Astor Piazzolla: a new-age score for the tango.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

IT WAS AN INCONGRUOUS SCENE: the lobby of a hotel on the shores of Lake Champlain, the aloof, button-down reserve of New England suddenly violated by six figures in black, some wielding violin cases. Shades of Coppola and Scorcese? An offer you can't refuse? A contract to be made? Not really. It turned out that the "hit" that night would be made by a near septuagenarian, at the Flynn Theatre, in Burlington, Vermont. The "thug" really was a musician, Astor Piazzolla, the "Father of New Tango." His weapon would be a bandoneon, a kind of concertina invented by a nineteenth century German-named band for impoverished parishes unable to afford an organ. Piazzolla and his five accomplices, the New Tango Sextet, would "knock 'em dead" just as they had done at Lincoln Center in New York City, Zellerback Auditorium on the Berkeley campus, and the Old Vic in Chicago. It was all part of triumphant standing-room-only tour that made the rounds of fifteen North American cities in the spring of 1989.

Gangsters, outlaws, tough guys - all are aspects of an image Piazzolla and his cohorts carefully nature. After all, tango, born at the turn of the century in the bordellos of Buenos Aires, was a dance once considered to "dirty" that men and women were prohibited from doing it together. The words were often obscene and only men - two machos - performed the dance in river front dives and brothels of the port city amidst the pimps, whores, and knife fighters who were later celebrated by Jorge Luis Borges. But in the 1920s, tango found its way into the elegant salons of the monied establishment and, with a measure of naughty respectability, it became the rage of Paris and New York. In the 1930s and 1940s it became more of a family affair, suitable for radio broadcast, sentimental, a symbol of Argentina's growing prosperity and comfortable middle class. It was the era of Carlos Gardel whose hundreds of tango recordings made him both a national hero and international celebrity.

In the ensuing decades, interest in tango declined, especially among young people who associated it with old folks and favored the angry rebellion of rock and roll. Only with Piazzolla did tango eventually find a new lease on life, often to the horror of die hard traditionalists. El Tango Nuevo was hybrid, a mix rooted in jazz and classical music with the telltale throbbing tango pulse "underneath (as Piazzolla would put it). It swaggered back and forth between instinct and reason, pitting harmony against dissonance. It was complex and contradictory, the struggle of modern life set to music.

Premonitions of stardom must have visited upon Vicente Piazzolla and Asunta Menetti when, in Mar de Plata, in March 1921, they christened their only child with a name that had a certain "astral" sound to it. Three years later, Astor accompanied his father and mother to the United States where they found work as barber and hair stylist respectively in the Little Italy of New York City. Piazzolla's father purchased a motorcycle with a sidecar which he named The Spirit of Buenos Aires and as further evidence of his longing for Argentina, he bought his son a bandoneon from a pawn shop, Piazzolla remembers taking to the instrument only with reluctance because baseball, soccer, and especially boxing were his real passion. "Tony Canzoneri taught me how to fight," Piazzolla recalls, "but boyhood buddies like Rocky Graziano and Jake La Motta gave me such a pasting I didn't want to fight no more. But boxing made me tough. That's what you need in the world of tango."

Piazzolla admits he was precocious, that much of his future success came from some gutsy moves as a young boy, pushed by parents, especially his father who early on opened a journal on Astor entitled El tambien tiene su historia. Through a succession of teachers, the youngster did master the new instrument and by age nine, he was performing professionally, touted as something of a boy wonder, el pibe bandeonista. A street wise kid who learned to speak cocoliche (pidgin Spanish), he was also prone to slip out at night, sneaking into clubs in Harlem to hear Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. It was the beginning of a life long love affair with jazz. Close to home, he was equally impressed by classical music - Mozart, Chopin, Schumann and Bach. A next door neighbor, a concert pianist from Hungary named Bela Wilder, helped Astor transpose piano compositions for the bandoneon. To this day Piazzolla confesses: "More than anything else, I am what I am thanks to Bach!"

Even as a lad, Piazzolla could have written a primer on how to succeed...