Carioca

This album by the Brazilian guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Ronaldo Leite de Freitas, known as Carioca, was issued by Carmo, the label of Egberto Gismonti. Carmo is named after the town where Gismonti was born. It is a solo record in which each piece is built on a different string instrument. They range from guitars with six, eight, ten and twelve strings to mandolin, ten-string viola and the northeastern Brazilian cítara. First released in Brazil in 1984 as an LP, it came back on CD in 1993 as Carioca.

Gismonti produced the original LP, titled 7 Dias 7 Instrumentos Música, and recorded and mixed it at his Porão Studio in Rio de Janeiro in March 1984. Pitanga and Bemtevi were recorded at Porão in June 1991. Carioca wrote all the music and plays everything except two small parts: Gismonti adds flute to the closing Revoada Final, and the singer Rosaly joins him on Caminho do Sol. Dulce Bressane was production assistant, and the poet and lyricist Aldir Blanc wrote the booklet notes in Portuguese and English.

The sequence opens and closes with the cítara, in two short versions of Revoada that frame the whole set. In between the instruments change from track to track. Briza is a single melodic line on a three-string mandolin, Alvorada is played on the twelve-string guitar, and Pitanga sets a six-string guitar against kalimba and clay pot. On Caminho do Sol the second cítara is joined by voices. Brilho is the only piece for the ten-string viola, and the eight-string guitar returns for Branca and Bemtevi. Three pieces run past seven minutes, so each instrument has room to unfold.

The record has had little press outside Brazil. Writing on ECM Reviews in 2020, Tyran Grillo compared it to the solo albums of Stephan Micus and wrote that Micus's "devoted listeners" would "feel right at home" with Carioca's music. He heard the tracks as a single journey, moving from images of nature towards an inner space and then back home. The online guide Slipcue called the LP challenging and pointed it to listeners interested in experimental guitar.

CD, catalogue number CARMO/8, released in June 1993 and distributed by ECM, a reissue of the 1984 Carmo LP with two additional tracks.