February 2021

Prelude

Astor Piazzolla at 100

Argentine composer, musician and bandleader Astor Piazzolla, the creator of New Tango, would have been…

Tales from the Sixth String: New Music from Michael Gregory Jackson & More

Michael Gregory Jackson is among a generation of guitarists who forged their own path on…

Five Essential Astor Piazzolla Albums

Piazzolla has an extensive discography, complicated by reissues, licensing deals, and deceptive titles. (Read an…

Times Will Get Better: How Vocalist Elise Morris Keeps the Music Playing

As a singer, pianist, and bandleader, Elise Morris has played with, or been musical director…

Remembering Pianist, Composer, Teacher and Author Junior Mance (1928-2021)

The durable Chicago pianist Junior Mance–who sparked many postwar jazz bands, recorded prolifically, and was…

Magazine Features

Tower of Power’s Emilio Castillo: Celebrating 50 Years of Hipness

To celebrate its Golden Jubilee, Tower of Power, America’s preeminent soul-funk-R&B horn band for half…

The Storyteller: New Book, Boxset Reveal Genius of William Parker

“Summational” immediately comes to mind as a descriptor for William Parker’s first release of the…

Richard Elliot on his Early Days in Jazz: Kittyhawk, Rickie Lee Jones, Melissa Manchester and Motown

Richard Elliot talks about his early days in jazz from cover bands to studio work…

10 Albums You Need to Know: February 2021

A highly-anticipated live album debut; an astronomical thrash-jazz showcase; a 63-piece orchestra jazz fusion epic.…

Auditions

Chris Pattishall, ‘Zodiac’ (self-released)

Throughout a 55-year career that started in the 1920s, Mary Lou Williams always sounded modern…

Various artists, ‘Outside in Music Live at Pinch Recording Volume 2’ (Outside in Music)

Plenty happens on the latest Outside in Music compilation. Live at Pinch Recording Volume 2…

Ben Wendel, ‘High Heart’ (Edition)

Tenor saxophonist Ben Wendel uses the eight self-composed tracks on his fifth session as a…

Melody Gardot, ‘Sunset in the Blue’ (Verve International/Decca)

Melody Gardot’s lush, intimate and multi-lingual Sunset in the Blue is a warmly inviting, sensual…

Diego Piñera, ‘Odd Wisdom’ (ACT)

Drummer Diego Piñera’s latest recording is a rhythmic treat that’s trickier than it seems at…

Coda

A Hollywood Trailblazer: Remembering Cicely Tyson

Cicely Tyson, the trailblazing actress/activist against racism and for social justice, passed away last Thursday…

Argentine composer, musician and bandleader Astor Piazzolla, the creator of New Tango, would have been celebrating his 100^th birthday this March 11. He died in 1992 at the age of 71. But by then, his music — which rewrote of the rules of tango by drawing from sources as disparate as jazz, European classical music and klezmer — had made him an international figure. Once reviled by many at home, Piazzolla attracted audiences for New Tango around the world and gained admirers and champions as disparate as Mstislav Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, Gil Evans, Al DiMeola, Gary Burton and Grace Jones. Also, as a student of classical music by day and a tango musician by night, the young Piazzolla had once dreamed of becoming a classical composer in the European tradition. But instead of merely emulating his predecessors, he forged a new musical genre that built on the foundation of the past. Years later, Piazzolla got to lead his ensembles in the temples of classical music, and his New Tango was played by symphonic orchestras, chambers groups, and string quartets. Being Piazzolla was enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MepPfI7ebMY Sometimes an outsider is needed to upend traditions and challenge entrenched habits. Piazzolla — who was not born in Buenos Aires but in the tango capital, Mar del Plata, a seaside city about 248 miles south of Buenos Aires — grew up in the rough Lower East Side of Manhattan until the age of 17, was the perennial outsider by fate and by choice. He got his first bandoneon, the melancholy-sounding button squeezebox, when he was nine, as a gift from his father, a tango fan. There was not a choice of bandoneon teachers in New York in the 1920s, so he made do by trying the buttons and, eventually, adapting the music of Bach and Schuman he learned from his neighborhood teachers, all pianists. When the family returned to Argentina, he didn't speak Spanish that well. "My mom would speak to me in Spanish, and I would answer in English," he once told me. Yet when Piazzolla moved to Buenos Aires, he soon found work playing and arranging for Anibal Troilo, a master bandoneonist and composer who led one of the top tango orchestras of the day. But still, in the tango world, Piazzolla was a talented oddball. And even Troilo was not enough for him musically. He started studying with classical composer Alberto Ginastera, organized his own orchestra and wrote music for film. In 1954, when he was 33, Piazolla won a scholarship to study in Paris, France, with the fabled Nadia Boulanger, teacher of Aaron Copland, Darius Milhaud and Elliot Carter, among many others. She was lukewarm about his classical writing, but, years later, Piazzolla was still fond of recalling the scene when she asked him to play something else, whatever he did back home. A bit mortified, he started out with "Triunfal," one of his tangos, and after a few bars she stopped him. "Now, this is Piazzolla," she told him. "Don't ever leave him." The blessing refocused and energized him. He returned to Argentina, and in 1955 he organized an extraordinary octet (which he claimed was inspired by hearing Gerry Mulligan's Tentet) that marked a before and after in tango. By looking past the dance floor and the postcard clichés of the music, Piazzolla, the man many accused of killing tango, saved it from itself. [caption id="attachment_36758" align="alignleft" width="1024"]

Piazolla (left) with Gerry Mulligan (Photo: Courtesy Library of Congress)[/caption] For his New Tango, Piazzolla held on to tango's poignancy while sidestepping its tendency toward nostalgia and self-pity. His writing was elegant and cosmopolitan but also visceral. It brought a fresh harmonic and rhythmic language to tango, with nods to jazz, Bartok and Stravinsky, soaring melodies and themes set as three-part fugues. The sum result was aggressive and lyrical, and always moving in its coarse tenderness. And while he was a master of the bandoneon, his best instrument was the quintet — a jazz-type of a group, not a traditional tango ensemble — that included piano, double bass, violin and electric guitar. He approached his quintets as miniature orchestras, but he would also tell his musicians that the music had to have mugre, grime. His New Tango came alive in the perfection of imperfection. Its humanity made him immortal. Fernando Gonzalez translated and annotated Astor Piazzolla "Memoirs" (as told to Natalio Gorin) Amadeus Press, 2001