Ojos Negros is the first duo album by the Argentine bandoneon player Dino Saluzzi and the German cellist Anja Lechner, released by ECM in March 2007. It is chamber music rooted in Argentine tradition, built on Saluzzi's own compositions but leaving wide room for improvisation. Ben Ratliff of The New York Times placed it in the gray areas among tango, jazz and classical chamber music, and found it a slow, luxurious version of that gray.
The partnership had grown over almost a decade. Lechner, cellist of the Rosamunde Quartett, had brought her interest in tango nuevo to Kultrum, the album Saluzzi recorded with the quartet in 1998. The two then toured widely as a duo. Ojos Negros was recorded in April 2006 at the Kulturbühne AmBach in Götzis, Austria, with Markus Heiland as engineer. Manfred Eicher produced, Steve Lake wrote the liner notes, and the cover is a work by the Czech-Swiss artist Jan Jedlička.
Seven of the eight pieces are by Saluzzi. The exception is the title track, a tango published in 1910 by Vicente Greco, the bandoneonist who led one of the first orquestas típicas. Tango a mi padre opens the album with the cello shaping the bandoneon's phrases as much as following them. In Minguito pizzicato arpeggios from Lechner answer Saluzzi's slowly building, sustained lines, and at moments the two instruments sound like a single voice. El títere, at over ten minutes, and the closing Serenata are the longest pieces, unhurried and freely rubato. Throughout, it is hard to tell where the writing ends and the improvising begins.
The album was widely reviewed in the United States. DownBeat wrote in May 2007 that the rasp of the bandoneon "curls against the plangent cry of the cello like an old lover". Wes Phillips of Stereophile named it an early candidate for the year's best-sounding record, and The Absolute Sound gave it one of its 2007 Golden Ear awards. In the German press, Volker Tarnow of Partituren noted that there is no milonga machismo here and linked this to Saluzzi's origins in Salta, far from Buenos Aires.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1991, first released in March 2007.
