Kultrum is the first album Dino Saluzzi made for ECM, a solo record on which the Argentine bandoneon player also uses his voice, percussion and flutes. It traces an imaginary return to the villages of his childhood in the north of Argentina. Folk tunes and older root sounds are drawn into the floating rubato of tango, and the result opened a long relationship with the label.
Saluzzi was born in 1935 in Campo Santo, a small village in the Salta province where life turned around a sugar cane mill. His father, who played the bandoneon in his free time, taught him the instrument when he was seven, without books or schools. He later played in the Orquesta Estable of Radio El Mundo in Buenos Aires, leaving in 1956 to concentrate on his own music. Kultrum was recorded in November 1982 at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, with Martin Wieland as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing, and released in 1983.
ECM describes the album as storytelling, created spontaneously in the studio. The opening Kultrum Pampa: Introducción y Malambo begins with flute and drum before a chanting voice enters over them. Ritmo Arauca is a three-part suite in which elemental percussion carries a song for the rain, and Saluzzi's voice is finally heard on its own. In the long El Río y El Abuelo the bandoneon alone reaches an almost orchestral density. The critic Tyran Grillo hears Agua de Paz as one of the most beautiful things Saluzzi has recorded. All eight pieces are his own.
Writing for AllMusic, Michael G. Nastos praised Saluzzi's precision and "subtle power" as a solo performer. He heard in the record the folkloric and ancestral sounds of the indigenous peoples of the Americas alongside Saluzzi's South American roots. On his ECM Reviews site Grillo went further and placed Kultrum among the label's ten finest albums. In 1998 Saluzzi returned to the title in another form, a work for bandoneon and string quartet recorded with the Rosamunde Quartett.
CD, ECM 1251, first released in 1983 and reissued in 2008 in the Touchstones series, the line of catalogue reissues in card sleeves that ECM launched that year.
