Two guitars gently envelop the uniquely evocative bandoneon of Dino Saluzzi on El Viejo Caminante, The Old Wanderer. Here, the Argentinean father and son team of Dino and José Maria Saluzzi are joined by Norway’s Jacob Young, in an album of musical depth and great charm. “It fills me with joy”, says Dino Saluzzi, delighting in this recording’s sonic blend, with José on classical guitar and Jacob on Telecaster and acoustic steel-string guitar. “Jacob and José are very good together. They have different sounds, different visions, but when it comes to the artistic output there is something beautiful happening.” The elder Saluzzi, who turned 90 in May, has lost none of his youthful enthusiasm for artistic collaboration, or for venturing beyond stylistic borders: “I always strive to make contact with new ideas outside my normal element,” he says, still seeking out contexts that offer, as he puts it, “potential for both musical and human growth.”
The association flowered after Jacob Young and José Saluzzi played duo concerts in Argentina in 2022. Dino Saluzzi, in the audience for a Buenos Aires gig, suggested that Jacob should return the following year for a trio recording project. Honoured to be invited to play with the great bandoneonist, Young was doubly pleased to be asked to bring material to the session. His compositional contributions include the portrait piece “Dino Is Here”, which offers tribute and moves toward the rubato world of tango, where the notion of pulse is elastic, and atmospheres are often closer to chamber music than to jazz. In the tune’s central modal section, guitars serve as a layered rhythmical foundation, “to give Dino space to comment on top, and be free.”
Dino’s own compositions include some reconsiderations of early works. Long time followers of his ECM history, for instance, will remember “Tiempos de ausencias” (Times of Absence) from Volver, Saluzzi’s spirited 1986 collaboration with Enrico Rava. “Y amo a su hermano”, meanwhile, was in the repertoire of a short-lived trio with Charlie Mariano and Wolfgang Dauner. And though it’s tempting to think of Dino as the old wanderer of the title track – not least because it is performed solo here – “El Viejo Caminante” is a vintage Saluzzi tune, one of his vivid character sketches, first played by the bandoneon master long ago. Dino sees the present album as a collection of music from different times and places that touches upon tango, Argentinean folk music and jazz and makes of these allusions something fresh. Jazz reference, in fact, is more specific this time around with the inclusion of a couple of standards, “Someday My Prince Will Come” and “My One and Only Love”, as well as “Northern Sun” a tune by Karin Krog. With its wide-ranging repertoire, its choice of compositions and unusual ensemble sound El Viejo Caminante feels, as José Saluzzi observes, “special, and very organic.” A piece by José, “La Ciudad de los Aires Buenos” invites the listener into the album’s particular sound-world, and has the feeling of an overture, offering insight into the regions about to be explored…
Dino’s “Buenos Aires 1950” offers flashbacks to the era when Saluzzi was a junior member of the Orquesta de Radio El Mundo. “This bandoneon has been with me for years. Sometimes it makes me cry, sometimes it speaks to me, but it never finishes telling me everything,” Dino reflected when speaking to the audience at a trio concert shortly before the recording. In this particular constellation, the two guitarists embellish the fragments of memory, and develop more of the story, which is both nostalgic and with enduring lessons for the present.
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One of the most important figures in contemporary South American music, Dino Saluzzi was born in Campo Santo in North Argentina and led his first group at the age of 14. He began to play professionally while studying in Buenos Aires. His ECM discography was launched in 1982 with the solo album Kultrum, a spontaneous example of the bandoneonist's art as "storyteller"; this marked the first of many "imaginary returns" to the towns and villages of his childhood. From the beginning of the 1980s Saluzzi made numerous collaborations with European and American jazz musicians – among those initiated by ECM were meetings with Charlie Haden, Palle Mikkelborg and Pierre Favre (Once Upon A Time - Far Away In The South), with Enrico Rava (Volver), with Tomasz Stanko and John Surman (on Stanko's From The Green Hill album) as well as with several Saluzzi family members and percussionist U.T. Gandhi on Juan Condori. There has also been a long-running collaboration with cellist Anja Lechner, documented firstly on a recording with the Rosamunde Quartet, and then in formations from duo (Ojos Negros) and trio (Navidad De Los Andes) to orchestra (El Encuentro). Dino and the cellist also appear prominently in the 2011 ECM documentary Sounds And Silence – Travels With Manfred Eicher.
José Maria Saluzzi, born 1975, first recorded with Dino at the age of 15 on Mojotoro, where he played drums, then stepped forward as a guitarist with a sound of his own on Responsorium (2003), and Cité de la Musique, where the Saluzzis were joined by respectively Palle Danielsson and Marc Johnson. José has long been a key member of the Saluzzi family band, contributing compositional material, as well as his guitar skills, to albums including Juan Condori and El Valle de la Infancia.
Born in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1970, Jacob Young was introduced to jazz by his American father and took up the guitar at 12. After studying music at the University of Oslo, he attended the New School for Jazz and Comtemporary Music in New York where his teachers included Jim Hall and John Abercrombie. Young’s ECM albums are Evening Falls, Sideways, Forever Young, and Eventually. He can also be heard with drummer Manu Katché on the album Third Round.
El Viejo Caminante was recorded at Saluzzi Music Studio, Buenos Aires in April 2023.
