Dino Saluzzi

Argentine composer and bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi has produced work that fuses tango, improvisation, folk traditions, jazz, and modern classical forms into a singular voice. His initial leader efforts, the 1978 release Dedicatoria and the 1980 album Bermejo, already displayed an electric Latin jazz-tango hybrid that carried him onto European festival stages. The musician’s association with ECM opened with the unaccompanied Kultrum in 1983, a spontaneous demonstration of his narrative approach to the bandoneon that initiated a series of musical “imaginary returns” to the towns and villages of his youth. Additional encounters with jazz players followed, among them the 1985 date Once Upon a Time: Far Away in the South alongside bassist Charlie Haden. Mojotoro appeared in 1991 under the Dino Saluzzi Group name, whose lineup featured brothers Celso and Felix plus son Jose Maria. A further duo project, Senderos, emerged in 2002 with drummer Jon Christensen. In 2011 Saluzzi joined Felix and cellist Anja Lechner for the widely praised Navidad de Los Andes, then revisited solo recording with 2020’s Albores.

Born in 1935 in Campo Santo within Argentina’s Salta region, Saluzzi is the son of multi-instrumentalist and composer Cayetano Saluzzi. He spent his early years in Buenos Aires, where his father introduced him to the bandoneon at age seven. By fourteen he possessed sufficient command to direct his own ensemble, the Trio Carnival. While pursuing studies in the capital he launched his professional life, successfully auditioning for the symphonic Orquesta Estable at Radio el Mundo, Argentina’s first radio station. It was also in Buenos Aires that he encountered composer and bandoneonist Astor Piazzolla. He departed the radio orchestra in 1956 and returned to Salta to refine an individual compositional language already blending folk elements with popular, jazz, and classical idioms. Rejecting “common eclecticism,” he pursued a flexible form that remained “vital and real beyond the conventions,” an aim that has continued to shape his output.

Saluzzi entered the renowned Los Chalchaleros in 1970. Formed in the 1940s, the group ranked among Argentina’s leading folk ensembles. He made his recorded debut with them on the 1971 album La Cerrillana, credited as co-billed soloist, and participated on four further releases between 1972 and 1976. During this period radio and television exposure grew, while critics throughout South America and Europe began to take notice.

Signing with RCA in 1978, he issued Dedicatoria, his first album as leader. The recording merged jazz fusion, tango, and choral writing in a manner that secured wholesale approval from European reviewers and opened festival opportunities. Bermejo followed in 1980 and produced a regional hit through his reading of “El Condor Pasa.” By the early 1980s Saluzzi had crystallized a distinctive bop-inflected, post-modern tango language that linked past, present, and future across multiple genres. ECM founder Manfred Eicher encountered the musician at a festival and signed him in 1982.

Kultrum, his 1983 debut for the label, earned awards for its completely solo multi-instrument performances and drew favorable notices from Downbeat and other U.S. outlets. Between the final two RCA fusion sessions, Vivencias (1984) and Vivencias II (1987), Saluzzi recorded Once Upon a Time: Far Away in the South for ECM with bassist Charlie Haden, trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, and drummer Pierre Favre. The following year he co-led the quintet date Volver with trumpeter Enrico Rava.

He resumed solo recording for the globally acclaimed 1988 album Andina. Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard incorporated its music into Nouvelle Vague and Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Although his ECM contract was non-exclusive, Saluzzi cut the unaccompanied Argentina for Germany’s West Wind Latina imprint in 1991, a year that also included a collaboration with guitarist Al Di Meola on World Sinfonia and bandoneon contributions to Rickie Lee Jones’ Pop Pop. That same year he established the Dino Saluzzi Family Project, later renamed the Dino Saluzzi Group, whose members comprised brothers Celso and Felix together with son Jose Maria; the ensemble’s first ECM release, Mojotoro, appeared in 1992. Also in 1992 Saluzzi featured prominently on Mikkelborg’s Columbia album Anything But Grey. In 1995 he joined bassist Anthony Cox and vibraphonist/marimbist David Friedman for the global-fusion project Rios on Intuition and appeared on Kip Hanrahan’s All Roads Are Made of the Flesh. His final recorded work with Di Meola arrived on 1996’s Di Meola Plays Piazzolla.

Returning to a nuevo-tango and contemporary-jazz synthesis, Saluzzi issued Cite de la Musique in 1998 with a trio featuring son Jose Maria on guitars and bassist Marc Johnson. The next year he released Kultrum: Music for Bandoneon & Strings, recorded with the Rosamunde Quartett; the chamber project dissolved boundaries between composition and improvisation as well as between so-called “serious” and popular music. In the same year he joined Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko’s quintet—alongside saxophonist John Surman, drummer Jon Christensen, and bassist Anders Jormin—for the chart-topping, internationally lauded From the Green Hill.

After touring with his own ensembles and with Stanko, Saluzzi resumed leader recording for 2001’s Responsorium, again with Jose Maria and double bassist Palle Danielson. The 2005 European-charting Senderos reduced the format further to a duo with Christensen, presenting loosely composed, largely improvised pieces. The Dino Saluzzi Group reconvened for 2006’s Juan Condori, an album that prompted tours across South America, Europe, and Asia. The following year he and cellist Anja Lechner issued the duo recording Ojos Negros.

Saluzzi’s first live album, the 2010 concerto El Encuentro, captured four distinct compositions performed with the Metropole Orchestra under conductor Jules Buckley for NPS Radio in the Netherlands; brother Felix on saxophones and Lechner on cello participated alongside the bandoneonist. He returned to the studio for the intimate trio Navidad de los Andes in 2011 with Felix and Lechner, without orchestra. That same year the bandoneonist, violinist Gidon Kremer, and vibraphonist Andrei Pushkarev co-led Giya Kancheli: Themes from the Songbook.

Reconvening the family group in a Buenos Aires studio during summer 2013, Saluzzi added guitarist Nicolas “Colacho” Brizuela and percussionist Quintino Cinalli to the core of José Maria on guitars, Felix on reeds and winds, and nephew Matias on bass. The resulting El Valle de la Infancia received universal praise upon its summer 2014 release. For 2020’s Albores Saluzzi recorded completely solo for the first time in more than thirty years. Captured at the Saluzzi Music Studio in Buenos Aires between February and June 2019, the performances illustrate his refined capacity for understated yet commanding musical narrative, merging memory, biography, and reflections on the passage of time.