Naná Vasconcelos

CD version. Saudades is the first album under his own name for ECM by the Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, and the fulfilment of a long-held wish to hear the berimbau with an orchestra. The single-string musical bow of Brazilian capoeira here meets a full string section, in a kind of concerto for a traditional instrument and its most inventive player. Recorded in March 1979 and released in 1980, it remains one of the more unusual records in the label's early catalogue.

The project was made possible by Egberto Gismonti, who wrote the string parts, composed Cego Aderaldo and plays super 8-string guitar on it. According to Nick Lea of Jazz Views, Vasconcelos sang his ideas to Gismonti on their travels together, and Gismonti notated them and built the orchestral score from them. The Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart is conducted by Mladen Gutesha, who had already led orchestras on ECM projects with Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek and Terje Rypdal. The sessions took place at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, with Martin Wieland as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.

The nineteen-minute O Berimbau opens with the instrument alone for several minutes, its metallic scrape and the shifting pitch of the gourd resonator heard up close. Then the strings drift in slowly, and the piece grows into a long dialogue between the bow and the orchestra. Vozes (Saudades) is a short, exciting piece for voices treated as percussion over a bed of strings. Ondas (Na óhlos de Petronila) works gongs, percussion, voices and strings played percussively into a rhapsody, and the brief Dado closes the album as a coda for berimbau.

The album was recognised as something special from the start. DownBeat wrote that "Nana plus Gismonti plus strings plus voices is awesome, and utterly disarming", and singled out the presence of Gismonti's guitar. In Die Zeit, Manfred Sack heard a contemporary music rooted in folklore and hard to classify, one that forces the listener into concentrated attention. Vasconcelos had by then played with Don Cherry and Collin Walcott in Codona, and in 1980 he joined Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays on As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls.

This is the CD edition of ECM 1147, first released in 1980.