Artist Bio:
Besides legendary singer Carlos Gardél, few artists are as intimately associated with Argentine tango as Astor Piazzolla. But where Gardél left his indelible stamp on classic tango during the music's 1920s-'30s golden age (before his untimely death in a plane crash in 1935), Piazzolla did more than anyone to keep the tango alive and evolving as an art form in the later half of the 20th century.
Piazzolla was born on March 11, 1921, in Mar del Plata, Argentina, but moved with his family to New York soon after. As a child he was exposed to tango, opera, classical and even jazz by his Italian immigrant parents, who bought him his first bandoneon (the accordion-like instrument that would become his trademark) at the age of nine. A prodigy, Piazzolla was invited by Gardél himself to play in the film El Dia Que Me Quieras .
Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires in 1938, at the ripe age of 17, and soon joined the band of tanguero Anibal Troilo, while studying music and composition with composer Alberto Ginastera and pianist Franciso Fiorentino. In 1947 he formed his first group, which lasted for two years. In 1953 he made a splash with "Buenos Aires," an original composition that fused tango with classical elements, which was criticized by tango purists for being too "modernist." Undeterred, Piazzolla traveled to Paris the following year, to study with renowned composer/educator Nadia Boulanger (whose other students included Stravinsky and Aaron Copland). Boulanger wasn't crazy about Piazzolla's classical compositions, but she was mad about tango and urged him to pursue his own synthesis of classical, jazz and tango.
Following Boulanger's advice, Piazzolla returned to Argentina the following year, and began working on this new style he called tango nuevo, which re-invented the tango as a concert hall form, meant to be sat down and listened to, as well as danced to. In 1960 he formed his second and most famous group, Quinteto Tango Nuevo, which enabled him to further explore his new sound. With them Piazzolla began introducing the vocabulary of 20th century classical music into the tango; playing with dissonances, chromatic harmonies, and introducing new rhythms and chord structures into the music's repertoire. He made the homegrown music of Buenos Aires' underworld—the dance music of brothels and shebeens —respectable for well heeled audiences, without ever sacrificing its exquisite passion or raffish soul.
The '60s were a fecund decade for Piazzolla, and saw him team with Uruguayan poet Horacio Ferrer to compose Maria de Buenos Aires, his classic tango operita, and record with Argentina's greatest author, Jorge Luis Borges, at New York's Philharmonic Hall. His second '60s collaboration with Ferrer, Ballada por un Loco, remains one of the most daring works for tango ever written.
But in the '70s Piazzolla was forced to disband his Quinteto and relocate to Italy, to escape Argentina's murderous military dictatorship. There, he formed a new group, the Conjunto Electronico, and composed another legendary operita, Libertango. He also began to experiment in jazz, recoding an album with saxman Gerry Mulligan in 1974. In 1978 Piazzolla teamed up with pianist Pablo Ziegler to form his final band, which he worked with until 1989. Together they would record some of Piazzolla most acclaimed records, including Tango: Zero Hour, The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night and La Camorra.
By the '80s, Piazzolla was both the grand old man of tango (voted "Distinguished Citizen of Buenos Aires" in 1985) and its most daring innovator; an international musical ambassador who was still willing to turn the music upside down when it suited him. This was the period of his greatest international influence. He had composed over 750 pieces of music, not just for the concert hall, but for film, theater and television as well, and was still in demand, writing new pieces with Lalo Schifrin and for the Kronos Quartet well into his late 60s.
When he died in Buenos Aires in 1992, at the age of 71 (having outlived the military junta that once forced him into exile), his passing was mourned by tango fans around the world, many of whom had been first introduced to the music by the master himself. — Tom Pryor, Courtesy Global Rhythm Magazine: www.globalrhythm.net
