Egberto Gismonti Group

Música de Sobrevivência ("Music of Survival") is the second album by the Egberto Gismonti Group for ECM, recorded in Oslo in April 1993 and released that September. The Brazilian composer leads a quartet of piano and guitars, cello and bass through five shorter pieces and one long suite. That suite, Natura, festa do interior, fills more than half of a programme running just over an hour. It is dedicated to the flooded forest of the Pantanal in the Mato Grosso lowlands.

Gismonti plays piano, guitar and flute, and wrote all the music. Nando Carneiro plays synthesizers, guitar and caxixi, Zeca Assumpção bass and rainwood (pau de chuva), and Jaques Morelenbaum cello and bottle. The same four had recorded Infância for ECM in November 1990. The session took place at Rainbow Studio, with Manfred Eicher producing and Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer. The booklet prints texts by Gismonti in translation and the poem Vespral de chuva ("Before the Rain") by the Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros.

The opening Carmem begins with guitar arpeggios that the cello takes up in long bowed lines. Bianca and Lundú #2 follow, each under six minutes. Forró, named after the dance music of the Brazilian northeast, runs to twelve minutes in two parts. Natura, festa do interior lasts thirty-three minutes and is divided into fifteen sections. Here the whole group is heard at length, with Gismonti changing between piano, guitar and flute, and with the cello, the bottle and the rainwood adding their own colours.

Writing on ECM Reviews in 2012, Tyran Grillo called Natura, festa do interior a masterpiece and observed that "the group members blend like a metal alloy". He singled out Morelenbaum, whose cello adds "notable fire" to Gismonti's cooler melodic lines, and heard joy in Alegrinho #2, where Gismonti moves easily between piano and guitar. With Infância, the album documents the stable Brazilian quartet Gismonti led in the early 1990s, recorded both times in Oslo by the same producer and engineer.

This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1509, of the album first released in September 1993.