Goncalo Marques

Lisbon based trumpet player Gonçalo Marques has been working on his melodic trio concept weekly for a long time in the Lisbon scene.



He started to learn the guitar as a teenager and then changed to trumpet after being very impressed with a performance by Eddy Henderson. His main teacher was the very creative lisbon based trumpet player João Moreira and he is one of his early mentors. Meanwhile he got a Physics degree from Lisbon University and started to work as math teacher. Then he got a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston and he decided to dedicate himself full-time to music. He started to have private lessons with John McNeil and that changed his approach to trumpet playing. He graduated from Berklee in 2005 and he came back to Portugal where he is actively involved in the local Jazz scene. He also teaches at the HotClub Jazz school, at the Escola Superior de Musica and he is the pedagogical director of “Férias com Jazz” an annual jazz camp for youngsters. He plays regularly with different small bands and bigbands and although he considers himself to be mostly a Jazz trumpet player he also plays in other musical contexts.



Besides music, he is very interested in the arts in general and in literature and he also reads math books when nobody is watching. He wants to keep developing as a musician and to explore new territories as a trumpet player, as an improviser and as a composer.



He plays regularly with his trio and for his debut cd for TOAP he invited tenor Bill McHenry to join and performed live with him in that setting in the Festa do Jazz festival 2010.