Dino Saluzzi Group: El Valle de la Infancia review – an Argentinian family story

The wonderful Argentinian bandoneón player and composer Dino Saluzzi has long maintained his traditional "family band" (including his brother Felix on saxes, son José Maria on guitars and nephew Matias on electric and acoustic basses) alongside his many genre-crossing ventures since the 1980s. Like so much of Saluzzi's more traditional work, El Valle de la Infancia (much of it inspired by places in his and Felix's childhood) conveys a strong sense of personal journeys to special places and the stories that began there; evoked by episodes such as the multi-thematic Sombras, with its delicate, piping sounds, tumbling-stream melodies and gliding rhythms; the slowly joyous dance in between guitar ruminations on La Polvadera; and José Maria's beautiful unfolding of his own haunting melody on the first part of the Pueblo suite. Dino Saluzzi's delightful La Fiesta Popular (a sequence of five fragments) catches this band's unusual mix of sensual sounds, fluid guitar melodies and varied bass textures, and tenor sax and bandonéon prance together with a deliciously solemn vivacity on En la quebrada de Lules. It all muses more than it gallops, but its nostalgic, lost-in-dreams quality is very beguiling.