Unlikely duo seem well-matched

Dino Saluzzi and Anja Lechner may appear to be an unlikely duo, but once you hear their music they seem inseparable.

Saluzzi, a very personable Argentinian, and Lechner, a pleasantly studious German, make good music together. When asked in separate telephone interviews what style of music they play, they both gently laughed. Saluzzi's tone was one of patience with someone well-intentioned but not fully informed of his ways.

Saluzzi then said, "When we have a name to call something it helps us, but the creativity has to be present all the time in who receives the creation and who makes the creation."

They feed off each other and the audience.

Although they are both in love with tango, Argentina's signature style, their music is beyond categorizing.

Lechner said, "Its just music. It's hard to say where does the tango start, where does the folk music start, where the jazz starts. He comes from the country of tango and he uses the tango but he leaves the tango quite often. He goes much more forward than the tango musicians did."

Saluzzi, a master composer of South American music, plays the bandoneon, an Argentinian accordionlike instrument with roots in the German concertina. Lechner is a cellist.

Their sound is unique and compelling. The cello, like the tenor saxophone, is one of the musical instruments very close to the human voice in pitch. Combine its sound with that of a bandoneon and the result is a rich, luxuriant feel that beckons.

"I know his entire family, nine grandchildren, wife, brother, everybody. It's important to the music (to know him) because the music of Dino is so unique," Lechner said. "You have to know him, know his country, his way of phrasing, his way of thinking about life to be able to follow him, to respond and to offer to him from your life."

Tango is at the root of 20th century Argentinian music. "We don't know exactly the origin but it started in the late 19th century," Dr. Maude Daverio, a former French teacher at the College of Charleston and a native Argentinian living in Charleston, said in a recent interview.

"It compares to the blues," she said. She went on to describe the similarities between blacks in the United States and Spanish and Italian male worker immigrants in Argentina separated from loved ones. "He had to leave his wife and children and this is where the blues comes from."

The duo was a late acquisition by Wachovia Jazz series Producer Michael Grofsorean, he said. The tandem represents Grofsorean's style in that their art results from the intersection of different cultures, a field Grofsorean has been mining for Wachovia for the last eight or 10 years.

"They remind me of Guinga and Mirabassi," Grofsorean said in a phone interview several weeks ago. Guinga is a Brazilian composer-guitarist and Gabriele Mirabassi is an Italian clarinetist. The pair wowed Wachovia audiences during the 2005 festival.

"Dino is a unique and prolific composer. He's captured the feeling of his native land in a body of what are turning out to be classic compositions. For Guinga it was Brazil. For Dino it's Argentina."

Grofsorean continued, "Anja is a lyrical European musician. Her instrument can sing the songs with that kind of affection and heart that you heard from Mirabassi. She's also got a freshness of viewpoint, as did Mirabassi. I think she plumbs the depth of the pieces Dino has written."

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