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... All of them beyond the classificatory manias and methodological provincialism of the "continental" disciplines in vogue among the colonial intellectuals and artists.

The unorthodox use of the bandoneon to produce its vibrato or the clarinet "glides" rather than producing a chromatic scale (listen in your memory the clarinet at the very beginning of Rhapsody in Blue) clearly showed from which side of the Atlantic our music came from, and unencumbered by long traditions it developed its own "schools".

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 unequal 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...

The sound of the bandoneon is tango's signature and Anibal Troilo, "Pichuco", 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 Satchmo's 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 sometimes close others. His music, like Charlie Parker's opened a few new doors, and like Ellington's gave us a counterpointalistic complexity that hadn't been there before. But also, there is a Parisian touch, the melancholy air of Django Reinhardt's impressionistic melodies, and a touch of Bix Beiderbecke's Ravel inspired pieces for piano like In a Mist. And the doors of the old tango and the old swing were closed.

El Jazz and The Tango... We always sounded like distant brothers saluting each other and exchanging gossips!

And like colonial brothers we inherited a bit of that sense of inferiority instilled by our metropolitan colonizers...

But we always have Paris!

It's in Paris where Gershwin anxiously requests lessons from Ravel who - after listening to the young American playing his own music - sends him back home because he has nothing to teach him.

The bohemian life of Piazzolla in Paris, where he experiences his first real success and starts recording his works and, most important: Nadia Boulanger, his counterpoint teacher, tells Piazzolla "not to be ashamed" of playing his own tangos!

It's all over now. The colonial wounds are closed. Tango and jazz are not the music of a generation or a social class or a country but the music of the planet. And slowly, predictably, they are becoming one music.

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. His collaboration with Gerry Mulligan and Gary Burton brought about some of the results of such fusion.

Now Argentina resembles the music he prophetically composed long ago, before his Tango Nuevo, when he was taking the modern but still conventional tangos 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.