Songparts 2: Happy Birthday Astor Piazzolla
Readers of this blog are probably not new to the music of Astor Piazzolla. His Four for Tango, and Histoire du Tango are commonly performed transcriptions for many performers. What I hear most often is very classical versions of the music he wrote down, but that is not his music. Piazzolla’s music, like that of jazz, lives off the page. Sure, he wrote great melodies and harmonies, but that was all a mere framework for Astor to improvise within. And when I say improvise, I do not mean in the jazz style. Astor’s improvisation was something different.
Here’s an example of Piazzolla’s remarkable improvisation skills from one of his most famous pieces: Le Muerte del Angel.
What he is doing there is not only a harmonic and melodic improvisation, but something very foreign to non-tango musicians. He is literally improvising with the tempo. In fact, by the end of the solo, his own band (the best tango musicians ever) can’t even find him. He dosen’t use the tempo in a classical-rubato, push-pull sort of way. In this example he is always rushing – always ahead of the pursuit. Why? Well, the outer sections of the piece are a fugue, after all.
Smart guy, eh?
It is this type of thing that I always miss when I hear musicians who have not committed to learning the tango play Piazzolla’s music. I heard it numerous times at NASA, and I expect to hear it forever. As classical musicians we hold the beat and the tempo so dear to us that implementing the freedom that the tango demands is simply too difficult.
I remember the first time my teacher taught us (my quartet) what he learned from Daniel Benelli (who succeeded Piazzolla after Piazzolla’s death) about tempo in l’Histoire. He told us to play the first 16 or so bars completely out of time. We were skeptical at first, but we gave it the old college try. Boy, did that change us. All of a sudden we were free from everything restrictive about music. We imposed a similar interpretation on the second movement and sections of the last movements too. To this day, I have never heard anyone play that transcription like we did, and to this day, I have never liked anyone’s performance of that transcription. Until you free yourself from the beat, you can not understand the tango. And that’s hard to do.
Because it is his birthday, here’s what I think is Piazzolla’s greatest recorded performance: La Camorra I.
As Piazzolla said, “[he] left his lungs on that one.”
Recommended reading: Astor Piazzolla: A Memoir
Recommended listening: La Camorra: The Solitude Of Passionate Provocation
