EU welcomed Brazilian guitar and piano legend Egberto Gismonti at our Europe Jazz Blues Festival 2025.
Egberto Gismonti drew encores from the crowd at the ornate Riga, Latvia. Gismonti opened his program on guitar with a set of three pieces performed classical-style on an acoustic nylon 10-string guitar. Gismonte assumes duties at the concert grand, demonstrating that his instrumental capabilities reach far beyond the guitar.
A virtuoso on both guitar and piano, Egberto Gismonti has created a body of work that stand at the crossroads of his native Brazil’s folk tradition and the world of classical music, in a way which echoes his predecessor Heitor Villa-Lobos. He is also a masterful improviser. Gismonti has been described as approaching the fretboard as though it were a keyboard, often creating the impression of more than one player. His blazing technique is capable of summoning up an almost orchestral palette of colours.
His first piece, Alegrinho & Saudações, coaxed a multiplicity of rising and falling calypso rhythms and sonic textures from the bass strings. His third piece, Águas Luminosas & Bianca, proved to be fleet-fingered and melodic in complexity, arpeggiated and in a minor key set against resonant bass strings…
After a brief guitar-tuning interlude against the Steinway piano onstage, Gismonti repositioned the nonslip cloth onto his left leg and played his second guitar piece, Mestiço Coboclo & Dança, which evoked a traditional Spanish sound and groove which had Gismonti bobbing along.
It’s rhythms burst into jovial fretboard tapping along the bass strings and simultaneous, galloping pluck of right hand treble strings. It’s truly lovely, vibrant stuff, particularly with Gismonti’s dynamic, propulsive improvisations around guitar-led pieces like “Salvador”, “Maracatu” and “Em Familiar”. These dancing Gismonti tunes are carefully counterbalanced by Haden’s stately, reflective compositions “First Song” and “Silence”, and this is so clearly identifiable as an ECM sound that it’ll do little to dissuade the label’s detractors. But that’s their problem. This is beautiful music, beautifully played, and surely there’s room for a little of that in all but the most barren of souls right now.
It’s an extended season that usually begins in end July and stretches until mid-August. Whatever the finer design points, this is an impressively old university setting for a gig.
During last year’s festival, veteran Brazilian guitarist and pianist Egberto Gismonti played in Ludwigshafen as a duo with Portuguese singer Maria João, whos
For his return visit, Gismonti played solo, beginning on guitar, then changing seats for the piano in the second part of a set that ultimately ran to around 90 minutes.
The 77-year-old Gismonti doesn’t make many live appearances nowadays, so it was impressive that EU Jazz Blues fest secured his presence for a second year, allowing him to express himself more personally, in this solo setting.
Although amplified, Gismonti didn’t sound much louder than semi-acoustic as he swapped between 10- and 12-string guitars, which sat high on his left knee, their broad necks angled upwards.
He had explained that everything he was going to play had roots in Brazilian folkloric tradition, and despite tidying up the trad edges and elaborating the melodies, this was indeed a recognisable factor.
He went on to mention the crucial importance of miscegenation in the formation of much Brazilian culture, particularly its music, which is made up of a rich brew of antecedents, and he reminded the audience that there are also many folks of German descent living in the south of the country.
Gismonti played skittering parts on his lower strings, then hopped up to the bass part of his aircraft carrier-sized guitar neck, stretching his palms to facilitate low runs – it was almost like watching a sitar player rather than a guitarist.
Gismonti’s fingertips had a percussive attack, tapping out harmonics whilst picking scintillating solo flurries; sometimes he rapped the guitar body like it was a cajon.
After around 50 minutes, Gismonti moved to the piano, never to return to his guitars. Perhaps this was because alighting on each instrument involves such a different process, not only on a finger-muscle level, but on a mental plane as well.
He began this second phase with Tom Jobim’s ‘Insensatez’, setting out on what was to be a river-flow of intermingling rhythms, phrases and decorations, in a style that was difficult to fix as jazz, classical, or folk.
Ultimately, it was an individual Gismonti concoction of all of them. He managed to insert sharply percussive emphases and atonal outbreaks, but still rafting across the top of his chosen melodies, which were usually manifested as a kind of suspended cascade.
The audience demanded two encores, ignoring Gismonti’s sleepyhead gestures, and his pointing, eyebrows raised, at his watch. Nevertheless, he still delivered some extra time, goaded on by the crowd’s extremely enthusiastic reception.
If there one description could characterize the entire evening’s concert, it would be of Gismonti’s astonishing energy and vibrancy.
Musically, he is able to evoke an array of new and unfamiliar creatures that traipse forward, peer with glittering eyes from the underbrush and then vanish just as mysteriously as they’d emerged.
By Olivia Peevas
