Albores is Dino Saluzzi's first solo bandoneon album in more than thirty years, and one of the most intimate records of his long career. The title means daybreak. Alone with the instrument he has played since childhood, the Argentine musician looks back across his life in nine of his own pieces. They touch on his father, on friendships and on the Buenos Aires of his youth.

Saluzzi was born in 1935 in the northwestern province of Salta and learned music within the family before studying in Buenos Aires. His first major statements for ECM were solo recitals, Kultrum, recorded in 1982, and Andina from 1988, and Albores belongs to that line. He recorded it at his own Saluzzi Music Studio in Buenos Aires between February and October 2019, with Nestor Diaz as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. The booklet carries liner notes in Spanish and English by Luján Baudino, who calls the album "an artistic manifesto of the bandoneon".

Saluzzi is often described as a storyteller, and his stories here are allusive. The opening Adiós Maestro Kancheli is a prayer-like farewell to the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, who died in 2019 and whose melodies Saluzzi had recorded on Themes from the Songbook. In it Saluzzi alludes to Andean music, far from Kancheli's Caucasus. Íntimo pictures the lights of an older Buenos Aires. The long Don Caye is a set of variations on the music of his father, Cayetano Saluzzi, who gave him his first musical education. Throughout, the clicking keys and the breathing of the bellows stay audible, part of the sound itself.

Writing for AllMusic in 2020, Thom Jurek called the record "an exercise in haunted beauty from beginning to end". In Songlines, Chris Moss found that Saluzzi keeps his groove even in sorrowful pieces. He added that "you'd think Saluzzi has 20 fingers, to get this amount of texture out of a solo squeezebox". Stefan Franzen, in the Badische Zeitung, heard it as the summing up of a long life given to music and to the bandoneon.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2638, first released on 6 November 2020.