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This is a recording of mostly Piazzolla compositions, mostly from the mid 1950s, mostly composed in Paris, mostly representing his early notions of ‘tango nuevo’. And certainly, we’ve tried to add our own bits of love to them as well...the trombone, the jazzy feel in the arrangements...
Whew. ok...elevator pitch aside, the first time I heard Astor Piazzolla’s music, I couldn’t believe my ears. As I listened, my heart opened to what I have come to understand - in a small way - as tango. The compositions we’re doing here are Piazzolla’s earliest ‘out’ pieces... the ones that made him split Buenos Aires for Paris to (ultimately, eventually) concentrate on them. Like the boppers in the 40’s, Piazzolla is beginning to see a new road with these tunes... It ain’t just about dance anymore. Check out the wonderful commentary by Carlos Suarez, poet & friend, for his always special perspective on this interesting correlation. Jazz and Tango? But of course! Right, Carlos!?
Also included are one piece by Troilo, La Ultima Curda (‘The Final Binge’, more or less, though it’s hard to translate), because we love it so, and Adios Nonino, the beautiful Piazzolla standard, because what’s a Piazzolla tribute without it, eh?
As for the title, there really ARE a ton of cats in Recoleta, I was amazed & lucky to find out.
We have come to know and love these pieces... they’ve touched our hearts... opened our minds to the vast and passionate world of tango... which we are only beginning to understand and appreciate.
We hope you enjoy the music.
Catharine Clune
Extra special thanks to: Alla Gladysheva
Many thanks to: Astor Piazzolla, Anibal Troilo, Horacio Salgan, Oscar De Lio, Mirta Israel & Miguel Arios, Dorab @ SPILLHOUSE, Giotto Harrison @ Babyface, John & Michael @ Bruno’s / Foreign Cinema, Don of the late, great Radio Valencia, Cori Chill @ PRP, Carlos Suarez, Tracy Landsman, los dos Joses (Navarrete & Maria Francos), David & Nancy Stevens Mendoza, Mark Wyman, Ron Borelli, Tom Yoder, Christie Cote, Pamela McCleave, Phillip Greenlief, Alejandro Oyuela, Bocha Lopez, Cara Manning, Pablo Aslan, George Gunnell, Myles Boisen, Steve Kirk, Bob Kissinger, Nadine Condon, Big Lou, Charles & Lori, Josh ‘setlist’ Pollock, Kat Eiswald, Dad (our biggest fan), Diana Alden Lang (our biggest agent), Juliana Grenzeback (our most persistent audience developer), and, as always, Reed Kirk Rahlmann.
Art by Dorab Wolfherring at SPILLHOUSE.
Back cover band photo by George Gunnell.
© 2000, Carlos V. Suarez.
Tango Number Nine The night is a perfume. The night is a black wolf searching the streets for your door. The night has a complaint from long ago And the night brings you. You arrive like the mist that hides the islands and strands the vessels of a distant land. Your voice is that complaint, that sadness of abandoned gardens, that daring and the promise of another dawn. Tango... Once, everything was said and done. The gods had turned their backs on us And time started flowing and devouring our hearts Because we were far, alien; busy in the narrow ways of others, Without passion or rebellion, without a mere piece of oblivion to our name... Broken. Distracted by false signals from another realm... But you came to slap our face with your insolent passion. You came to show us the white orchid of the swamps And the moon reflected on a blade That once killed out of fear and despair. You came with the Southern Cross broken And your dreams turned into rags. Here I am, you said, and you stood there, Waiting for the sign... And when it came; when the bandoneon started To weave more mist and more melancholy You looked at us straight in the eyes And burned us in the flowers of fire of your heart.
by Carlos Suarez, © 2000
I am asked quite often — and I don’t like it — since I am Argentinian and apparently such coincidence makes me an expert, “Yeah, but... They don’t play the real thing. Do they, Carlos?”
Apparently, the real thing is some kind of special elusive thing culturally bonded to our “hearts”. Some sort of solid and unyielding thing, monolithic and impervious to evolutionary or transcultural bugs. Such conservatism kept Piazzolla away from us during my youth. The people and the new tango were in different gene pools... Like management and labor? Traditions some call it. I think that in these days of a globalism, we would do better by letting our definition of reality stretch a bit. Here and in Buenos Aires... the name of all our nostalgia.
Jazz and Tango? But of course! Both had the uncertain origins of any cultural hero; historically vague, suspicious, with very few recorded facts about it... Born of dubious or suspicious parentage, a hidden identity... Tango and Jazz were created in discredited places; colonies, ghettos, among the humble, the outcast and the marginalized. It happened near Congo Square in New Orleans — which later became a parking lot and now is an apartment building — and in the poor suburbs of Buenos Aires — still there...in a world of whorehouses and little bars, of delinquency and poverty... perfect places for miracles. Both stories are one and the same. Instruments sold very cheap after the bands of the Confederate regiments were dissembled, or the bandoneon that some hypothetical drunk German sailor exchanged for drinks in a bar near Buenos Aires harbor... Who knows? The fog of the beginning is thick and somehow we are grateful for it because in those uncertainties we nurture our fantasies and dreams.
Both were forbidden in their birthplaces. Both had to go underground. And both have men and women of mythological statures whose names are safe-conducts, words of salutation and welcome, identifying a certain lifestyle, a specific group, a nation, a flagless empire of sounds and feelings, a language, a culture. From the harbor and the southern suburbs of muddy streets and tin roof houses to the heart of Buenos Aires; from the damp and sweaty nights of New Orleans to Chicago, our music migrated and changed. Jazz lost its tuba and banjo. Tango let go of the flute and drums that somehow started the whole thing in the “candombe” that begot the “milonga” that, mixed with immigrant sounds, begot the tango...
The voices of tango and jazz singers were mostly untouched by the norms and the training of the European schools. Louis Armstrong or Tita Merello, Johnny Hartmann with the Coltrane Quartet or Edmundo Rivero with Anibal Troilo, Pedro Maciel or Chet Baker... The Ellington machine offered its compact sound and the symphonic complexity of a mature music. Mariano Mores and Carlos Di Sarli obtained the same in Buenos Aires, and Ellington’s piano signature wasn’t dissimilar to that of Osvaldo Pugliese.... The chamber music elegance of the Modern Jazz Quartet or the Quinteto Real of Horacio Salgan. The telegraphic piano of Thelonious Monk or Pablo Ziegler...
Anibal Troilo, “Pichuco” and Louis Armstrong, “Satchmo” share something special. Both have gone through — and synthesized for us — the history of tango and jazz. The bandoneon’s sound is tango’s signature and Troilo its greatest virtuoso, with a long career that took him from the oldest traditional pieces to the cutting edge of the most exploratory forms in existence. Somehow his trajectory is, like in jazz, the history of his music, and beyond into the same area Coltrane explored, adding an extra dimension to his improvisations.
And Astor Piazzolla? That’s a hard one! Precursors open some doors and close others. His music, like Charlie Parker’s, opened a few new doors, pushing aside traditional mores, perhaps even the need to dance, as opposed to listen, to learn. And the doors of the old tango, as the old swing, were closed.
El Jazz and The Tango... We always sounded like distant brothers saluting each other and exchanging gossip! And like colonial brothers, we inherited a bit of that sense of inferiority instilled by our metropolitan colonizers...Astor Piazzolla spent his early years in New York’s Greenwich Village. It’s not unlikely that jazz was an early influence in his creations, many times rejected in Argentina by the arrogant conservatism of our own people. Now Argentina resembles the music he prophetically composed long ago, when he was taking the modern but still conventional tango of the 1940s and 50s and developing it into his early pieces, laboriously dissembling the old tangos and rebuilding them in a modern form...
I remember when he played La Cumparsita, as much a “national anthem” as St. Louis Blues... Most of the audience wanted his head! He had committed a sin! But a few of us realized he had played something of a reflection, comments, his own personal view of those old times when life was simpler and the word alienation wasn’t in our vocabulary. Later on, starting in the 70s and until his death in the 90s, Astor Piazzolla’s music evolved into the Tango Nuevo and his jazz influences became clearer. He started going beyond, into longer, larger compositions. Some of those longer works remind us of the evolution of Ellington in his older years, his concertos and oratorios.
But what the years of despair and the nightmares of a twisted social and political life did to Argentina was prophesized in Piazzolla’s early music, which very few of us listened to. Shocked that it was the reflection of those things we had in our heart, new things that could be, and would be, were being composed by Piazzolla!
This is the music offered here...the beginnings of Piazzolla’s journey...the same journey that took Charlie Parker...that took John Coltrane...
“Yes but... Is it the ‘real thing’ or not?”
Relax, stretch your legs under the table, savor your drink and listen. If you are alive and you aren’t ashamed or afraid of your passions; if you don’t fear either exploration or discoveries, and specially if you enjoy changing... Then it’s “real”, as you put it. It‘s just the next step, that’s all.