Sep 22, 2026 12:26 PM
Hyde Park Jazz Fest on Chicago’s South Side to Present 20th Edition
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival will take place for the 20th time on the final weekend of September 2026. Beginning half…
Brazilian drummer, singer, composer and improviser Mariá Portugal is the curator for Music Unlimited 40.
(Photo: Courtesy Mariá Portugal)Music Unlimited is a festival that occurs annually in the town of Wels, Austria. Its 40th edition will take place Nov. 5–8 at the Schlachthof, a community and arts center; Landesmusikschule, a local music school; and Schloss Puchberg, an adult education facility housed in a 430-year-old castle. Given its age and its affiliation with community establishments, one might expect a program that celebrate its accomplishments and double down on its brand. Music Unlimited will celebrate its long history of hosting the best free improvisers from around the world with art exhibits presenting the images and work of past performers and set designers.
But change is built into the festival’s modus operandi. It invites a guest to select the acts every other year. The curator for Music Unlimited 40 is Mariá Portugal, a Brazilian drummer, singer, composer and improviser who currently lives in Berlin.
Portugal is a bandleader and musician who has recorded and performed with Mats Gustafsson, Joe McPhee and Fred Frith. She has also been organizing concert series since shortly after coming to Germany in 2020 to be the Moers Festival’s artist in residence. After the residency she programmed Soundtrips, a network that invites international guests to present their work and collaborate with local improvisers and experimentalists in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. After moving to Berlin, she was invited by the concert venue Sowieso to program a concert series. She named it TOMA CHOCOLATE! after a line in the cha-cha “El Bodeguero” by flutist Richard Egües.
Says Portugal, “I had the idea to make a series focused on Latin American musicians. Now, they are the only ones who are let in, so that was my perfect small personal revenge against European anti-immigration politics. My idea was to put together people who are making risky music within their genre. I invite from singer-songwriters to noise, free improvisers, computer music, installations. It’s pretty vast. I think it was the beginning of the curatorial line that I assumed for myself for Unlimited.
“It has two different sides. One is focusing on immigrants based in Europe. Most of the artists, and almost all of the bandleaders, are either immigrants or children of immigrants. There are people from South America, Asia and the Middle East who have moved to Europe, but also people from different parts of Europe who immigrated to Berlin. The other side is about people coming from the U.S. and Brazil who are part of the Black diaspora, and whose work is very meaningful for me. For example, Marcelo Galter and Ilessi are coming from Brazil. Their music has a strong connection to jazz, while at the same time being deeply rooted in Afro-Brazilian musical traditions from the northeast of Brazil. They bring these different influences together in a very unique way.”
Ilessi is a fluent and chameleonic vocalist who moves easily between scatting, chanting and melodically adroit Portuguese singing. The trio of pianist Marcelo Galter, who produced her most recent recording, will accompany her, and also play some pieces from his joyous, intricately rhythmic new album Investiga A Beleza Sem Fim De Dorizal Caymmi. Moor Mother is more of a declaimer than a singer, and she selects accompaniment freely from jazz, metal and psychedelic soul, choosing sounds whose textures match the fury, rue and tenderness of her gripping recitations. She will be accompanied by trumpeter and percussionist Aquiles Navarro. While both are members of the electrified free-jazz combo Irreversible Entanglements, the ritualistic explorations of sound and space on Navarro’s recent LP Live in Ravenna indicate a myriad of possible outcomes for their collaboration. And Banquet of Consequences, the Berlin-based sextet led by Italian bassist Antonio Borghini, presents a vision of jazz that encompasses Mingus-worthy bruisers and ballads, third stream chamber pieces and life-affirming kwela rave-ups.
Austrian bass clarinetist Susanna Gartmayer, who has played with Portugal, John Edwards and Joe McPhee in the free-jazz quartet Monster, will present a solo set. Alto saxophonist Angelica Niescier and pianist Marta Warelis, both Poles who live outside of Poland, will present the music of their so-far unrecorded duo. Portugal will present two linked combos of her own. Her Erosão Trio, with percussionists Emilio Gordoa and Burkhard Beins, threads moments of lyrical singing through a microscopically detailed sonic environment. The Erosão Septet (erosão is Portuguese for erosion), on the other hand, features bass, tuba and paired reeds and trombones played by free music vets from Cologne, Copenhagen and Berlin who shift mercurially between song fragments and free improvisation. She will also represent TOMA CHOCOLATE! with an ensemble recruited from musicians who have played in the series. The series’ eclectic spirit will also be represented by Alejandra Cardenas, who will play two very different sets of music that deal with her Peruvian heritage. In Água Dulce, a duo with percussionist Laura Robles, she will subject traditional Afro-Peruvian grooves to electronic duress. And under her own name, she will present A Body Like A Home, a cycle of spoken and sung contemplations of colonial and dictatorial traumas. And the duo Deafkids, an old favorite of Portugal’s from back home, will close the festival with a set of blown-out beats and postpunk noise.
To view the complete lineup for Music Unlimited 40, CLICK HERE. DB
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