Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank, first of all, Mrs. Laura Escalada Piazzolla, widow of Astor and President of the Astor Piazzolla Foundation, for her trust and for the distinguished task that she has been carrying out with passion, love and dedication to maintain the legacy of Astor in full force, to Daniel Hugo Piazzolla, musician and son of Astor for his wonderful generosity and so many years of friendship, to Diana Piazzolla, daughter and biographer of Astor for her enriching telephone conversations in 2009, to the great musician Al Di Meola for kindly providing a heartfelt prologue and  to Randal Irwin for his trust, friendship and permanent support.

And a very special thank you to all those who have collaborated in one way or another with this work: Omar Garcia Brunelli, Walter Rios, Jorge Lombardo, Armando Blumetti, Raúl Islas, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Gustavo Balboa, Familia Meana, Amelita Baltar, Horacio Ferrer, Marcela Ocampo, Mariel Dupetit, Litto Nebbia, Peter Hammill, José Bragato, Gary Burton, Joe Zawinul, Raúl Lavié, Juan De Paolo, Luis Alberto Melograno Lecuna, Hector De Rosas, José Boesmi, Jorge Bustos, Carlos Kuri, Gabriel Soria and Victor Oliveros.

This book is dedicated to Evelyn Marzoa, the love of my life.

Preliminary Words

Well, I would like to say that Marcelo Gobello is a great historian, in addition to everything he is. I would like to tell you that in addition to his vast knowledge, he writes with his heart, with his feelings. Something that is not so common today. Generally people do it for a job, to make a living, for so many things, but for love, dedication and studies there are really few. But Marcelo Gobello is one of them. I thank him deeply because this work that he has done on my husband is work done conscientiously, with a lot of perseverance and passion. And I am proud because Marcelo has really followed his instinct, his devotion, his knowledge, above all his knowledge of history, of research. I thank you very much, Marcelo and I admire you, because you are a great historian, a great narrator, you are a great researcher and you also do things with love, with affection, with dedication. There is nothing to do, it is the only way to move forward in life. So congratulations Marcelo and many, many, many thanks for this work about Astor that makes me proud and excited.

Thank you Marcelo Gobello,

Laura Escalada Piazzolla, Astor's widow and President of the Astor Piazzolla Foundation

Prologue by Al Di Meola

Discovering Piazzolla changed my life

The most important turning point in my career was having met Astor Piazzolla, with whom we also became friends. I found out that his whole band was a fan of my music, he had come to see me play and they were also fans of Return to Forever.

But I had not yet heard Astor's music until 1982 maybe, and we were on a tour in Japan playing some of the same festivals. And that's where when I met them, I felt like I was meeting my relatives, people that are, you know, I really can kind of associate with being my family. They were very, very warm, like very Italian in a way. And they really loved what I did. So I then had a very big curiosity to hear Astor's music because I heard about them from the Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira. When he was in my band a long time ago, he told me, You have to hear the music of Astor Piazzolla. So Piazzolla told me in Japan when we were seeing one another every day that he was going to send me a piece of music to my home. And he would love to hear me play it my way, you know, my kind of style, some of his music. So he sent me Tango Suite, but even while I was in Japan and I was still curious about his records, I asked Gary Burton, who was a special guest of Piazzolla's group, on the elevator going up to my room, and he was there in the elevator. And I asked him, Tell me, what is Astor's music like? And I'll never forget Gary said, It's the hardest music I've ever played. So then I said, Oh, I got to hear it now. Now I got to hear it. I got to hear this music. So when I heard his music and I started to digest it and also go to see him play when he was in New York or I saw him play in Amsterdam or in different cities, the music brought me back to having my heart connected, you know, it wasn’t just intelligent music. It had both. It also could make you cry. It could really bring back emotions of people that you miss. You know, lovers that you lost. Whatever it was, it was touching me in a way that I kind of missed in fusion music or jazz music of some of my heroes, even where I listened to the music. And it's only cerebral, but not a lot of the melodies were very much at all moving me to to tears. So what I loved about Piazzolla was he had the ability, without the expense of the music becoming simple or just frivolous. The music had a lot of depth, but at the same time it was connecting to the heart and it was challenging to play at the same time. You know, there are very specific, beautiful melodies. There are beautiful passages. There's beautiful harmony, beautiful counterpoint. It's exactly what I needed as a kind of inspiration at that point in time. And I think from that period, I think my writing took a better evolution.

Meeting Piazzolla brought me all the way back to what it was that we loved. It wasn't just technical, it wasn't just difficult or cerebral. It was also beautiful. Aesthetically beautiful. You know, so I think that, growing up, my influences were aligned perfectly. You know, Chick Corea, tremendous influence. Piazzolla in the second half of my career, tremendous influence. Ralph Towner, ever since I was in college, I loved this music and it's been, indirectly a very inspiring, combination of the greats, that led to my development.

Astor and I were very good friends. He wrote me letters in the days when people write letters. And I wrote him letters back. And he send me a signed score of Tango Suite for me and said, Dear Alberto, I wish to hear you play my music someday. We were supposed to record an album together. Unfortunately it never happened after Piazzolla’s incapacitating stroke. We were like two amici and it was very heartfelt.

I saw him in Amsterdam with a different group, not the Quintet. And we talked and he said Alberto, I'm going to Paris now with my wife Laura and I'm going to finish my opera (an opera about Carlos Gardel). And in Paris he told me After I finish my opera, we will do our record next", because his next record was going to be me and him.  But unfortunately, he had a stroke. But in Paris I had one of  the best nights of my life thanks to Laura, a night I will never forget. I invited them to dinner. And then Laura, she did something very special for me, she invited me to come over to the apartment where they live in Paris, and I got to play his bandoneon and see his music. And it was very, very meaningful that she invited me there. So, I'll never forget what she's done for me, to make me so happy at that time.

And from that day on, Piazzolla is always in my life. Every day. Every day I play Piazzolla. Someway, somehow, when I'm playing my music, I'm always talking about Piazzolla. And I always play his music in my shows. So I must say that he is, and will always be a part, somehow, of my music and all of my shows for the rest of my life. It's goes to my heart.

In short, discovering Piazzolla changed my life.

Introduction

More than one hundred years after his birth (11 March 1921) and thirty years after his physical disappearance (4 July 1992) we can already ask ourselves if it is not time to face the figure, the work and the music of Astor Piazzolla in a different way. Who really was Astor Piazzolla? What did he want to be? The questions and doubts are many, the vastness and variety of his production is unique. How to approach it? Are certain canons, sentences, prejudices or priestly opinions that have been in place for more than sixty years still valid in the 21st century? Astor Piazzolla, from the cradle, was an accumulation of contradictions, rarities and exceptional facts. An extra-ordinary being who was undoubtedly born with the mark of the chosen ones, of the brilliant, but who added a lot of effort, work and passion to it. Precisely, that noun, Passion, is what burns at the center of its essence, what makes it what it is. That passion is Music, another noun that defines him. Music is the Best in the words of Frank Zappa, and there is no doubt about it in the life of Astor Piazzolla. Nothing was more important than music, nothing: imagining it, composing it, arranging it and playing it, EVERYTHING.

He grew up listening to Tango in his home and Jazz outside of it, he fell in love with Bach as a child while at the same time listening to Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington live. And although he was born in a maritime city in the South Atlantic, he grew up in the most cosmopolitan city in the world at its peak and growth. In New York he received his first bandoneon and upon returning to his native Mar del Plata he learned to play Tango; and then he went to develop it in the place he had to go, the universal capital of tango, the city of Buenos Aires.

At the age of 20 he was already a precocious genius who played the bandoneon and arranged songs for the best Orquesta Típica (a Latin American term for a band which plays popular music) of the golden age of classical tango, that of Anibal Troilo. At 23 he was already studying with Alberto Ginastera and dreamed of being a concert pianist or composing symphonies. And everything mixed, swirled in his being: De Caro and Stravinsky, Vardaro and Bach, Gobbi and Art Tatum, Bartok and Gil Evans, Gardel and Chick Corea, Pugliese and Miles Davis, Laurenz & Maffia and Emerson Lake & Palmer. But the novelty, the wonderful thing, is that something unique and different came out of that musical cocktail: Piazzolla's music came out, which we could typify as a genre in itself. A music that starts from Tango, that also contains it, that brings together the musicians named above (and many more) but that at the same time has its own identity and personality. Because, and this should be very clear by now, Piazzolla did not kill Tango (as he was accused for decades), quite the opposite: Piazzolla saved it, gave it new life, made it grow, evolve.

Fortunately, those old and sterile discussions are almost completely gone, I say almost because there is still a segment that tends to continue pontificating old precepts, or tends to repeat old academicisms. With this I do not mean that absolutely all of Piazzolla's stages or compositions are equally great, but we can affirm that in each of them, even those most vilified by traditional critics, there are outstanding and wonderful pieces. We must be careful with a certain Piazzolleano Taliban fundamentalism, which has often done more damage than the declared enemies of his music. Friendly fire they call it...take for example the often demonized stage of the Electronic Octet (especially the second in Europe in 1977). I honestly believe that it has been mistreated without listening to it carefully, allowing itself to be carried away, perhaps, by bitter concepts of Astor himself at the time for the group, which were more the product of personal and human issues than musical ones. Anyone who listens without prejudice to the only recording that exists of that formation, the live album Olympia 1977, will be totally surprised by its sound, strength and arrangements. In fact, Astor himself admitted that the arrangement and version of none other than Adiós Nonino, with the second Electronic Octet, was one of the best.

And not to mention the vilified and mistreated Libertango, that genius of three notes and a repetitively simple cadence, which in its apparent simplicity (or poverty as some academics have pointed out) hides a standard that has a wonderful arrangement ( It's the Stupid Fix!), something completely revolutionary. Libertango is a song style with incredible dynamics (a la Quincy Jones, someone Astor listened to a lot at that time) that brings together in itself all the popular music of the 20th century: it is tango, it is pop, it is jazz, it is rock, it is easy listening, lasts less than three minutes and was composed with the aim of entering the European market with something accessible and simple to play on the radio. Obviously we are not facing a work of the magnitude and instrumental richness of Portrait of Alfredo Gobbi or Concerto for Quintet, nor does it have any notable solos, but it is a kind of molecular music that is covered from symphony orchestras to heavy metal bands all around the world.

Beyond any trivial discussion, there are two points that are fixed: the genius of Piazzolla's work and the perfection of his Quintet as a more finished and representative ensemble.

In this volume we will take a tour of Astor's artistic (and life) career, placing special emphasis on the creation of the Nuevo Tango Quintet in 1960 and how he arrived at it, since it is vital and fundamental to understand and know well the course of Astor, from his first bandoneon in New York to the genesis of that group, of that unique and innovative musical concept. It is truly an exciting journey to discover and learn how and in what way he got there. A Quintet that laid the foundations of its stylistic canon and classical repertoire in its first version in the 60s and in a second stage of renown and great international presence in the 80s. Of course we will not leave aside his other groups such as the wonderful Nonet from the beginning of the seventies, the serious sextet from his last period and the avant-garde Octeto Electrónico (my favorite, especially the second one that toured Europe in 1977 and left as a testimony the impressive work recorded live at the Olympia theater in Paris).

Astor Piazzolla composed his music thinking about the future, and he is without a doubt one of the greatest creators, instrumentalists and composers, not only in the 20th century, but the entire history of humanity, because his music (besides being beautiful) is eternal and infinite.

And, as was his desire, it will continue to play in 3001...and beyond as well.

Chapter 1 – What Will Come (1921-1939)

Mar del Plata, the Pearl of the Atlantic

It all began in what was then a very young coastal city in Argentina called Mar del Plata, which began as the site of an important salt mine and soon became the main tourist location in the country. Beautiful like few others, the city of Mar del Plata (in the first two decades of the twentieth century) combined within itself a series of qualities and characteristics that made it unique, both in Argentina and in all of Latin America. Luxurious and aristocratic in its coastal walks (the exquisite French Rambla), top-class hotels, satin-lined theaters, fine restaurants and exclusive commercial establishments (even the London jewelry store Mappin & Webb had a branch in the city!), or in the notable cottages, chalets and villas on the hills next to the sea. Impressive in its varied and wild geography, with its privileged maritime landscape, its kilometers and kilometers of beaches, its mountains, lagoons, forests, country houses and farms outside the walls. The city honored future tourism marketing campaigns, without a doubt it was the Pearl of the South Atlantic, and by the time of the vernacular Belle Epoque it had displaced the Buenos Aires area of ​​El Tigre from the preferences of the privileged of that time.

As the researcher Carlos A. Bozzi rightly pointed out regarding the city of Mar del Plata: It was born from the hands of Brazil, beginning to walk due to the push of the British railway and the industrial sector of the oligarchy. And it was the great financiers of the first decade of the century who transformed it into beauty for future generations, motivating in the memory of our ancestors the memory of a city like no other in the country.

But a few decades before, even the so-called Argentine Biarritz (located 404 kilometers south of the Federal Capital) needed people to take care of unskilled labor and services, so faithful to the postulates of the priests of the so-called Generation of the Eighties, the city welcomed thousands of immigrants (mostly Italians) who came to its shores to do everything other than enjoy themselves. This immigration was of vital importance in the development of the city, which was already evident in 1895: of the 8,175 inhabitants registered that year in Mar del Plata, 3,220 were foreigners, which made up no less than 40% of the total.

One of those immigrants – who arrived in Mar del Plata from Trani, Italy – was Pantaleo Piazzolla, a tall and strong man of the sea. With a robust physical complexion, white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes (he looked more like an immigrant from northern Italy than from the south), the then renamed Pantaleón arrived on the shores of Mar del Plata with his wife, Rosa Centofanti (whom he had married in May 1880) and his son Ruggero. The Piazzolla couple settled in a wooden cabin facing the sea (of course!) near the Port area, which over the years was known as the boatswain's house, making use of another of the nicknames with which Pantaleón was well-known, always with seafaring stories on his lips and the blue horizon of the sea in his eyes.

In fact, his first job was as a fisherman on small commercial boats (precursors of the later popular little yellow boats) that navigated the coast in search of the required seafood for the hotels, restaurants and markets that housed the elite that were located in this young city, declared as an extraordinary place of rest and summer vacation in 1874.

In addition to being a fisherman, he worked as a lifeguard and as a doorman at the Palace Theater on Rambla Bristol, where he was in charge of keeping onlookers at bay. He was very skilled with his hands, he liked to carve wood or make little boats that he then sealed in bottles, and many times, at dusk when he became more melancholic looking at the sea, he would play the accordion that he had brought from Italy.

On 12 November 1893, his first son from Mar del Plata was born, whom he baptized with the name of Vicente (who, in addition to his older brother, Ruggero, born in Italy, had two sisters from Mar del Plata, Rosita and Teresa). Vicente would grow tall and lanky like his father, and would also adopt his father's hobby of wood carving and playing the accordion. But his true interest did not develop on the side of music or art but on the side of sport; more precisely because of a very new (and expensive) one that he discovered by watching the good kids in their races along the coast: motorcycling. Beyond the physical resemblance that he had with his father (who was a taciturn and serious man, of very few words), Vicente had other particular characteristics: he was jovial and smiling, always making jokes. 

Astor himself remembered it this way in an interview with him by journalist Carlos Speratti in 1969: My father was an incredible, tireless joker. I inherited it from him, although with the passage of time I have lost some of it. But I also learned it from him, watching him. In the end, I continued making jokes about him.

But beyond his endless propensity for jokes, Vicente Piazzolla had a strong and determined character; his humble origins did not prevent his strong will and ability to work from leading him to achieve his desire of having his own motorcycle... and racing with it.

He worked as an apprentice mechanic, as a bicycle repairman, and did whatever it took to earn a living and not get away from his hobby; In fact, his hobby made him make friends with three brothers who, despite belonging to a higher social stratum (they were great musicians who had lived in the United States), shared his same passion. These brothers were the Bologninis: Remo, a famous pianist who would eventually settle in Mendoza, Enio, first violin of the Arturo Toscanini orchestra, and Astor, first cello of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The real motorcycle fan was Astor Bolognini (who had shortened his real name, Astorre, because he didn't like it), which is why he built a great friendship with the young Piazzolla. By the time he had to do his military service, Vicente was already known as crazy Piazzolla, an affectionate nickname given to him by his barrack mate Moisés Olindo Manetti, another man from Mar del Plata with whom he was under the flag in Campo de Mayo. . His friendship with Moisés was also very significant for his life, since his younger sister, Asunta Manetti, would become his great love and lifelong wife.

The Manettis' paterfamilias, Luis, was another well-known and respected figure in the city of Mar del Plata. Northern Italian, he had emigrated from the city of Lucca, in Tuscany, together with his wife Clelia Bertolami, and founded one of the best-known farms in the city, supplier of the most required vegetables and fruit trees in the city, which Luis was in charge of taking the carts daily to markets and hotels. He was also responsible for foresting the area where one of the oldest and most beloved squares in the center is located, Plaza Miter; Many of the trees that