McPhee, now over 80 years old, continues to reveal an impressive vital force, a miraculous breath that dates back to the late 1960s and that has touched practically everyone who matters – from Peter Brötzmann to Mathew Shipp, from Hamid Drake to Evan Parker -, leaving essential documents for the genre’s canon, and still feeding a voracious thirst for discovery that leads him to collaborate with musicians from the most diverse latitudes and ages, always guided by a language that is admittedly his own, as lyrical as it is fiery, as meticulous as it is human. BS

Susanna Gartmayer is a composer and improviser from Vienna, whose craft moves from jazz to contemporary composition and freer rock, playing a leading role in freer music on Austrian soil, not only as a performer, but also as the organizer of the “Monday Improvisers Sessions” in Vienna. Collaborating regularly with musicians such as Stefan Schneider and Thomas Berghammer, she is also part of The Vegetable Orchestra, which has toured a lot. BS

John Edwards is one of the most venerable figures in the lineage of jazz and improvisation from the UK. Active since the 1980s, he is today one of the reference figures for the double bass, capable of coming up with new ways of animating it from absolute notions of balance and feeling, in a vast network of encounters and synergies that lead him to artists as disparate and brave as Phil Minton, Roscoe Mitchell, Maggie Nichols or John Butcher. And that’s just a tiny part of it. BS

Mariá Portugal is a drummer and singer from São Paulo based in Germany, whose constant transit around the world has revealed a continuous and attentive work that includes the stage, curating and composing for dance, theater and cinema. Without forgetting her Brazilian roots, she feels the pulse of the rhythm to take her to new places. Stops that lead her to play with luminaries such as Elza Soares (DEP), Fred Frith, Metá Metá or Gerald Cleaver. BS