Charlie Haden, Egberto Gismonti

In Montreal is a live duo concert by the bassist Charlie Haden and the Brazilian guitarist, pianist and composer Egberto Gismonti, recorded in 1989 and issued by ECM twelve years later. That summer the Montreal Jazz Festival honoured Haden with a series of concerts in different settings. ECM calls this one perhaps the most exceptional of them, and the one that took Haden furthest from strict definitions of jazz.

The concert took place on 6 July 1989 at the Salle Marie-Gérin-Lajoie of the Université du Québec, during the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal. It was recorded and mixed for the festival by Alain Chénier and Michel Larivière, with Daniel Vachon as producer, and Manfred Eicher was executive producer of the release. The two musicians already knew each other well. With Jan Garbarek they had formed the trio heard on the ECM album Magico. Here Gismonti moves between acoustic guitar and piano, and Haden plays double bass throughout.

Seven of the nine pieces are Gismonti's, several of them from the repertoire of his 1980s group Academia de Danças. Haden contributes First Song and Silence. The long duet Em Família, over ten minutes, moves from energetic passages to calm, open ones. Palhaço, a piece the two had played with Garbarek, appears here in a spacious duo version. The concert closes with Don Quixote, at twelve minutes the longest track, which Gismonti had earlier recorded with Naná Vasconcelos.

The release was widely praised. In DownBeat, Fernando Gonzalez called it "a small jewel" and wrote that Gismonti's "clean, crisp touch" plays well off "Haden's rich, booming sound". The Montreal Gazette, reviewing the concert itself, heard first "the soft silences, then the bright tropical colours". For Kenny Mathieson in Jazzwise, the pair traded ideas with a freedom that sparked mutual inspiration. Not every critic agreed. In PopMatters in 2001, Maurice Bottomley found some of the free passages forced, but named Em Família a "tour de force".

This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1746, with the nine tracks of the concert first released by ECM on 3 September 2001.