Tango: Zero Hour

Performer: Astor Piazzolla
Engineer: Jon Fausty
Producer: Kip Hanrahan
Distributor: WEA (Distributor)

Notes: Personnel: Astor Piazzolla (bandoneon); Horacio Malvicino (guitar); Fernando Suarez Paz (violin); Pablo Ziegler (piano); Hector Console (bass). Recorded at Sound Idea Studio, New York, New York in May 1986. Originally released on American Clave. Includes liner notes by Fernando Gonzales. To paraphrase a statement made by Piazolla in the disc's liner notes, TANGO: ZERO HOUR is undoubtedly the finest effort by this utterly unique Argentinia-born and New York-raised musician. A master of the bandoneon, a buttoned squeeze-box that is the central instrument of tango music, Piazolla forges a hybrid style that mixes his love of tango with elements of jazz and classical and unifies the blend with an avant-garde sensibility. TANGO: ZERO HOUR supports Piazolla with an ensemble of violin, piano, guitar, and bass for an album of great complexity and fierce passion. The result is something of a cross between experimental chamber composition and careening dance songs, music that sounds at once ethnic, indigenous, singular, and contemporary. Each of the album's seven pieces is demanding, though the rewards--from the insane spill of "Michelangelo '70" to the achingly beautiful "Milonga Del Angel"--are multiple. This is the best kind of fusion music: intense, multi-dimensional, and adventurous.

While tango had long been associated with the dancehalls of Buenos Aires, Astor Piazolla reinvented the music for the concert stage. In the 1950s and 1960s, he infused tango with the oblique harmonies of jazz and classical music, as well as new instruments such as electric guitar, and although he may have alienated traditionalists, he gained a worldwide audience seduced by his music's exotic beauty. Over the course of five decades, Piazolla continually expanded the scope of the tango--or "tango nuevo," as his music came to be called--to produce a wealth of inventive, emotionally rich music. He died in 1992.

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