On Wednesday the distinguished Argentinian bandoneonist and composer Dino Saluzzi turns 80.

To mark the birthday, his long term label ECM will issue, on its New Series imprint, Imágenes a new album of Saluzzi piano music recorded in Oslo during the autumn of 2013. The content draws on a body of work that spans more than four decades performed by pianist Horacio Lavandera.

For more than 30 years Dino Saluzzi has brought a poetic passion and heat to ECM beginning with the album Kultrum, his work sitting uniquely within the label’s vast range of styles. In 2012 the documentary El Encuentro provided some firm insights to this most mysterious of music-makers whose work has so much earthiness but also so much improvisational abandon. Saluzzi came across as a pater familias, the head of a family band, and someone who as he says himself uses “doubt” to channel his musical ideas. It’s almost a Jesuitical concept, and Saluzzi in a fictional form could be the main character of a Graham Greene novel.

On his more recent album El Valle de la Infancia released in 2014 his family band backed the leader like listeners to the stories he is compelled to tell musically, the clarinet down-playing its natural perkiness, the classical guitar hinting at another kind of music entirely. Held in the interstices between the folk traditions of his native land and the improvised world of jazz from far northern places the sensual side emerges in his music and on this album, as so often in his career, amid much nostalgia and café bar mystique Saluzzi is the master of his own dramatic musical universe.

Dino Saluzzi, above. Photo: ECM