Selected Recordings is volume 19 of ECM's :rarum series, in which artists compiled music from their own ECM catalogue. Arild Andersen chose thirteen pieces recorded between 1975 and 1999, taken from more than ten albums. The disc covers his quartets of the 1970s, the band Masqualero, the folk-based Sagn, duos and trios, and the string writing of Hyperborean. It is about as wide a portrait of the Norwegian bassist as one CD allows.
The earliest pieces are 305 W 18 St from Clouds in My Head (1975) and Sole from Green Shading Into Blue (1978). A Song I Used to Play comes from Lifelines (1981), a quartet with Kenny Wheeler on flugelhorn. In August 1981 Andersen led a one-off band at the Molde Jazz Festival with Bill Frisell, and its Molde Concert provides The Sword Under His Wings. Shorts, a duo with Frisell, is borrowed from the guitarist's In Line. Masqualero, with trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, appears through Vanilje from Bande à Part and Printer from Aero. The trio with Ralph Towner and Naná Vasconcelos on If You Look Far Enough gives Svev and For All We Know. The most recent track is She's Gone from Achirana, recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in October 1999 with pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos.
Some choices revisit tunes Andersen kept returning to. The Sword Under His Wings had appeared in a studio version on Clouds in My Head, and here it is the thirteen-minute Molde performance. A Song I Used to Play, under three minutes in its Lifelines form, was also played at Molde and recorded again on If You Look Far Enough. For All We Know, by Fred J. Coots and Samuel Lewis, is the only standard. The Island comes from Hyperborean (1996), where saxophones and the Cikada string quartet meet Andersen's bass.
The twenty :rarum volumes appeared between 2002 and 2004, each selected by the artist and digitally remastered. Reviewing the disc in 2020 on Between Sound and Space, Tyran Grillo wrote that it offers "the grandest possible conspectus of his recorded odyssey in a single disc". He wrote that the two early quartet tracks captured "the young bassist at his most sunlit".
This is the CD edition, :rarum 19 (066 598-2), released on 26 January 2004 in the second batch of the series, volumes 9 to 20.
