The Hot Clube de Portugal will return to No. 48 Praça da Alegria, in Lisbon, after the building undergoes work that is expected to last several months, the president of the association told Lusa today.
In January of last year, the building that houses what is the oldest active European jazz club was closed due to structural issues.
Since then, those responsible for the club have been “fighting and talking to the [Lisbon City Council (CML)] in order to find a solution for the building where the Hot Clube is at the moment, which is the building that has been banned,” said Pedro Moreira, speaking to Lusa.
According to the president of the Hot Clube, talks with the local authority “have been very productive, very useful”, but “it’s always a slow process, which always involves some bureaucracy”.
“I’m really convinced that we’ll be able to say something about this very soon. And then, of course, we’ll have to do a period of construction. We’ll always be talking about being closed for another period, because we need to carry out work that hasn’t started yet,” he said.
Pedro Moreira expects the work to take, “unfortunately, several months, maybe a year, hopefully less”.
“I want to see the light at the end of the tunnel, I want clear solutions, not only in relation to the stability of the Hot Clube’s situation in that space, which until now was somewhat precarious – always in good faith and with great collaboration from CML, but it wasn’t a definitive situation,” he said.
Although it has been closed for about a year, Hot Clube has “done a lot of activities in partnership, in outside productions”.
“We’ve done a lot of things, of very high quality, with very well-known and established musicians, but also with our young people, the students from the school,” added Pedro Moreira.
Although he hopes for “a solution soon for the club”, the idea is to “continue with this network of partnerships, to go out into the city, because the Hot Clube belongs to the city, it belongs to the country”.
The Hot Clube de Portugal has operated in Praça da Alegria since it was founded, first in No. 39, a building that burned down in 2009, and then in No. 48, on the same street.
The oldest active European jazz club was officially founded on March 19, 1948, when Luiz Villas-Boas, a melomaniac and its founder, filled out membership form number one – a form that remains in the institution’s heritage.
In addition to the club and the Luiz Villas-Boas Jazz School, which operates in the Metropolitana building, also in Lisbon, part of Hot’s work also includes a museum, based mainly on the estate left by the founder, who died in 1999.
