Attend open-air jazz concerts during Jazz em Agosto, held at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon.
Jazz em Agosto 2022, in its 38th edition, sill show the multiple identities of jazz, a more unusual program than what is offered at the main international festivals.
“Jazz has always had the seed of protest and change at its root, a genre of music animated by the social context surrounding it and able to focus on grievances that are often inconvenient and which the eye so frequently prefers to ignore. Music must carry greater meaning. It must be a vehicle for the most profound expression of everything that makes us humans and point to words a more meaningful existence. Jazz has understood how, at various times, to channel and harness protest and revolt in a way that is impossible to silence.
In his book 33 Revolutions per Minute, British journalist Dorian Lynskey traces the history of protest music and identifies Billie Holiday’s unforgettable Strange Fruit as quite possibly the birth of protest in the form of pop music: “[It] was not by any means the first protest song, but it was the first to shoulder an explicit political message into the arena of entertainment.” By throwing the song at a Café Society audience in March 1939, Holiday’s soulful voice left everyone hanging on her every word and made it clear that music had the power to ruffle feathers and bring about change.”
Source: Gulbenkian Foundation, about Jazz em Agosto
