Dino Saluzzi, Anja Lechner, Felix Saluzzi

Navidad de los Andes (Andean Nativity) is a trio album led by the Argentinian bandoneonist Dino Saluzzi. He shares it with his brother Felix Saluzzi on tenor saxophone and clarinet and the German cellist Anja Lechner. Its music sits between chamber music, Argentinian folklore, tango and improvisation without settling in any of them. Most of the eleven pieces are Saluzzi's own, and many look back to the Andean north of Argentina where he grew up.

The trio grew out of Saluzzi's orchestral album El Encuentro of 2009, where Lechner and Felix both appeared as soloists. The brothers have played together since childhood, and Felix is a regular in Dino's family-band projects such as Mojotoro and Juan Condori. Lechner has worked with Dino since the mid-1990s, first in his collaboration with the Rosamunde Quartet and then in duo, recording Ojos Negros in 2006. The album was recorded in July 2010 at the Auditorio RSI in Lugano and produced by Manfred Eicher, with liner notes by the poet Leopoldo Castilla.

Flor de tuna opens with whistles and fluttering, bird-like sounds from the cello before a slow melody gathers clarinet, cello and bandoneon. Gabriel Kondor, a piece first heard on Saluzzi's 1983 ECM debut Kultrum, starts with bandoneon alone and changes colour when the cello enters. Felix's tenor saxophone appears on only a few tracks, among them Enrique Delfino's tango Recuerdos de Bohemia and the medley of Saluzzi's Candor with Carlos Gardel's Soledad. On Fragments, taken from a trio for clarinet and two bandoneons, he plays clarinet.

Writing in The Irish Times, Ray Comiskey found that with this trio "boundaries aren't stretched, just ignored", the formality of chamber music meeting folk elements and jazz improvisation. In The Guardian, John Fordham heard the music evoke everything from dark mountainscapes to village dances. He also noted the surprise of Felix's smoky, late-night tenor on Recuerdos de Bohemia. Thom Jurek at AllMusic gave it four stars and called the music often brooding but never less than poetic.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2204, first released on 26 August 2011, with a 20-page booklet of photographs and liner notes in English and Spanish.