Three Continents in Dialogue, Thirty Years Later
Three players from three continents working in near-symbiotic dialogue, offering music that transcends genre.
By 2012, when ECM finally released Mágico: Carta de Amor (2012), Charlie Haden had already spent decades moving between worlds — free jazz with Ornette Coleman, the Liberation Music Orchestra's political urgency, ballad playing of devastating restraint. This live recording, captured in 1981, arrives as a late-career gift, one that needed three decades to surface. It documents a trio that had already made two studio records together: Magico (1979) and Folk Songs (1981). But a live performance carries different weight. Here, the three players — Haden on bass, saxophonist Jan Garbarek, and guitarist Egberto Gismonti — are caught in real time, responding to each other without the edit.
What makes this matter is how naturally they move between worlds. Garbarek brings his Nordic restraint and free-jazz vocabulary. Gismonti draws on Brazilian and world-music textures. Haden anchors everything with the kind of listening that defined his best work — never filling space, always waiting for the right moment. The Guardian's John Fordham heard it as "impassioned and fiercely improvisational," and that's accurate. They touch on Liberation Music Orchestra material and Haden's own compositional territory, but the point isn't repertoire — it's the conversation itself.
For Haden, this wasn't a departure or a summation. It was simply what he did at that stage: make music with serious players from other traditions and let the results speak. AllMusic's Thom Jurek awarded it four stars. The recording quality, released decades after the fact, is clean and intimate. If you know Haden's work across genres, this belongs alongside his best ensemble playing.
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