Tango (20 page)

¿Adónde? ¿Trabajar? ¿Extender la mano

pidiendo, al que pasa, limosna? ¿Por qué?

¿Recibir la afrenta de un perdón hermano; . . .

. . . Se durmieron todos, cachó la barreta

¡Si Jesús no ayuda, que ayude Satán!

Un vidrio, unos gritos, auxilio, carreras . . .

¡un hombre que llora y un cacho de pan!

Work? Where? Holding out your hand / Asking passing strangers for a coin? Why? / Facing the offence of a ‘sorry pal'? . . . / Everyone's asleep now, he grabs the iron bar / If Jesus won't help then the Devil will / A pane of glass, shouting, help, running feet . . . / A weeping man and a crust of bread
.

(‘Pan', Bread – Celedonio Flores, 1933)

Tango in the early Thirties had embraced protest, speaking on behalf of the very same diverse public who for a while had felt fully integrated into the national community and reflected in the collective psyche. A decade later those sections of society again found themselves excluded by a renewed appeal to the most conservative of Hispanic Christian values.

Perón restored their faith, perhaps. But the new immigrants from the rural interior were problematic, and the older urban community was divided in its reaction. The new arrivals from the country came with their own musical identity, their own dances, their own shared memory. Born in the province of Mendoza in 1913, Antonio Tormo was a well-known and popular radio artist in provincial Argentina before arriving in the capital in 1947 – a significant moment. His songs, like the huge bestseller ‘El rancho e la cambiche', spoke of rural life and the favourite dance of the Argentine northwest, the
chamame
, a traditional couple dance accompanied by guitars played in the style of the ancient
vihuela
. The scattered words in the Guarani language of the Paraguayan frontier functioned just as
lunfardo
had done in the tango – to symbolize a different life and a different history.
⁷
Yet Tormo had to acknowledge tango in the lyrics of the song.

Perón's conscious and sophisticated deployment of that shared past resonated with his supporters among the recent working-class
arrivals from the north. And his support for ‘national' music embraced both the rural and the urban traditions. Tango now had to share the public musical space. And, in fact, many tango musicians chose not to give their support to Perón but instead to play for the still enthusiastic dancing public. The number of lyricists declined.

Tango was facing its sunset, reiterating old issues, interpellating people who did not exist any more, making remembrance of the past its major theme. It was so fixed in its old structures that the most important tango poets of the period, who were also supporters of Perón, were unable to link their lyrics with the new social process that was occurring.
⁸

Homero Manzi's ‘Sur', written in 1947, might serve as an epitaph, just as it did for the great musician himself, who died shortly after its composition. The music was by the other great survivor of the Golden Age, Aníbal Troilo. It is a string of memories – the shop on the corner, the muddy streets, the smell of alfalfa, the barrios, like Pompeya, where tango was born: ‘Nostalgia for the things that have passed on / grains of sand that life blew away'. And sadness that it should all have disappeared, except in memory.

As we have seen, it was the old tango that died; the new was just emerging in new ways and new places.

In many ways, the regimes that followed Perón were united by the deeply conservative vision that time and again had confronted and challenged the concept of the nation as a melting pot of cultures, traditions and histories – a concept embedded deeply in the tango.

Cátulo Castillo s ‘La última curda' feels like an elegy, or perhaps an epitaph, for the
compadrito
. His woman companion is tango itself. And it serves, by date and register, to mark the beginning of an end. This final ‘binge' (
curda
) unfolds against a grey background and a fading past. The ‘dancings' had mostly closed,
few of the
confiterías
and cafés were left, the sports clubs could no longer afford the spectacular Saturday gatherings they had organized through the late Forties. In the venues that remained a different music was heard and it was listened to in a different way. Small ensembles replaced the ambitiously large orchestras of the previous time; they played what was now called
tango de cámara
, or ‘chamber tango'. They were musically adventurous and engaged with other musics and traditions in enormously creative ways. The artists from previous generations that continued playing, chief among them the great Aníbal Troilo, were largely disapproving of this
tango nuevo
(new tango). It was not danceable, it was avant-garde, it was fluid and open. It broke with the tango tradition. It welcomed the influence of jazz, of black music, of elements of the classical repertoire. Yet this was tango still, and the era of chamber tango produced some of the greatest individual virtuosi in the tradition, most of whom had learned their craft with Manzi, Troilo, Pugliese and Caló – the outstanding figures of the
Guardia Nueva
and the Golden Age. They included Roberto Grela on guitar, Horacio Salgán and Juan José Paz on piano, Enrique Mario Francini on violin, Pedro Laurenz and Pedro Maffia on bandoneon. There were others, of course; but for all of them the small ensembles playing in the cafés were an opportunity to play for a public growing accustomed to listening rather than dancing.

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA

One of the finest musicians of them all was Astor Piazzolla, bandoneon player, composer and arranger. When he went to Paris to work with the world famous piano teacher Nadia Boulanger, with the aim of becoming a classical musician, Boulanger commented that his classical playing lacked ‘feeling' and asked him to play his own music. When he played tango on his bandoneon, she was emphatic: ‘That's Piazzolla; never leave it'. He would go on to revolutionize the music he loved, in his own compositions and arrangements and later in his remarkable collaborations with the Uruguayan poet and lyricist Horacio Ferrer.

Astor Piazzolla.

Born in 1921, Piazzolla spent his childhood with his family in New York.
⁹
At the age of twelve he met Carlos Gardel and even played for him; indeed he appears as a newspaper boy in Gardel's film
El día que me quieras
. The family returned to Argentina, to Mar del Plata, in 1937, much against Astor's wishes – Spanish was still his second language. Buenos Aires was where the music was, of course; it was where he could listen to the newly formed orchestra of Aníbal Troilo and hear the bandoneon masters Pedro Maffia and Pedro Laurenz, the extraordinary but ill-starred pianist Orland Goñi, as well as the inimitable Fat Man. But a major influence on him seems to have been an ensemble which has left no recordings – Elvino Vardaro's Sextet. Astor would move restlessly from café to café, listening to the enormous variety of interpretations that were available in what was probably the richest musical period in tango's history. It was also, of course, a time of division between the traditionalists whose orchestras played for dancing and the experimental and avant-garde musicians, like Vardaro and Goñi, who were developing a music to be heard. Troilo, with whom Astor began his playing career, was a great admirer of the young man's talents, but he also warned him not to go beyond ‘playing the music'. The difference between the two men was not simply about music. Troilo was not only the outstanding musician of ‘traditional' tango, he was also the embodiment of the tango life. His girth testified to his love of good food and drink, and he spent a good part of his life in the clubs and cafés of the tango world. He tried hard to encourage Astor to follow him around the nightclubs of Corrientes Street but Astor was resistant. He was not much of a sybarite and no great lover of the smoky bars where the musicians went after their gigs. He would
detach himself from Troilo and go home, getting up early to go to his classes with the great Argentine composer Alberto Ginestera, who taught him harmony and composition.

All these different influences could not but impel Astor towards experimentation and the fusion of styles and traditions. And he was surrounded by innovative musicians who encouraged him in this, albeit with the disapproval of his bandoneon master Aníbal Troilo, though Troilo continued to work with and support him.

In 1946, Piazzolla formed his first band and recorded its first album. But in 1949 it was dissolved when a phone call from the presidential palace instructed him to attend to play for Perón and his entourage. Rather than be compromised, Piazzolla informed the presidential palace that his band no longer existed.

The experience appears to have caused a degree of depression in him, and for the next few years he played less and devoted himself to composition; he was composing in a classical mould, and it was in that frame of mind that in 1954 he took up the opportunity of a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. It was the great veteran teacher, whose list of pupils read like a catalogue of modernist music, who encouraged him to go back to tango.

Returning from Paris, Piazzolla launched the ‘tango revolution' with a manifesto, his
Decálogo.
¹⁰
The ensemble would ‘be
listened
to by the public, it will not play at dances'. It would use a range of new instruments, and would work from scores; there would be no improvisation. The overall purpose was:

to raise the quality of tango, to convince those who have moved away from the tango, and its detractors, of the unquestionable value of our music . . . to conquer the mass public . . . and to take tango abroad, as a musical ambassador . . . .

The rather dry and earnest tone of the
Decálogo
belies the daring and excitement of the music itself.

There is a case for viewing the Octet as the most audacious of Piazzolla's various ensembles. For the first time, Piazzolla treated all his musicians as solo instrumentalists. He allowed the electric guitar a high degree of improvisation, something totally unknown in previous tango music. The piano's free-flowing role, the counterpoint achieved with the strings, the percussive effects created by the strings and electric guitar, and the neatly calculated dissonances, gave the ensemble a revolutionary sound.
¹¹

The group played mainly for radio and in concert venues; it was emphatically not going to play to accompany singers. But in the context of Perón's recent overthrow and the shrinking space for tango music, this controversial music attracted limited interest, and few of the musicians could make a living playing it. By the end of 1957, Astor had decided to return to New York.

There was a logic in the trip beyond simply returning to his childhood home. Piazzolla's music was profoundly Argentine, but it had absorbed key elements from jazz. During the Octet's brief life, Piazzolla, its leader, acknowledged a special debt to Osvaldo Pugliese, who had drawn into his playing elements of black culture, the rhythms of African dance and the improvised shapes of jazz. Pugliese's ‘La Yumba' and his key composition ‘Malandraca' anticipated and informed the new tango, introducing jazz rhythms and syncopations which were in their turn a homage to the hidden origins of tango in black music. It seemed appropriate that the Octet should go to Pugliese to ask whether what they were doing was tango. Pugliese answered with an emphatic ‘yes'.

Things did not go well for Astor in New York; he became a working musician playing more conventional tango and his own work went into a kind of hiatus. Then, in October 1959, his beloved father, his
nonino
, died. From his pain and sadness emerged what he himself, as well as many others regard as his finest piece – ‘Adiós
Nonino'. Its core, and its opening, is a cheerful tango he had written in 1954, called simply ‘Nonino'. Then in an abrupt change of tone, the original tune is taken up by an elegiac violin and continued in piano passages in dialogue with Piazzolla's bandoneon. It is a conversation around shared memories evoked in the music. And to watch Piazzolla playing the piece, is to see how his relationship with the bandoneon adds to the music a kind of choreographed embrace, as if bandoneon and player were sharing the pain of loss.
¹²
Carefully constructed like all his pieces, it nevertheless allows space for interpretation and self-expression for the extraordinary musicians with whom he worked. It also offers a narrative that has the insolent swing of the original tango interwoven with a lament and contemplative, and sometimes angry, interventions from the bandoneon. ‘Adios Nonino' is a piece that has been recorded by an infinity of ensembles – though his own favourite was the version played by the Quintet which he formed on his return to Buenos Aires in 1960. He was resolved, as he expressed it at the time, to ‘win the battle of tango nuevo', to establish its incontestable musical credentials. He composed relentlessly – some 1,000 pieces in all before his death in 1992. And he introduced into his new tango elements of every musical tradition: the harmonic progressions of jazz, the rhythmic phrasing of black music, the ground bass of Bach, the dissonances of Bartók, the impressionism of Debussy. Tango could absorb them all, just as it had integrated so many earlier traditions into its original sound.