In May 1978, now featuring an additional guitarist, Eduardo Chermont, the group performed at the Teatro São Pedro in São Paulo. That night yielded an amateur recording, released in 1988 on the album Faremos Uma Noitada Excelente (We’re going to have an excellent night out).

The record features well-known tracks such as Emergindo da Ciência, É Um Pouco Assustador II, I Fell in Love One Day, Cowboy, and Hoje de Manhã Eu Acordei. The only previously unreleased track is the instrumental Arnaldo Soliszta — a piano improvisation in the style of Hermeto Pascoal. The title was later bestowed by Rolando Castello Júnior and encompasses Arnaldo’s various facets and areas of knowledge: pianist, soloist, fan of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886), and—obviously—a “solist” (a lover of the sun, or sunshine).

In these two songbooks, Arnaldo composes his revolutionary body of work like a mosaic. It exists in a state of lucid madness, involving dialogues and exchanges between stage and audience, past and future, life and art, science and dreams. He reveals that something is always missing —something irretrievably lost— and that with every discovery, we realize it is incompleteness that makes us whole. Arnaldo’s solo works are precisely this: a collection of gaps and missing links that are constantly completing one another.

So, let us bring fresh, attentive ears and welcome the “Garden of Dreams” and the new Science of this eternally new music known as: Arnaldo Dias Baptista. (Marcelo Dolabela – bhz, Oct/Nov 1999).