Le Grand Tango: The Life and Music of Astor Piazzolla [Hardcover]

Piazzolla died in 1992. But the debate still rages, and there's little middle ground. The reason for it is that Piazzolla remade the Argentine tango in ways that had never been imagined possible before him. He's one of those composers who takes a regional musical impulse and refashions it into a new statement of world-wide interest. Controversial he is, to be sure. But with the possible exception of the legendary singer Carlos Gardel, no one has expanded the consciousness of the world more with regard to the tango than Astor Piazzolla.

Le Grand Tango is the first complete biography of Piazzolla. Born in Buenos Aires in 1921, he spent eleven years of his childhood in New York City, in the East Village. Radio interviews with him reveal that he spoke fluent English with a Lower East Side accent. Even as a child, Astor's talent on the bandoneón, the large concertina-like instrument that is considered by most to be the soul of the tango, was noted. But he was not playing the tango at that time. The boy preferred classical music and jazz, Bach and Gershwin. His father Vicente, a barber and woodworker, pushed Astor to make himself into a true tango musician. But it was only when, at the age of thirteen, Astor met and was befriended by Carlos Gardel himself, that he began his serious studies in the tango.

Returning to Argentina at the age of sixteen, Astor threw himself into those studies and, almost immediately, was offered a job by another great innovator on the bandoneón, Aníbal Troilo. He joined Troilo's band and became one of its principal arrangers. It was at this time that his difficulties began, as some of the tango musicians found Astor's arrangements too complicated and too difficult to play.

That was because he was putting things into the arrangements that were largely unknown to tangueros. Counterpoint. Fugue. Polyrhythmic intensities that turned the more traditional, and simple, tango rhythms on their heads. Bartok. Stravinsky. Ravel. But Piazzolla was also a consummate tango musician, as anyone knows who has heard him play his own slow, lovely tangos. Despite his experimentalism, his abilities as a composer, musician and arranger simply could not be denied.

Azzi and Collier do a fine job describing Astor's artistic fire, and the debate which always followed in his wake. The book is also often quite funny, because Astor was a genuinely humorous man himself. And it sheds light on the difficulty of being so important an artist who must struggle so to be heard. At least when he was heard, he received the praise that he deserved. As one British critic put it, upon seeing Piazzolla play for the first time, "It was like going to inspect an interesting hillock and uncovering an erupting volcano."

The book contains a very useful discography of Piazzolla's work, excellent notes, a fine list of sources and a complete index.

In the end, Le Grand Tango may be of more interest to aficionados of Argentina and the tango than to the general public. But Piazzolla became so well-known that he was sought out by every kind of accomplished musician, from such disparate realms as jazz, classical music, opera and rock and roll, and they are all here in this book. As a chronicle of this very important composer's presence in the totality of world music, and his battles to make his own music heard and appreciated, it is invaluable. _________________________________

(Novelist Terence Clarke [The Day Nothing Happened, My Father in the Night, The King of Rumah Nadai] has just completed a screenplay that tells of the friendship between the thirteen year-old Astor Piazzolla and Carlos Gardel in New York in 1934. teryclarke@hotmail.com)