21.05.2025 | Artist
On the occasion of Dino Saluzzi’s 90th, listen to the new song “Quiet March”, performed by the bandoneonist alongside his son José María Saluzzi and Jacob Young on guitars. The new album El Viejo Caminante is out on 20 june.
Dino Saluzzi, bandoneon master and musical philosopher, turns 90 today. We send him our best wishes, and look forward to his forthcoming album, El Viejo Caminante (The Old Wanderer), a trio recording, in which Dino and his son José are joined for the first time by Norwegian guitarist Jacob Young. As he embarks on his tenth decade on the planet, Dino Saluzzi is still finding fresh contexts for his uniquely expressive music. “I always strive to make contact with new ideas,” he said recently, “and encounters with the potential for both musical and human growth.”
Born in 1935 in the Northwest Argentine province of Salta, Dino learned by watching and listening to his father playing: “We didn’t get any information through the radio or through albums,” he has recalled, “and there wasn’t any knowledge of academic music or symphonic music or formal concerts when I was very young. But still my father was able to transmit a musical education to me.” By the age of 14 he was playing professionally in Buenos Aires while simultaneously pursuing his studies.
From the outset the bandoneon has been Dino’s constant companion, an extension of his personality, and a musical means of thinking aloud, of reflecting on earthly and spiritual matters. This was already evident on his early ECM albums, the solo recordings Kultrum and Andina in the 1980s, superb instances of the narrative qualities of his music, conveying images of country and city scenes, and characters encountered along the way.
Since then we’ve heard him in collaborations with jazz improvisers including Charlie Haden, Palle Mikkelborg, Pierre Favre, Enrico Rava, Tomasz Stanko, Jon Christensen, Palle Danielsson and Marc Johnson, and with classical musicians including Anja Lechner, the Rosamunde Quartet, the Metropole Orchestra, and – on Giya Kancheli’s Themes from the Songbook – Gidon Kremer. And we’ve heard him, too, in the congenial company of his family band with son José Maria Saluzzi on guitar, brother Felix “Cuchara” Saluzzi on tenor sax and nephew Matias Saluzzi on bass, playing music that is – in the words of the Salta-born poet Leopoldo Castilla – “alive with different genres, ablaze with mourning, despairing with joy”.
Through all these many forms of expression and whether he’s closer, at any given moment, to tango, Argentinean folk music, jazz or chamber music, Dino Saluzzi always sounds entirely like himself. For his is an inclusive art, and if the yearning quality of his music is rooted in his North Argentinean origins, it’s also true that, when he addresses the buttons and bellows of the bandoneon, he has the whole world in his hands. Many happy returns, Maestro!
Photo © Lisa Franz
