It's not hyperbole to say that Astor Piazzolla is the single most important figure in the history of tango. Piazzolla's place in Argentina's greatest cultural export is roughly equivalent to that of Duke Ellington in jazz; the genius composer who took an earthy, sensual, folk music and elevated it into a sophisticated form of high art. Piazzolla was also a virtuosic performer with a near-unparalleled mastery of the bandoneon, a button accordion noted for its unwieldy size and difficult fingering system. In Piazzolla's hands, tango was no longer strictly dance music; his compositions borrowed from jazz and classical forms, creating a whole new harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary made for the concert hall more than the ballroom (which was dubbed "Nuevo Tango"). He wasn't afraid of dissonance or abrupt shifts in tempo and meter, and often composed segmented pieces with hugely contrasting moods that interrupted the normal flow and demanded the audience's concentration. The complexity and ambition of Piazzolla's oeuvre brought him enormous international acclaim, particularly in Europe and Latin America, but it also earned him the lasting enmity of many tango purists, who attacked him for his supposed abandonment of tradition. But Piazzolla always stuck to his guns, and remained tango's foremost emissary to the world up until his death in 1992.
Tour Dates 2009