Liner Notes

I feel a great affinity towards the 38-year-old Astor Piazzolla of 1959, living in the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife and two teenage kids, trying to simultaneously be true to his artistic vision and put bread on the table. It’s not just the art vs. commerce part of our lives. It´s also the struggle to find a place for jazz, for New York, in my own music.

It all came together in this project and with these musicians.

All the writing in this recording is by Piazzolla, but unlike the maestro, I have Iived with jazz: for me the page is a definite road map, but also an invitation to explore. So while Piazzolla went as far as writing out the bongo parts, I trusted these musicians to create their own world.

“Pipi”, his fluid drumming replacing his grandfather’s attempt to create a generic Latinbeat, Gustavo, a jazz man true and true who has been experimenting with tango since 1960, the year of Piazzolla’s return from New York. Abel, who contributed his own voicings and sonorities to replace the formulaic block chords that Piazzolla utilized on the original album. And Nicolás, a 21-year-old who at some point dropped the electric guitar for the bandoneón because he heard Piazzolla — and ended up taking the plunge with us into the uncharted territory of tango improvisation.

My deepest gratitude to the musicians and to engineer extraordinaire Fernando Martinez, who always makes the process much easier than it should be. Roger Davidson, for his trust and unconditional support of this project. Jocelyn Howells for access to the Edouard Pecourt Tango Collection, and Emma Dedrick (Indiana University) for research assistance. Juan Pablo Navarro for generously loaning me his bass for this recording.

And also Daniel Piazzolla (Sr.) – who as a teenager heard Astor and Dedé, his parents, discussing the music of Take Me Dancing at the kitchen table of their 92nd Street apartment, and who, as a grown-up and a musician himself, heard for years his father cursing every time the subject was brought up. The image of Daniel, sitting on the floor of the recording studio with a huge smile on his face, watching his own son and his colleagues performing this ritual of musical alchemy on Astor’s damnedest album, stays with me. Dedita is for him.

PABLO ASLAN

Masterpieces spark new work. Piazzolla in Brooklyn was inspired by a dreadful recording.

Take Me Dancing, a 1959 jazz tango album by New Tango master Astor Piazzolla, was dreadful. Astor Piazzolla said so.

Still, Pablo Aslan was curious. An Argentine-born, Brooklyn-based bassist, bandleader, and producer, Aslan has been a pioneer in jazz tango, working on his own ideas for the past 20 years. His 2009 recording TANGO GRILL looked at jazz tango through a traditional tango keyhole, earning him GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY nominations.

“I had heard all the infamous stories about this recording, so when I saw Take Me Dancing in a record shop in Buenos Aires, I snatched a copy,” he says. “And it played exactly as Piazzolla had said: it was awful.”

There was little jazz and a simplified, clunky Piazzolla played to a güiro-and-bongo beat.

But then Aslan read a critical reevaluation of Piazzolla’s career (Diego Fischerman’s study “Piazzolla El Mal Entendido,” The Misunderstood Piazzolla) and the comments about Take Me Dancing intrigued him into giving it an open-minded second listening.

What he heard then inspired Piazzolla in Brooklyn.

“The themes and the ideas were very strong and original, but some of them just went by too fast,“ he says. “I felt there were many places where the music could be opened up and developed further. That was the Eureka moment, when I realized that the material in this record had a potential that just needed to be unleashed.”

The transcriptions of the original arrangements by Piazzolla for nine of the pieces in Take Me Dancing became the road map for Piazzolla in Brooklyn. And for the journey, Aslan not only had Piazzolla as a guide, but also something that el maestro didn’t have: a group of musically bilingual players (including Piazzolla’s grandson, drummer Daniel “Pipi” Piazzolla), as knowledgeable and comfortable with the vocabulary, syntax, and rhythms of tango as they are with jazz.

The Piazzolla of Take Me Dancing was a musician desperately juggling artistic ambitions and subsistence needs. He was back in New York City, where he had spent most of his childhood, but now with a wife and two kids, and looking for a fresh new start for a sputtering career. (“La Calle 92,” the only track here that is not from Take Me Dancing, plays like scene setter. It’s a piece by Piazzolla titled after the street where he and his family lived during this period.)

He pushed and probed, but with modest success. His most ambitious gambit was “a new rhythm called J.T. (jazz tango),” Piazzolla wrote in a letter dated June 1958 that Aslan found in his research. “This rhythm has been well liked because I play jazz melodies with a modern tango rhythm. It’s the only way to break in the U.S.A.”

The pearl of this work was supposed to be Take Me Dancing, a recording of both originals and jazz standards interpreted by his Jazz Tango Quintet, comprising electric guitar, vibes, piano, and bass, plus small percussion. Dominican bandleader, musician, and producer Johnny Pacheco, who would go on to develop salsa and cofound the influential Fania Records, was one of the percussionists in the Take Me Dancing sessions. “I had no idea who [Piazzolla] was,” Pacheco told me. “I was doing a lot of studio work those days and they called me because I could read music. Everything was written down. It was tango with rhythm, and he improvised in jazz [style].”

“It was the first time I had ever heard a bandoneón played in that style,” he recalled. And Piazzolla, “had this expression of happiness in his face because everything he had written, he was hearing. These were the best studio players around. As for me, it was a feast.”

In August 1959, in another recently unearthed letter, Piazzolla writes his friend that “The recordings are marvelous, and if the company really tries, they will sell well.”

In fact, Take Me Dancing sank without a trace. Piazzolla would later sour on the whole experience, and go on to denounce the quintet as “a monstrosity,” and Take Me Dancing as an artistic “sin.” In those recordings, he once said, “I sold my soul to the devil.”

Daniel Piazzolla, a musician himself, remembers asking his father about Take Me Dancing “seven million times, and the conversations always ended the same way: with him yelling at me, ‘don’t bust my chops with that piece of shit, that crap, that black stain in my story.’”

Yet for all its shortcomings, real and exaggerated, an argument can be made that Take Me Dancing had a subtle but lasting impact on Piazzolla. Still, while he would go on to collaborate with exceptional jazz musicians such as Gerry Mulligan and Gary Burton, Piazzolla never went back to jazz tango.
As it turned out, that was left to another Argentine New Yorker, one raised in Buenos Aires but educated on Miles, Coltrane, and Mingus, as well as Salgan, Pugliese, and Piazzolla.

“Astor Piazzolla has been a model for my own development, but I also had systematically avoided his music,” Aslan told me. ”I always felt it was too strong and defined, and his own interpretations very rarely have been surpassed. But in Take Me Dancing I found a place where I could create my own world and actually interact with him.”

That place is Piazzolla in Brooklyn. It’s not a remake and it’s not nostalgia. It’s not even a tribute. Rather, it’s a continuing conversation among musicians, across fifty odd years of music, shared stories of displacement and deeply personal searches.

It’s a thank you note to a favorite teacher, long gone: your lessons were not lost on me, on us.

It has all been worthwhile — and we are carrying on.

Fernando Gonzalez

Fernando Gonzalez is an independent writer and editor based in Miami Beach, FL.