Egberto Gismonti

Selected Recordings is volume 11 of ECM's :rarum series, in which artists compiled music from their own ECM catalogue. Egberto Gismonti chose nine of his pieces, recorded between 1977 and 1995 and drawn from seven albums. The selection moves between solo guitar, duets with Naná Vasconcelos, his Brazilian groups and a symphony orchestra, a compact map of almost two decades on the label.

The oldest track is Kalimba (Lua Cheia) from Sol do Meio Dia, recorded at Talent Studio in Oslo in November 1977. Gismonti plays kalimba, wood flute and voice, Vasconcelos percussion and berimbau. A year later, in the same studio, he made Solo, the source of Selva Amazônica / Pau Rolou. The double album Sanfona (1981) supplies Cavaquinho and 10 Anos, the latter played with the Academia de Danças, his group with saxophonist Mauro Senise and bassist Zeca Assumpção. Bianca comes from Duas Vozes, the 1984 duo album with Vasconcelos, and Lundu (Azul) from the solo guitar record Dança dos Escravos, made in November 1988. Two pieces come from Infância, recorded in 1990 by a group including cellist Jaques Morelenbaum. Frevo is taken from Meeting Point, made in June 1995 with the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. Manfred Eicher produced the original sessions.

Frevo has a history of its own in this catalogue. Gismonti had already recorded it on Solo and again on Sanfona, and the version he chose here is the orchestral one, with himself at the piano. Selva Amazônica / Pau Rolou closes the disc and fills more than a quarter of it. Over twenty minutes Gismonti moves from super 8-string guitar and surdo to voice and cooking bells. The disc opens with Ensaio de escola de samba (Dança dos Escravos) from Infância. Its subtitle points back to the solo guitar album of two years earlier.

The :rarum series ran to twenty volumes between 2002 and 2004, each compiled by the artist and digitally remastered, and Gismonti also wrote the liner notes for his. Reviewing it in 2020 on Between Sound and Space, Tyran Grillo wrote that "the music of Egberto Gismonti is ultimately about one thing: memory". He also heard in the choice an attempt "to pull out songs that might otherwise remain forgotten in the recesses of history".

This is the CD edition, :rarum 11 (014 199-2), released on 26 January 2004 in the second batch of the series, volumes 9 to 20. It comes in a six-panel digipak with a 20-page booklet.