Magico, Jan Garbarek, Egberto Gismonti, Charlie Haden

Carta de Amor is a live double album by the trio of Jan Garbarek, Egberto Gismonti and Charlie Haden, recorded in Munich in April 1981. The tapes then stayed in the archive for more than thirty years. A Norwegian saxophonist, a Brazilian guitarist and pianist and an American bassist, three strong and contrasting musicians, are heard here after two years of playing together. The two discs hold almost an hour and fifty minutes of music, with room for long, open improvisations.

The trio first worked together in the studio in 1979, when they recorded Magico in June and Folk Songs in November, both at Talent Studio in Oslo for ECM. Touring then sharpened their improvisational empathy. The concert took place at the Amerika Haus in Munich, where ECM presented and taped many of its artists in those years. Garbarek plays tenor and soprano saxophones, Gismonti guitars and piano, Haden double bass. Manfred Eicher produced, Martin Wieland recorded the concert, and in 2011 Eicher and Jan Erik Kongshaug mixed the original analogue tapes at Rainbow Studio in Oslo.

Gismonti wrote five of the eleven pieces, and his title track, whose name means "love letter", opens the first disc and returns as a variation to close the second. Haden brings La Pasionaria, from the book of his Liberation Music Orchestra and dedicated to Dolores Ibárruri. Here it stretches over sixteen minutes, and it sits beside All That Is Beautiful, which had never been recorded before. Garbarek contributes arrangements of folk songs and his own Spor, first heard on Magico and now opened up into a fourteen-minute collective improvisation. Other pieces, such as Gismonti's Palhaço and Cego Aderaldo, also come from the two studio albums.

In the ECM notes Gismonti describes the release as "a message in a bottle that has taken this long to reach the shore". Reviewing it for London Jazz News in November 2012, Chris Parker singled out Gismonti's "mesmerising, shimmering guitar" and the "hypnotic duo improvisations" he shares with Haden. He set them against the intensity of Garbarek's attack. Parker also placed it next to Keith Jarrett's Sleeper, another long-shelved live recording that ECM brought out the same year.

This is the double CD on ECM Records, catalogue number ECM 2280/81, first released in November 2012, with liner photographs by Ralph Quinke.