Yesterday (20 May 2025), Argentinian bandoneonist Dino Saluzzi celebrated his 90th birthday. A long time collaborator with ECM records [his discography is here], the label has released the first track from his upcoming album El Viejo Caminante (album release 11 July). 'El Viejo Caminante' translates as ‘The Old Wanderer’, and Dino Saluzzi is joined by his son José María Saluzzi (who first recorded with his father, at the age of thirteen, as drummer on Mojotoro) on classical guitar and Norwegian jazz guitarist Jacob Young,
The track is Quiet March, available via ECM's link tree.
A key figure in contemporary South American music. Born in the small village of Campo Santo in northern Argentina in 1935, Dino Saluzzi began playing professionally while studying in Buenos Aires, where he met Astor Piazzolla, who was then in the process of shaping the Tango Nuevo idiom. In 1956, Saluzzi returned to the rural district of Salta to concentrate on his compositions, now consciously incorporating folk music elements.
He says of his background, "My father worked on a sugar plantation, and, in his free time, he played the bandoneon and studied lead sheets of tango and folkloric music. There weren't books, or schools, or radio — nothing. Nevertheless, my father was able to transmit a musical education to me; music that, later, when I was studying, I realised that I already knew—not from the point of view of reason or rationality, but rather in a different way, a strange way, the way that is produced by oral transmission".
That notion of centrality of the oral transmission of culture is one that has remained strong in Saluzzi’s musical identity ever since. His long collaboration with ECM Records, which began in 1982 with the solo album Kultrum - and was followed by a second album entitled Kultrum in 1988, a collaboration with the Rosamunde Quartet.
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