferreira.

In the space of just a few months, the Coimbra-born musician has released two discs with Carimbo Porta Jazz, a fundamental association for improvised music in the city of Porto, where Ferreira currently lives.

In both of these highly collaborative works – ‘Stop’ with the Godua quartet and ‘Esfanes’ with the quintet of the same name – Hugo Ferreira excels in both writing and playing.

The trio Fiona and duos with musicians such as Joana Raquel, José Vale or Duarte Ventura are other examples of his intense activity. All in all, there are plenty of reasons to invite Hugo Ferreira to share more facets of his work at the Jazz ao Centro Festival.

Ivo is a great musician from the Coimbra diaspora. From Amsterdam, where he completed his higher studies in music, he often brings the best of the best to Coimbra.
Once again, not to be missed.

Festival Jazz ao Centro

Satoko Fujii is a notable pianist, composer and improviser, with a solid career spanning almost three decades. Since she first became noticed in 1996, Fujii has maintained an intense activity, both recording and live performances. In 2022, she released her 100th album as a leader. This impressive milestone was achieved thanks to working with some of the most consistent groups in contemporary jazz.

Pedro Ricardo – guitar, bass, vocals
Pablo Rizo – keyboards
Marco Duarte – drums

Pedro Ricardo’s debut album, entitled ‘Soprem Bonsentos’, was one of the great surprises of 2023. Released on Soundway Records, the disc reflects the astonishing wealth of inspirations of the multi-instrumentalist and producer from Porto, who lives in London. If jazz is fertile ground for fusion, then ‘Soprem Bons Ventos’ perfectly illustrates this ability to bring together seemingly distant traditions and sound universes.

And if the disc was a solo effort by Pedro Ricardo, the live performances have taken on a new dimension with the addition of drummer Marco Duarte (a friend of Pedro Ricardo’s from his high school days in Vila Nova de Gaia, with whom he shared his first musical experiences) and keyboardist Pablo Rizo.

João Pedro Brandão – Alto and soprano saxophone, flute, organ pedalboard
Demian Cabaud – Double bass, charango
Marcos Cavaleiro – Drums, percussions
Ana Rita Xavier – dancer
Wura Moraes – dancer
Cárin Geada – light design

A cross between sound and movement, this show has as its antecedent the disc ‘Aether’, released by the trio made up of João Pedro Brandão, Demian Cabaud and Marcos Cavaleiro, which takes the name of Bode Wilson and which, in 2022, was published by Carimbo Porta Jazz.

During the last quarter of 2023 and throughout 2024, the trio began looking for common ground with dancers Ana Rita Xavier and Wura Moraes. The result of this research will have its first public presentation in Coimbra, at the Convento São Francisco, as part of the Coimbra International Jazz Encounters.

In the second half of 2024, we will continue the Café Curto cycle of showcases, which began in October 2020 and has already had more than 150 sessions. On a weekly basis, on Tuesday evenings, the public will be able to enjoy a variety of musical proposals on the stage of the Café Concerto of the Convento São Francisco. Between 3 September and 17 December, there will be 15 performances featuring artists with expressions ranging from the intimacy of folk song, to the experimentalism of electronica, the energy of pop, the boldness of jazz and the unique jazz and the singularity of world music.

Tânia OP + Eduardo Cardinho

Tânia OP was born in 1980 and is from Bragança, where she develops her work as an artist and musician. She trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto, the Vila Nova de Gaia Conservatory of Music and Media Artes at the University of Beira Interior, and also took a course in Sung Prayer with Iégor Reznikoff. She was part of projects such as Pé na Terra, Lelia Doura, Chamaste-mó, Lapantim, Momento Sabbath and, in 2020, she created the Adélia project, which she still maintains today and which is made up of Litos Dias (bassist) and Joaquim Rodrigues (pianist). As well as singing, he is a multi-instrumentalist, playing piano, guitar, ukulele, flutes and bagpipes, often using loops in his performances. In this Café Duplo he is joined by Eduardo Cardinho, a composer and producer based in Porto, one of the most creative vibraphonists of his generation, known for his rhythmic approach and unique sound. Having studied at the Escola Profissional de Música de Espinho, the Escola Superior de Música do Porto and the Conservatorium Van Amsterdam, there are countless musicians he has met on stage, including: Jeffery Davis, Hermon Mehari, Aaron Parks, Ricardo Toscano, Melissa Aldana and Carlos Bica. He has been invited to record by names as diverse as João Barradas, Marta Arpini, Azar Azar and Da Chick, and has released ‘Black Hole’ (2016), ‘Galip Cale’ (2018) and ‘In Search of Light’ (2019) under his own name.

Gonçalo Almeida – double bass
Hannah Marshall – cello
Karoline Leblanc – piano
Luís Vicente – trumpet
Marcelo dos Reis – guitar
Mark Sanders – drums
Pat Thomas – electronics
Olie Brice – double bass
Rachel Musson – tenor sax
Ziv Taubenfeld – bass clarinet
This concert will be performed by the largest group in this residency, a decatet involving all the participating musicians.

Gonçalo Almeida – double bass
Rachel Musson – tenor sax
Ziv Taubenfeld – bass clarinet

With three instrumentalists accustomed to free improvisation, this concert is also part of the Apura Festival programme.

Hannah Marshall – cello
Karoline Leblanc – piano
Marcelo dos Reis – guitar

The Jazz ao Centro Festival returns to the Machado de Castro National Museum, one of the venues that has hosted numerous concerts over the last decade and a half.

Luís Vicente – trumpet
Mark Sanders – drums
Pat Thomas – electronics
Olie Brice – double bass

The trio of Luís Vicente, Olie Brice and Mark Sanders (who have already released a disc), invites pianist Pat Thomas.
Luís Vicente is one of the most recognised Portuguese musicians in the context of jazz and improvised music. He takes part in more than a dozen collaborative groups and leads his own projects, for which he composes. Mark Sanders is an inescapable name in European creative music, appearing on more than two hundred discs in a career spanning the last four decades. Pat Thomas is one of the most unique figures in British music. Active since 1979, he has recently gained widespread recognition through projects such as Black Top or [Ahmed] أحمد . Olie Brice is a double bass player who moves with relative ease between various contexts. With a serious dedication to freely improvised music, he is also a composer in his two current groups (a trio and an octet).

Marta Bajouco, from Coimbra, returns to Liquidâmbar together with Ana Trindade on flute and Guilherme Nunes on piano, to seek calm and restlessness through original and non-original songs of acoustic pop, indie folk, among other fusions.
In September 2022, Marta Bajouco released the EP ‘Ao Canto do Rio’, which she has been performing until today, having toured the Festa do Avante!, APURA Festival, FNAC Coimbra, etc.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

At the same time as the residency, on 28 September there will be the final presentation of the result of the Immersion / Improvisation project, in which several musicians from the University of Coimbra’s Tuna Académica groups, namely the RAGS Big Band, are challenged by Maestro Luís Castro (from the Porta-Jazz Association) to create a unique and unrepeatable show, based on improvisation and various techniques that allow for real-time composition. The Gil Vicente Academic Theatre will be the stage for this concert, in which the audience will also play an active role, led by Maestro Luís Castro.

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Karoline Leblanc – piano
Marcelo dos Reis – guitar
Gonçalo Almeida – double bass
Mark Sanders – drums
Ziv Taubenfeld – bass clarinet

The final concert of the residency that brought together 5 British musicians and 5 Portuguese musicians between 24 and 28 September.

Salão de São Tomás

Pat Thomas – piano, organ, electronics

Born in Oxford, Pat Thomas began to be noticed at the end of the 80s. Firstly, thanks to his work within Oxford’s Improviser Co-op, where he found the conditions to create his first major work. Entitled Monads, it helped define the contours of the new electroacoustic improvisation in the UK, with a very particular instrumentation, marked by the use of computers, programming and turntables. Then, in the early 1990s, following his connection with Derek Bailey, one of the major figures in British free improvisation. Participating in Bailey’s Company Week in 1991 alongside musicians such as John Zorn opened doors for Thomas, allowing him to play regularly in groups with Tony Oxley and Lol Coxhill in the following years.

By the end of the 1990s, Thomas was an inescapable figure on the London scene (while remaining connected to Oxford), with endless collaborations. One of the encounters at that time, which would come to mark the following years, was with vibraphonist Orphy Robinson, with whom Thomas would form the Black Top project in 2012, a group that has maintained intense activity, fuelled by the energy of guests such as Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Shabaka Hutchings, Peter Evans, Maggie Nicols and Mariam Rezaei.

Over the last 10 years, and especially after being one of the recipients of the Paul Hamlyn Award – one of the most important artistic honours in the UK – Pat Thomas has gained an aura of respectability that he never sought.

This concert is hosted and supported by the Seminário Maior de Coimbra.

Semente Atelier

Hannah Marshall – cello
Luís Vicente – trumpet
Olie Brice – double bass
Rachel Musson – tenor sax

This concert will be one of the first public events in Semente Atelier’s brand new space.