The new album by the bandoneon player Dino Saluzzi sounds like the cover suggests, which is to say that it evokes shaded parks and dusty streets in the twilight or amid the gentle bustle of a late afternoon when couples are making dinner plans, parents are rounding up their children and the few last stragglers are still making their way home from school. Summoning a vision of Buenos Aires at the turn of the fifties, one might imagine from some corner of the park – beyond the swings and pushchairs and those idlers whiling away their time on benches – Jorge Luis Borges for instance shuffling through the scene.
But it would be unfair to reduce Saluzzi’s music to a kind of hazy depiction of the golden hour or to limit its purview to long decades past, not least because he plays with such delicacy and poise, bringing a real sense of quietude and thoughtfulness to his ambling compositions. Breathing with a gentle sigh, keenly observant rather than wheezing or hopelessly rapt, on El Viejo Caminante which means fittingly enough ‘The Old Walker’ he is joined by his son José María Saluzzi on the classical guitar and the Norwegian musician Jacob Young who plays acoustic steel-string and electric, with the three performers all taking a share in the compositional duties to which they add a song by Karin Krog plus a couple of standards.
Saluzzi was born in the small village of Campo Santo in northwestern Argentina in 1935 and picked up the bandoneon from his father, who played and studied tango and folkloric music. The aspiring artist moved to Buenos Aires, where he met the great tango composer and bandoneon player Astor Piazzolla and honed his craft as a junior member of the Orquesta Estable, the house band of Radio El Mundo, one of Argentina’s first radio stations. But by the late fifties Saluzzi had returned to his home province of Salta where he began to elaborate his own style, a fusion of tango, folk idioms, classical practices and contemporary jazz.
By the turn of the seventies he was a member of the popular folk ensemble Los Chalchaleros and he made his debut as a leader for RCA a few years later, before joining ECM upon the release of his acclaimed solo record Kultrum in 1983. A series of collaborations ensued as Saluzzi led a starry quartet featuring the trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, the bassist Charlie Haden and the percussionist Pierre Favre for Once Upon a Time – Far Away in the South in 1986 then linked up with Enrico Rava for Volver the following year. Then in the nineties he recorded with Tomasz Stańko and Rosamunde Quartett, a small chamber gathering which commenced an enduring partnership with the cellist Anja Lechner.
Dino Saluzzi has frequently solicited family members to be part of his band, uniting with his brothers Celso and Felix for the debut of the Dino Saluzzi Group in 1992, with the album Mojotoro also featuring his then thirteen-year-old son José on the drums. The guitarist Jacob Young meanwhile had already collaborated with fellow Norwegians like Trygve Seim, Christian Wallumrød and Arve Henriksen and had established a duo with the jazz singer Karin Krog when he made his own mark on ECM Records, with Evening Falls an album regarded for its gentle lyricism landing in 2004 as Young made a band out of the trumpeter Matthias Eick and the reedman Vidar Johansen, the bassist Mats Eilertsen and the drummer Jon Christensen, a deft and cross-generational group.
Pushing and pulling the air through the bellows of his bandoneon, Dino’s steep drone on his album’s opening track ‘La Ciudad de los Aires Buenos’ gives way to the burnished ornaments and slinkier shapes of Young’s steel-string and José’s classical guitar. In accordance with its title, ‘Northern Sun’ a Karin Krog composition which also finds Jacob Young closer to home – the guitarist accompanying the singer for a rendition of the song on Where Flamingos Fly, their 2002 duo album – has a warmer morning feel, that orb just beginning to crest the sky in a layered formation as the guitars mesh nicely behind the bandoneon while the twang of the steel-string frazzles out from beneath the smooth nylon strings of its classical variant.
Young contributes a ‘Quiet March’ which proves mournful though not without a certain sweetness of sentiment, picking up his Telecaster as the guitarists play basslines and splaying harmonics against the leaden drone of the bandoneon. And on another capital piece, the redolent ‘Buenos Aires 1950’ returns to more ruminative airs, which are interspersed with sudden gusts like clamour in the streets or rhapsodic swells of feeling.
Despite its reputation for a certain mournfulness the bandoneon is a diverse instrument, capable of resembling not only other concertinas and free reed aerophones like the accordion but in the opening bars of ‘Tiempos de ausencias’ a church organ before Dino and José deliver a fine melodic duet between father and son, as Young’s strumming in the background adds depth to the composition. Then the guitars dovetail and take a deft, winding course like two birds frolicking in flight or a serpentine jaunt through a city’s back streets and alleys with Young’s pointillist plucks matching José’s smoother divertissements. Those snatches of the sacred should come as no surprise since the bandoneon was devised by its creator Heinrich Band as a religious instrument for use in churches without organs, growing in popularity as tango began to take off in Argentina and Uruguay around the turn of the twentieth century.
Then the trio turn to the silver screen and American popular culture by way of their take on ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’, the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs classic written by Frank Churchill and Larry Morey which found a second life as a jazz standard. Their version starts out surprisingly arch, summoning images of medieval chivalry and shining armour as the high pitches of the bandoneon are offset by the more grounded strums of guitar. It’s a loose and amorphous, abstract and even somewhat blocky take on the tune which nevertheless carries real emotional resonance, rough-hewn like a Cézanne painting and in a jazz context more in line with Dave Brubeck’s original setting of the piece than the uptempo swing of Bill Evans or Miles Davis’s jaunty version, notwithstanding John Coltrane’s late arrival and his glorious sheets of sound.
The closing section of ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ on bandoneon sounds especially proud and plangent while the spare yet studiously involved, sometimes flamenco-flecked ‘Y amo a su hermano’ stems from a short-lived trio with Charlie Mariano and Wolfgang Dauner. An inveterate storyteller, Dino Saluzzi turned 90 in May and churns out a fine solo on the title track to El Viejo Caminante, which is a fresh take on an old favourite. Yet he allows Jacob Young to sketch his own portrait on ‘Dino Is Here’ as the guitarist blends a fond and playful slackness with livelier passages, laying down a bed of guitar in the middle section which gives the bandoneon free reign and showing his penchant for expressive rubato, flicking through genres while deftly interpreting the strings and basslines of the orquesta típica.
‘Old House’ stretches out to fill every inch of a comfortable and well-worn space before El Viejo Caminante draws to a close with ‘My One and Only Love’, the delicate Guy Wood and Robert Mellin ballad whose opening solo here highlights the percussive nature of the bandoneon, as Dino’s melodic line is imbued with a kind of anxious and bumbling restlessness through an undercurrent of button presses. The guitars arrive to offer their ambling and tenderhearted accompaniment, ever more piquant and poignant with the trio even-keeled and easy handed even as they ache as one.
