Selected Recordings is volume 14 of ECM's :rarum series, anthologies compiled by the artists from their own ECM catalogue. John Abercrombie chose ten pieces, one from each of ten albums, recorded between 1974 and 2000. The programme follows his career almost in order, from the title track of Timeless to Convolution from Cat 'n' Mouse. It gives as much room to his work inside other people's bands as to his own groups.
Timeless was recorded in New York in June 1974 by an organ trio with Jan Hammer and Jack DeJohnette. DeJohnette returns in Gateway, the trio with bassist Dave Holland. His Sorcery I comes from the first Gateway album, made in Ludwigsburg in March 1975, and Holland's Homecoming from the 1994 reunion in New York. From Oslo come the guitar duo Avenue with Ralph Towner (Sargasso Sea, 1976) and the solo Memoir (Characters, 1977). Stray, also from Oslo, was recorded in 1979 by his first quartet. The 1990s bring Ma Belle Hélène from the Kenny Wheeler Quintet's The Widow in the Window and the trio piece Big Music from November. Carol's Carol comes from the organ trio album While We're Young. Manfred Eicher produced the original sessions.
Half of the programme was written by others: DeJohnette, Holland, Wheeler, Richie Beirach and the organist Dan Wall. Timeless opens the disc at twelve minutes, one of its two longest tracks with Homecoming. Memoir is the shortest, three minutes of Abercrombie alone on overdubbed acoustic guitars. On Beirach's Stray he switches to the mandolin guitar, and Convolution ends the disc in a quartet with violinist Mark Feldman, recorded at Avatar Studios in New York in December 2000.
The twenty :rarum volumes appeared between 2002 and 2004, each selected by the artist and digitally remastered. Abercrombie wrote his own liner notes, and the booklet carries photographs by Roberto Masotti, Patrick Hinely and others. Reviewing the disc in 2020 on Between Sound and Space, Tyran Grillo found "Abercrombie's self-selection is as widely ranging as his career". Of the Wheeler track he wrote: "Abercrombie is golden in tone, the arc to Wheeler's straighter lines."
This is the CD edition, :rarum 14 (014 212-2), released on 26 January 2004 in the second batch of the series, volumes 9 to 20. It comes in a tri-fold digipak with booklet.
