Astor Piazzolla

Mar del Plata and New York

Astor Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, on 11 March 1921, the only child of Vicente "Nonino" Piazzolla and Asunta Manetti. In 1925 the family moved to Greenwich Village in New York, where he grew up hearing his father's records of tango orchestras alongside jazz and classical music, Bach among them. His father spotted a bandoneon in a pawn shop in 1929 and Piazzolla began to play it. In 1934 he met Carlos Gardel and played a paper boy in Gardel's film El día que me quieras.

Troilo, Boulanger and the octet

Piazzolla moved to Buenos Aires in 1938 and joined the orchestra of the bandoneonist Aníbal Troilo the following year, as a player and arranger. He studied composition with Alberto Ginastera for five years. By 1944 Troilo feared that his advanced ideas would make the orchestra less appealing to dancers, and Piazzolla left. He formed his own orchestra in 1946, disbanded it in 1950 and almost abandoned tango. A symphony he entered for a prize in 1953 won him a French government grant to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. He tried to hide his tangos from her, but when he played her Triunfal she encouraged him to pursue tango. In Paris he also heard Gerry Mulligan's octet, which gave him the idea of an octet of his own.

Back in Argentina in 1955 he formed the Octeto Buenos Aires: two bandoneons, two violins, double bass, cello, piano and electric guitar, with no singer and jazz-like improvisation. The result sounded like chamber music, and it made him a controversial figure at home, while his music found acceptance in Europe and North America.

Quintets and Italy

After a hard stretch in New York he heard of his father's death in October 1959 and wrote Adiós Nonino. In 1960 he put together the first of his quintets, with bandoneon, piano, violin, electric guitar and double bass, the format that best expressed his approach to tango. With the poet Horacio Ferrer he wrote the operita María de Buenos Aires, premiered in 1968, and in 1969 Balada para un loco, his first popular success.

In 1973 he moved to Italy, where the publisher Aldo Pagani offered him a 15-year contract in Rome to record anything he could write. Libertango was recorded in Milan in May 1974, and in Milan he also made Summit with the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. His music of the decade was leaner and more fluid, with more jazz influence. In 1978 he formed a second quintet, which toured the world for 11 years. In 1982 he wrote Oblivion, which appeared in a Marco Bellocchio film.

New York and Montreux

With that second quintet, Pablo Ziegler on piano, Fernando Suárez Paz on violin, Horacio Malvicino on guitar and Héctor Console on bass, he made three albums in New York with the producer Kip Hanrahan. One was Tango: Zero Hour in 1986. Piazzolla called it "absolutely the greatest record I've made in my entire life," and Robert Christgau gave it an A minus. Another was The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night, recorded in 1987 from music first written for a theater piece about the history of tango.

In July 1986 he played the Montreux Jazz Festival with the vibraphonist Gary Burton. The concert was recorded and released in 1987 as The New Tango. Everything on it was Piazzolla's, written across some 40 years, except Vibraphonissimo, which he composed expressly for Burton, and the two men had only three rehearsals.

Last years and legacy

In 1989 he formed the Sexteto Nuevo Tango, his last ensemble, and played his last concert in Argentina on 9 June. That November he recorded Five Tango Sensations with the Kronos Quartet, his last studio recording. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in Paris on 4 August 1990 and died in Buenos Aires on 4 July 1992.

Critic Stephen Holden called him "the world's foremost composer of Tango music" in 1992. Biographers estimate that he wrote about 3,000 pieces and recorded about 500. His pianist Pablo Ziegler has become the principal custodian of nuevo tango, and Osvaldo Golijov has acknowledged him as perhaps the greatest influence on his own compositions. Grace Jones built her 1981 single I've Seen That Face Before on Libertango, and Oblivion was nominated for a Grammy in 1993. Google marked his 100th birthday with a Doodle on 11 March 2021.