PAULO CHAGAS
Compositor, professor e multi-instrumentista. Tem dedicado a sua intervenção a várias vertentes da música contemporânea, electro-acústica, ambiental, improvisação, jazz e música de câmara. Tem igualmente trabalhado no campo da produção musical, da promoção de concertos e festivais, assim como na escrita sobre música. É director artístico do MIA – Encontros de Música Improvisada de Atouguia da Baleia, desde 2010. Tem percorrido vários países tocando em concertos e festivais e ministrando workshops sobre composição e improvisação.
EN
Portuguese-born Paulo Chagas is a wilfully eclectic musician, having devoted much of his career to experimentalism. Being by nature a maverick, he has committed his life to the research of new (or renewed) solutions and links between the sounds he explores. Paulo is a dedicated composer, multi-instrumentalist (woodwinds, electronics), teacher, writer and music promoter. He is actively involved with Zpoluras Archives, a music label committed to various branches of contemporary improvised music and to working in partnership with musicians from all parts of the world, and MIA (Encontro de Música Improvisada de Atouguia da Baleia), which plays an essential role within the Portuguese improvisation circuit.
Paulo has a Classical Music background. He studied oboe, composition, acoustics and music history at the National Conservatory of Lisbon (1980-1985), where he joined Orchestra and Chamber Music groups. He has degrees in Special Education, Pedagogy of Music Education, and Music Therapy. He subsequently devoted himself to jazz, studying with saxophonists David Binney and Perico Sambeat. From his earliest years as a musician, Paulo has had a broad interest in all musical forms, from folk, pop and rock, through jazz, fusion, improvised music, and classical.
He has composed, performed and produced music for theater, film, and for educational purposes. He regularly performs and records with an ever-widening range of musicians and collectives, such as P.R.E.C., Variable Geometry Orchestra, Chagas Curado Viegas Wind Trio, Palimpsest Trio, Peixe Frito, Tania Giannouli, Fernando Guiomar and many others. He develops also a soloist career, having covered countries like France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Turkey, Brasil, both to play and to teach workshops and masterclasses.
Describing himself as a “music addict”, Paulo is an avid performer, keen to experiment, record, perform, and to do whatever is necessary to further the cause of music. For him, music is an Art form that is intimately linked with the ongoing search for the meaning of life.
From his discography we can highlight the following titles: Mispel Bellyfull (2004); Miosótis – Risco (gds 2007); PREC – Contagious Insanities (A Beard of Snails Records 2009); The Limbo Ensemble – Plebiscitu (Audiotong 2011); Chagas Curado Viegas Wind Trio – Old School New School No School (Creative Sources 2012); Tania Giannouli and Paulo Chagas - Forest Stories (Rattle, 2012); Paulo Chagas - Saxophone Solos (darkpebble-bluewave, 2014); Palimpsest Trio - Stanze (Pan y Rosas, 2015); Fernando Guiomar & Paulo Chagas - Escape and return (Zpoluras Archives, 2016); Paulo Chagas, Samuel Halkvist, Stephan Sieben - Days are not days (Creative Sources, 2016); Parlato, Chagas, Lenglet, Gibbs - Wasteland (Setola di Maiale, 2018); Peixe Frito - Jazz From Here (Last Pork Records - 2018).