Review Summary: Trained hands of a new dogma..
When you hear the word ‘fusion music’ today, the first thing that likely comes to mind is the measured unrest and crazed funk licks of
Bitches Brew. Jazz was never a surprising front for fusion, a genre whose strongholds already rested on improvisation and artistic upheaval. What Astor Piazzolla did with Argentine tango in the mid-50's presented a much more audible disturbance, a deconstruction of a preordained mode, one that relied as much on flamboyant passion as it did on careful steps.
The sound of
Tango: Zero Hour is one of a man at odds with convention, restless in his search, and methodical in approach. Piazzolla’s existential woes as a musician and his intermittent pursuits of classical music are all starkly visible here. The album’s pieces are built on choreographed fluctuation, an immaculate mix of deviation and strain. And like all good fusion, the headiest, most enraptured aspect of it is a paradox, the collaboration between precision and spontaneity.
Milonga del Angel follows a tipica tango trope, all cobbled streets and melancholic lamp-posts. The mood shift at the piece’s end is painstakingly plaited, heavy-handed dramatic keys colliding with the accordion and violin. It briefly feels overwhelming, before retreating back into dysphoria.
At a little under three minutes,
Michelangelo ‘70 is a compressed tribute to the heart of Piazzolla’s fusion tics. The piece kicks off an impish violin squeal and swings raucously, before changing tempos, the bandoneon giving way to classical strings
Set over buzzing baroque strings,
Contrabajisimo is one of the most temperamental and symptomatic pieces in Piazzolla’s canon. Unraveling deliberately over its ten-minute runtime, its theatrical ebb and flow is precisely what gives tango such life on the stage.
Just as John Mclaughlin did with Miles Davis during his winsome fusion run through the early 70’s, Horacio Malvicino’s guitar is
Tango: Zero Hour’s secret weapon. Never crashing to the forefront, his work is all contemplation and restraint, a stretch of lurking lines that slip in to fill all the small spaces left open by the roaming concertina. Yet for how hermetically the instruments interplay,
Tango: Zero Hour feels airy and dapper, almost translucent at times. Piazzolla’s deftness not only as an arranger, but a bandleader and mediator is another parallel that his redrawn tango prints carry in common with jazz from the hard bop era -on, a period that put great stock in both abstraction and musicians who thrived as architects, as opposed to solely virtuosic players.
In its chronic mood swings is where
Tango: Zero Hour’s strengths lie. Piazzolla’s arrangements have always fallen somewhere between manic and stolid, but most importantly, they rarely feel forced or complacent. The first third of closer
Mumuki leans on cool jazz piano. Piazzolla lets loose over contrasting rhythms and tonalities, before the piece fades abruptly, only to resurrect on a sustained note of atmospheric strings. The bass marches in wide strides, and the menace builds, clashing against the unsettlingly chipper bandoneon, until the whole thing flags again, dissolving into a sharp frequency.
While
Tango: Zero Hour is hardly an obscurity in the world of music critics and lovers, its presence on best-of genre lists borders closer to cult status and trendy completism, rather than actual regular listening. Outside of his homeland Argentina, Piazzolla’s celebrity has traditionally slanted closer to the parts of the world where accordion-based music is rooted in folklore and thereby transcends pop modalities. So despite the fact that most Western aficionados could rattle off his best pieces without blinking; it is France, cumbia-infused parts of Latin America, and the Baltics where he still receives regular radio-play.
In expected academic fashion, music historians have been flagellating endless theories about Piazzolla’s bipolar arrangements reflecting Argentina’s troubled political state in the 50’s and 60’s. Some of these claims do carry surface value. 1955, when he first premiered his band in what would become known as Nuevo Tango, was the year of the air-bombing of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. The country was still reeling from Perón’s populist inhumanity; and constitutional reforms, along with frequent coups and intermittent bloodshed were gearing the country toward its 1966 Revolution. Piazzolla’s abstracted and liberal take on a traditionalist art-form did produce some political backlash, causing him to return to Paris and later New York, where his experimentation fell in step with a sharp rise in cultural innovation. By mid-70’s, in the thick of the Dirty War, he had already attained legend status both in Argentina and abroad.
It’s difficult to say just how influenced Piazzolla was by his turbulent surroundings, and if he tried to make method of madness as a way to cope and comment. But this humble reviewer doesn’t believe it. I think great art serves empirical purposes – to compel, to derange and to make beauty. And I think the best and brightest have no choice but to do so, be it from the streets of a country smoldering from conflict, or a balcony atop the Ritz with a steak in their belly.
