This neighbourhood orchestra launched an acoustic adventure for bars where a furious Portuguese guitar challenges the accordion, people use street talk, chairs are drums, basses are double basses and children’s keyboards make adults dance to the sound of a new emigrant song with a desire to leave and come back.
People say it’s a new song, another way of experiencing music…the result is a delirious, athletic and popular sound. Celebrating now for seven years in a real and powerful country when they showed their acoustic home disco to the public to make the world dance with their first album, "TascaBeat O Sonho Português".
TascaBeat is the result of a seven year saga lived through Summer dances and well-known festivals. In this odyssey, Oquestrada courted and won over the public in their only retreat, which was an old cinema, inherited from the Incredible Almada Philharmonic Orchestra, and has created concepts such as Sala de’Star, Tasca Dancing and Fado dos Subúrbios…
They created conditions from scratch. They acted both for the parish and for national and European halls full of technical equipment. From now on they were ready to appear in the village square or on the most brilliant stage in the world. For them, dreams and reality are only a short distance away from each other. So rumours started that there was another version of d’Star. Word went round announcing a new song. The acoustic player had new clothes, the punk wasn’t ashamed of being romantic and the Fado could actually be a party: from the suburbs shadowed by uncertainty arose enchanting stories.
A new culture took shape. Brandy with champagne and snails with caviar. The project opened its arms and welcomed others: it divulged lives and artists and promoted secrets as well-guarded as the project itself. It embraced the past and gave it life and hope for the future. Speaking about them is like speaking about the Boxing Fado Singer, the first woman to use shorts and ageless magicians, or a travelling Bar used as the limelight for artists without stages. Music took a fresh breath of air. Tradition too. The result was a song based on the vagrancy of Fado with the throbbing rhythm of dance music. Tasca Beat is the world’s dream told in Portuguese style. It’s a sound track of a life lived in an opposite direction that’s an eternal dance in which nostalgia is the hope for the future and Fado the companion of happiness.
It stays in the hearts of those who saw it…