Juan Condori is a family album by the Argentinian bandoneonist Dino Saluzzi, his first in that form since Mojotoro in 1991. With his brother, his son and his nephew, plus an Italian drummer, he goes back to the people and places of Campo Santo, the village in northern Argentina where he grew up. The music moves between tango, regional folk forms and open improvisation.
The Dino Saluzzi Group was recorded in October 2005 at Estudios Moebio in Buenos Aires, where Mojotoro had also been made, and mixed at Artesuono in Udine. Manfred Eicher produced. Dino plays bandoneon, his brother Felix Saluzzi tenor and soprano saxophones and clarinet. His son José María Saluzzi plays acoustic and electric guitars, the electric for the first time on one of his father's ECM records. Felix's son Matías Saluzzi plays double bass and bass guitar. Drummer U.T. Gandhi, from Udine and known in Italy for his work with Enrico Rava, makes his ECM debut, brought to the group by Eicher.
The title piece portrays a childhood friend from one of the Amerindian families of Salta province, a man who lived close to nature. It unfolds as a long exchange between bandoneon and guitar. Memoria remembers the victims of the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. Pedro Laurenz's tango classic Milonga de mis amores is the only outside tune, its theme returning between darker, slower passages. Felix's rough-edged tenor and his pastoral clarinet give much of the record its local colour.
Reviewing it for The Guardian, John Fordham heard melodies far from the jazz tradition, "but an improvisational spark keeps appearing". Chris Moss wrote in Songlines, which made it a Top of the World pick, that "on Juan Condori, the dialogue is harmonious and the mood lyrical". The German magazine Stereoplay named it jazz CD of the month. Saluzzi's links with the saxophone go back a long way. In 1973 he helped steer Gato Barbieri towards his roots on Chapter One: Latin America. Here his brother's tenor keeps its own diction instead of imitating the bandoneon.
This is the original CD edition, ECM 1978, released in October 2006, with ten of its twelve pieces composed by Dino Saluzzi.
