Egberto Gismonti

Egberto Gismonti enjoys global acclaim for his skills as both a multi-instrumentalist and composer. Deeply shaped by the legacy of Brazilian master Heitor Villa-Lobos, his output mirrors the nation’s broad musical spectrum, spanning the Amazon Indians’ batuque, the Carioca samba and choro, and the Northeastern frevo, baião, and forró. In this manner he conveys the authentic spirit of the Brazilian soul—raw yet refined—filtered through a personal lens honed by extended classical study and fluency across numerous musical idioms, with jazz occupying a central place.

Born into a musical household where his grandfather and uncle Edgar both led bands, Gismonti began piano and theory lessons at age five. He simultaneously took up the flute and clarinet, later adopting the violão during his teenage years. While his father steered him toward the piano’s classical path, he chose the guitar to satisfy his Italian mother’s love of serenatas. Seeking to adapt the piano’s polyphonic character to the guitar, he eventually commissioned three custom instruments with ten, twelve, and fourteen strings and cultivated a distinctive two-handed technique. At eight he commenced a fifteen-year course of piano study under Brazilian masters Jacques Klein and Aurélio Silveira. He spent one year and four months in Nova Friburgo, a town near Rio, attending the local music conservatory. Offered a scholarship at twenty to pursue classical training in Vienna, he declined in favor of deeper engagement with popular music.

In October 1968 his composition “O Sonho,” scored by him for a one-hundred-piece orchestra, was performed at the third International Song Festival (FIC) sponsored by TV Globo in Rio by the ensemble Os Três Morais. The piece’s striking orchestration generated widespread excitement and was subsequently recorded by eighteen different artists worldwide. Later that year he departed for France, serving for eighteen months as conductor and orchestrator for singer Marie Laforêt. During this period he studied with Jean Barraqué (1928–1973), a disciple of Anton Webern, and Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), once an advisor to Igor Stravinsky. These encounters reinforced the singular value of his Brazilian heritage and prompted him to develop a personal voice grounded in cabocla and mestiça traditions, leading to his return to Brazil in 1971.

His debut album, Egberto Gismonti, appeared on Elenco in 1969, featuring his own songs and a collaboration with bossa-nova composer Paulo Sérgio Vale. That same year he appeared at the San Remo Festival in Italy. In 1970 he toured Europe, cutting two singles in France, an LP in Italy, another in Brazil titled Sonho 70, and Orfeu Novo in Germany; his song “Mercador de Serpentes” was featured at the fifth FIC. After resettling in Teresópolis in 1971, he performed across Brazil, and his music appeared in the soundtracks of A Penúltima Donzela (Fernando Amaral, 1969), Confissões de Frei Abóbora (Brás Chediak, 1971), and Em Família (Paulo Porto, 1971).

He released Água e Vinho (with poet Geraldo Carneiro) in 1972 and Egberto Gismonti and Academia de Danças in 1973, all on EMI/Odeon; the last marked his decisive shift toward instrumental music. Despite the producer’s initial dismissal and a label letter citing economic constraints that supposedly ended his recording career, the album—containing twenty-five-minute tracks produced at considerable expense with synthesizers and orchestra—earned a Golden Record in Brazil. Between 1972 and 1991 he issued nineteen albums for EMI/Odeon.

Invited to a 1974 festival in Berlin, Gismonti brought Hermeto Pascoal and Naná Vasconcelos along and there met ECM chief Manfred Eicher. An invitation to record for the label arrived in 1975; after delaying until late 1976, he accepted but, constrained by a Brazilian military-government exit fee of roughly seven thousand dollars that only he could afford, proceeded alone. While wandering Norway he encountered a Brazilian actor friend, met percussionist Naná Vasconcelos at the actor’s home, and invited him to join the hastily arranged three-day session. Describing the project as the shared story of two boys traversing a humid forest teeming with insects and animals while maintaining a 180-foot separation, he secured Vasconcelos’s immediate agreement. Their resulting album, Dança das Cabeças, garnered divergent international honors—in England as pop, in the United States as folklore, and in Germany as classical—transforming both careers: Vasconcelos became an in-demand global artist, while Gismonti returned home to investigate Amazonian traditions.

In Alto Xingu he spent a month with the Yawaiapitì tribe after two weeks of playing his flute gained an invitation from chief Sapaim; lacking a shared language beyond music, he absorbed their culture on the condition that he disseminate the forest people’s values. Two years later he recorded Sol do Meio-Dia with saxophonist Jan Garbarek, percussionist Colin Walcott, and guitarist Ralph Towner. The following year’s Solo sold 100,000 copies in the United States. In 1981, alongside Garbarek and bassist Charlie Haden, he made Magico; the trio performed across Europe, including at the Berlin Jazz Festival, and cut a second album, Folksongs. That same year Gismonti again toured Europe with Haden and Garbarek and, with his Academia de Danças ensemble (drummer Nenê, saxophonist/flutist Mauro Senise, bassist Zeca Assunção), released the double album Sanfona. He recorded Duas Vozes with Vasconcelos in 1985, Dança dos Escravos in 1989, and, following the reissue of Dança das Cabeças, toured the United States in 1990 with cellist Jaquinho Morelembaum, flutist/saxophonist Nivaldo Ornellas, and keyboardist Edu Mello E Souza. Also in 1990 he issued Infância with Nando Carneiro (guitar/keyboards), Zeca Assumpção (bass), and Morelembaum. The same group recorded Música de Sobrevivência in 1993, an album drawing on the writings of Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros and the country’s tension between cultivated Portuguese heritage and widespread illiteracy that nonetheless shapes the national language.

In 1995 Gismonti recorded Meeting Point with the State Symphonic Orchestra of Lithuania; the following year he released Zig Zag with Nando Carneiro and Zeca Assumpção. As an entrepreneur he operates the thriving Carmo label, which maintains joint ventures with ECM, and secured worldwide publishing rights (except Brazil) to his entire EMI/Odeon catalog. Music nevertheless remains his primary pursuit. In 2009 he issued the two-disc Saudacoes, one disc devoted to his seven-part composition “Sertões Veredas – Tributo à Miscigenação” and the other to guitar duets with his son Alexandre Gismonti.