A Beginning -- Dino Saluzzi -- Part 1

I'm certainly NOT an expert on music, but I don't have to be. In fact, I will begin by saying that, given all the music I've listened to -- mostly in recorded form, since concerts are frequently and often (yes, that double adjective is intentional) disappointing -- I ought to know a lot more than I do. Shame begets shame, then, and the confession begins where the imagination lies silent....On this point, I claim absolute guilt, but the kind of guilt out of which ignorant bliss is born. Borne upon the wings of my guilt, then, I promise to bring you something I have heard that you may one day wish to hear, too.

I may also reach deep into the future as an example of honoring the past, which is never buried as deep as the future is wide. That is to say, I will reach wide into a future whose height exceeds us, only to remind us that we are going where from we whence came, which is from darkness and light.

I don't know anything about the Tango, other than that it's ferocious and sexy and seems dangerous (although, if you walk down the dark corridors of Venice in the middle of the night, and you meditate on their dangerous poetry, a Venetian in the light of day will screw up her face at you and interrogate you for poeticizing her ordinary reality). I don't know anything about Argentina, other than that Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, writers who have spun reality into a dark web of fiction from which a reader cannot extract themselves, both claimed themselves to be "of Argentina". Such is the same knowledge that accompanies what I know of Dino Saluzzi.

Saluzzi plays the bandoneon, an accordion-like tango instrument, which seems to hearken back to some imagined time when a musician hunched over his tools at the end of a dark alley, his face breathing its way through each note to bear the storm beyond it.

(You almost think that what you imagine is true, except it has little if nothing to do with sound itself. What it has to do with, of course, is what sound is like. Meaning, the moment we determine that words are what we need to describe sound, we launch ourselves from what David Toop has called the "Ocean of Sound" onto the dry land of language. I chose a clunky image there because, well, it's clunky imagining what something could be in another form, you know? I mean, music SOUNDS to mean, words MEAN to mean. Anyhow....)

Saluzzi's music sounds like a whisper. I mean it. I have, I think, 6-7 of his records, all on the ECM label (www.ecmrecords.com; I will write on that label later). The records (I call them records because that's what they are; more on that to come as well) each show him in different musical settings -- Solo (Bandoneon, Voice, Percussion); Jazz Quartet (Bandoneon, Trumpet, Acoustic Bass, Percussion); Jazz Trio (Bandoneon, Acoustic Guitar, Acoustic Bass); "Classical" Duet (Bandoneon, Cello); "Classical" String Quartet (Bandoneon, 2 Violins, Viola, Cello); Orchestra (Bandoneon, Saxophone, Cello, Orchestra). Why list all this, which is kind of tiring to read through, let alone imagine? Because each instance of the musical grouping, the circle of instruments gathered to express Saluzzi's project, these moments (which are more than moments, but they end up being only what lasts slightly longer than a moment, which is a recording, or a record) end up gathering everything into Saluzzi's whisper.

What is it that he whispers? What is a whisper like that is a description of a sound whose description is the image of a whisper?

Now, it's kind of easy to use music as a way to throw an image into space, where it will only endlessly float, never to return...(I'm reminded of Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi's "fake" blues band "The Blues Brothers", with their song "Rubber Biscuit" -- "A Ricochet Biscuit / is the kind of a biscuit / that's supposed to bounce back off the wall / into your mouth / If it don't bounce back / you go hungry...") My image of Saluzzi as a whisper, though, is meant slightly differently. I'm aiming at the thought of what a whisper is, and what it is not. Of what it could be, and how you remember it. Of where it is, and what it reveals about the words that it surrounds.

I mean that it is as if Saluzzi himself is hovering on the outside of each note, as if each note is, in the words of the poet Gustaf Sobin, "the husk of experience". That would mean that the whisper of his bandoneon is the whisper of a world that is yet to come, whose passing is not yet past.