Jazz Articles about Mário Franco
Mário Franco: Rush

by Chris Mosey
Portuguese bassist, composer and dancer Mario Franco, describes Rush as a rock-inspired jazz album." It came, he says, from an inner need of electric sounds." Franco, born 1965, started out playing classical music before switching to jazz. He is a dancer with the National Ballet Company of Portugal. His latest album is about how humanity wastes time while kidding itself that it uses it. We are forever doing and forget just being," he says, ...
read moreMário Franco Trio: Our Door

by Gabriel Medina Arenas
Our Door, the debut album from the Mário Franco Trio, is lush with nostalgia and camaraderie, but also creates a vibrant breath of fresh air, offering hope for the present and future states of Portuguese jazz. These gifted musicians met at the end of the 80's in Lisbon's Hot Clube de Portugal, one of the oldest jazz clubs in Europe. As emerging players, they learned the unique syncopated genre there, since it is also a music school, where ...
read moreTake Five With Mário Franco

by Mario Franco
Meet Mario Franco: Mário Franco was born in 1965 and started music lessons when he was four years old in Centro Estudos Gregorianos. Franco studied music theory with Maria José Godinho then with Cristina Brito da Cruz in the Academia de Amadores De Música. During his time at Academia Amadores De Música, he initated double bass and chamber music with Fernando Flores and composition with Pedro Rocha. Franco attended double bass courses with Ludwig Strecher in Estoril ...
read moreMario Franco: This Life

by Phil DiPietro
Sometimes a disc comes from out of left field that's so good, it makes you drop not only everything you're listening to, but a few other things you shouldn't. Wherever these records come from, you want to go there--and they just take you. Such is the case with this release from Mário Franco, a forty-something bassist/leader from Portugal. It's uncanny that last year, another unheard-of bassist's date from the Portuguese Tone of a Pitch imprint accomplished the ...
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