LIBERTANGO & DANCING OUTSIDE THE BOX
A HISTORY OF TANGO & ASTOR PIAZZOLLA
LIBERTANGO & DANCING OUTSIDE THE BOX: A HISTORY OF TANGO & ASTOR PIAZZOLLA by Johnny J. Blair
Somewhere in Buenos Aires you see a lone man and a lone woman, a porteño and a porteña, both leaning against a wall in the center of town. They are always waiting, but for what? A cruel fate? The lessening of pain? To not be forgotten and unacknowledged? Where do they find understanding? In the unstoppable world of the tango. It always sympathizes. It always speaks the right words to take away the hurt. The tango understands.
When I listen to tango music, I am drawn into a vast and disconnected world, layered in comedy, heartache, profanity, reverence, romance, and tragedy. You can smell and taste it like fresh, velvety blood after a punch in the nose.
“The tango creates a murky, unreal past / that somehow becomes true, an impossible memory of having died / fighting, on a suburban street corner”— Jorge Luis Borges from his poem Tango.
The legendary tango composer Astor Piazzolla said he wrote “Libertango” as “a song to liberty.” When I look at the life of Piazzolla, I believe he meant artistic and personal liberty—the freedom to think outside of the box. He was born lame, lived trans-nationally as a constant immigrant, was reared simultaneously in Catholic school and inner-city gangs, and he loved Bach, Gershwin, and jazz as much as tango. That made him a soldier of artistry.
“I always thought there was someone in back of me in life, just pushing me. He is always telling me what to do.”—Astor Piazzolla.
To paraphrase Robert Fripp, tango is to Argentina what blues and jazz are to America. Like tango, blues and jazz came from shameful and ugly places in history. Yet blues and jazz have become indispensable treasures, able to communicate on many wavelengths. It is as though God, who made all things, can transform that which is debased and hideous into something glorious and beautiful.
“Tango is a music of paradoxes…a porridge of African, European, and indigenous cultures. Its quintessential instrument is the bandoneón, a button squeezebox invented in Germany as a poor man’s organ. It was created to play sacred music, but it flourished in the whore houses of Buenos Aires…the dance might be understood as a macho ritual, but in the first step, the man backs down.”—from Fernando Gonzalez’ Introduction to Piazzolla’s memoir.
Tango dancers move like statues coming to life. The exaggerated stiffness, kicks, flicks, and deliberate pauses of the dance are Afro-Argentine in origin. Tango music has roots in Cuba (the habanera), Argentinian vidalitas (sad songs), and Africa. Slaves brought candombe rhythms and the tambor (an African drum). Some believe “tango” originally meant “a place where black people gather to dance.”
In its primal years (1870-1910), tango was the music of the low class arrabales (suburbs of Buenos Aires), a blend of gaucho (Argentine cowboys) verse and lunfardo (Italian reverse slang) with Spanish music, Italian tarantellas, and German/Polish waltzes (later known as milangos).
“Tango is a hybrid of a hybrid people.”—Ernesto Sabato
Happy, frisky Afro-European folk dances became menacing in the vulgar hands of dirty, homesick men and treacherous prostitutes who’d as soon rob you as befriend you. The original tango dances were man-on-man, as there was a shortage of women. As more females entered the population, the dance became the personification of man and woman.
The dance is improvised rather than standardized, consisting of long walks and intertwined movements, usually in eight steps. A Buenos Aires tourist brochure states, “The man and woman glide across the floor as an exquisitely orchestrated duo with early flirtatious movements, giving way to dramatic leads and heartfelt turns. Depending on the music, the dance might proceed slowly and sensually, or with furious splendor.”
“It is a dense lament that quickly turned into violently carnal words, in proclamations of imprecise desires.”—Horacio Vazquez-Rial (whose website plays symphonic tango with front page quotations by Raymond Chandler and John Wayne)
Early tangos were played on flute, guitar, violin, and piano. The old lyrics spoke of grift, novelty, sports, and the war between the sexes—men as brutes, women as animals. In the book “Historia del Arrabal” (1910), Manuel Galvez wrote, “it was a sensual, swinish, fringe music, mixing insolence and baseness, voluptuousness and toughness, secular sadness and the coarse happiness of brothels.”
“The tango is a sad thought that is danced,” said songwriter Enrique Santos Discepolo, who created the fictional Pipstrela, a slum girl who acts stupid so she could scam unsuspecting men. Yet she yearns for a rich boy to take her away.
“You gave me stormy weather / with just the shadow of your hand / across my face /
You gave me the cold, the distance, / the bitter midnight coffee / among empty tables /
It always started raining / in the middle of the movie, / and waiting amid the petals /
of the flower I brought you: a spider /…I was a tango lyric / to your indifferent tune”
—from “Maybe the Most Beloved” by Julio Cortezar (author of “Blow Up”)
The tango lyric explores the mystery that separates man from woman. In the “Tango de los Pistoleros” episode of the cult-TV show, “The Lone Gunmen,” the dance became a metaphorical discourse on the universal battle between male and female.
Tango music moves and resounds like exotic birds crying out after flying astray into a big city. It’s no wonder Piazzolla drew comparisons to Gershwin. Piazzolla meant Buenos Aires. Gershwin meant New York City.
“Tango shocked him, and yet despite himself he felt moved: it was the cry of his land, of his sad city.”—the painter Tomas in the novel “Calles de Buenos Aires” by Silvino Bullrich.
By 1900 (when Argentina was a larger world power than America), the Gran Aldea (Great Village) of Buenos Aires was becoming an immigrant city where frustrated and melancholy Europeans were displacing the rowdy, rustic gauchos. German sailors brought in the bandoneón. Children of this generation became the first porteños (people of a port city), and the tango cancion (tango song) became the new expression of urban experience, bittersweet nostalgia, and unifying myths. It was the “get me out” voice of lost love and lost by the wayside.
“The tango is the grumble of Buenos Aires and its outsiders, its musical tribulations, its sentimental death-throe, its neurotic tremor, its sensual snore, its exclusive rainbow.”—Ramon Gomez de la Serna
Between 1890 and 1920, tango went through a laundering. It became art and entertainment for polite society. Hollywood and Paris became tango epicenters.
Agents of these changes were singer-songwriter-actor Carlos Gardel and actor-dancer Rudolph Valentino. In silent film classic “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalype” (1921), Valentino appeared with his little smile and gaucho hat, dancing in a mix of gypsy and Spanish flamenco. By 1925 (the year of Gardel’s first European tour), Parisian fashion triumphed and tango became an international craze. Fans and musicians became known as tangueros.
The real hero is Gardel, El Zorzal Criollo, the songbird of Buenos Aires. America has Frank Sinatra. Latin America has Carlos Gardel. He is the icon of tango culture; the master of the tango cancion, with songs of depth and mystique that resonated with millions of people.
Though born in France, Gardel epitomized the South American porteño. He was internationally successful as a radio and recording artist before he branched into movies. By no coincidence, a young Piazzolla appeared in a film with Gardel, whose untimely demise in 1935 contributed to the mythology of the era.
From the 1920’s until the early 1950s, it was The First Golden Age of Tango, with big bands led by Juan D’Arienzo (“the King of Rhythm”), Osvaldo Pugliese, and Anibal Troilo (names now spoken in reverence). Unfortunately, in the mid-50s, economic, political, and social changes in Argentina, complicated by the Peron regime, brought a sharp decline in tango’s fortunes. Then Elvis Presley and The Beatles hit, seizing the minds of young Argentine musicians just like the rest of the world. Tango became the music of cartoons, old folks, and touristas.
Not for Piazzolla. Even in the 1940s, Piazzolla served notice that he’d be reworking the rules for tango. In the early 1950s, he went to Paris to study under renowned composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. He said he “wanted to be Stravinsky,” but Boulanger told him to seek the soul of the tango, adding, “Why be a second rate Stravinsky when you can be a first rate Piazzolla?” One night in Paris, after hearing a concert by jazz saxophonist/composer Gerry Mulligan, Piazzolla had a revelation. He now had all the information to save tango from caricature, if not extinction.
“The tanguero is a strange animal.”—Piazzolla
Piazzolla retained tango’s poignancy and lyricism, but he rejected tango’s penchant towards sentimentality and morbid self-pity. He revised the language to include influences of Bartok, Debussy, Puccini, Ravel and Stravinsky, as well as jazz and pop/rock. He introduced complex harmonics, dissonances, and modalities.
“Termina con esa fantasia; macramé un tango (Cut it out with those fantasies; just give me a tango)”—bandleader and tango-purist Francisco “El Tano” Lauro
Like Miles Davis and Bob Dylan, Piazzolla enraged the purists. In doing so, he would barely draw an audience in his spiritual home of Buenos Aires. What was worse, Piazzolla had perfect tango credentials, having played with the legendary Troilo (originator of the perfect bandoneón method). Yet Piazzolla (who grew up in New York) was an outsider who dared to play Bach and Mozart on the bandoneón, which
he discusses in this interview clip (with the song “Zero Hour”). Piazzolla’s big band gave solos to a cello, reeds and other unorthodox (to tango traditionalists) instruments.
“He was considered a heretic.”—Horacio Ferrar, president of the Tango Academy in Buenos Aires.
Piazzolla did not sell well in Argentina, but around the world he drew a loyal following. His music has been performed by the Assad Brothers, Emmanuel Ax, Daniel Barenboim, the Kronos Quartet and Yo-Yo Ma, not to mention orchestras and small groups. Piazzolla scored numerous films and crossed paths with Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Alberto Ginestera, and Lalo Schifrin.
During the 1980s, Piazzolla’s mission was indirectly helped by films and Broadway musicals that used tango as the theme. Today, Nuevo Tango has a substantial following in Europe and Japan (where there is a Second Golden Age; Japan and Scandanavia have whole tango subcultures). Groups like The Gotan Project mix tango with rock, soul, and techno.
“Who sets the limits of artistic revolution?”—Piazzolla
It was the late 80s when I first heard Piazzolla, via his collaborations with jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton. Some assumed was just an oddball playing jazz on a squeeze box. The turning point for me was seeing “The Tango Lesson,” a 1997 film by Sally Potter, a filmmaker, dancer-choreographer, writer, and composer. She “started out trying to make a film about the joy of dance and ended up making a story about the complexity of love.” Potter (playing herself) discovers tango. She finds the reigning Prince of Tango Dancing, Pablo Veron (playing himself) in Paris, offering to make him a movie star if he makes her into a tango dancer. The film soundtrack contains both Piazzolla’s original 1974 recording of “Libertango” plus “Libertango Reprise” with Yo-Yo Ma and Fred Frith, a 1997 update.
There is some question over when and why Piazzolla composed “Libertango.” German arranger Klaus Jackle claims Piazzolla wrote it for his Octeto Nuevo de Buenos Aires, the group he formed after returning from Paris in 1954. The common story is that, in the early 70s, Piazzolla was nudged by his agent to write shorter "airplay-friendly" pieces. He was 50, had just survived a heart attack, and was in financial straits. Between 1971-78, Piazzolla worked with the electric and eclectic nonet, Conjunto 9, which gave his work a commercial, jazz-rock feel. To regain the earthy intimacy of his earlier work, Piazzolla reformed a more acoustic quintet in 1978. “Libertango” survived the transitions and remains as one of his most beloved works.
Of the 1530 Piazzolla-related videos on You Tube, a good third are renditions of “Libertango.” Most of these videos are from Europe, Japan, Korea, and Russia (another 200 are devoted to
“Adios Nonino”). Guy Marchand and Grace Jones made hit versions of “Libertango” with lyrics. Over the years it has been remade (in wildly varied tempos) as chamber, folk, jazz, rock, opera, pop, and symphonic music. Here is a
lyricized tango-techno update by the http://www.reverbnation.com/astorpiatangoquintet Astopia Tango Quintet (from Slovenia).
The original arrangement begins with a fast, busy piano solo and bass (acoustic and electric) support. Piazzolla's bandoneón takes center stage for the remainder of the piece, which relentlessly moves forward. During the fade you can hear a stormy, melodic bass solo.
Recorded in Italy, Piazzolla’s 1974 production of “Libertango” may have been too frantic to be a hit record, but it was successful in other ways. It is of one of his pure tangos: compact, dynamic, and unforgiving.
Here are a handful of choice Piazzolla clips:
“Muerte de Angel” and “Verano Porteño”
“Milonga del Angel”
and “Resurrecion del Angel Decarisimo” ...dreamy Bach-influenced jazz with guitar and violin.
“Oblivion” is one of his popular slow tangos:
“Tristezas de un Doble” has an amazing bandoneon solo.
“…It was all first rate art…bohemian, confidential, delicate, porteno, rioplatense, universal…superfriend and supratanguero…that tango future so seductive and triumphant, sensed so many times…a creation immortal and luminous…like a star that has become substance in the sound of souls.”—Natalio Gorin, Piazzolla biographer
For me, this music a soundtrack about discovery, exploration and pioneering your craft, be it music or something else. Tango music has forever changed my approach to composition and songwriting. The first time I heard “Libertango” it was like putting my finger into a still pool of water only to find out, once I lifted my head and looked, that it is not a pool, but an ocean.