Starting with his Lower East Side roots, Astor Piazzolla returns with a story to tell—and a new (female) voice—in a riveting musical biography of the legendary composer by Lesley Karsten and Stephen Wadsworth.
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Argentine composer and musician Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) wrote and performed some of the most affecting music of the 20th Century. Rooted in tango tradition expanded and renewed by elements from sources as disparate as European classical music, klezmer, and jazz, Piazzolla’s music challenged conventional labels. As a result, what was once dance music in Buenos Aires has become, reimagined by Piazzolla, part of the repertoire of chamber groups and symphonic orchestras around the world.
Still, one of Astor Piazzolla’s great creations was not a piece of music but Astor Piazzolla’s story.
“Never believe what I tell reporters,” he once told an interviewer and, weaving reality and mythmaking, Piazzolla constructed a story of struggle and triumph, deep passions and utter loneliness, a devotion to music and astute pre-social-media marketing instincts.
The irony is that the facts of his life are often richer and far more layered than the fantasies.
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In That’s Not Tango—Astor Piazzolla, A Life In Music, the maestro returns—and he has a few things on his mind.
Conceived by Lesley Karsten and written by Karsten and Stephen Wadsworth, That’s Not Tango will be presented at The Appel Room in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall on July 30 and 31 at 8pm. (Previous incarnations of the show have been performed at Joe’s Pub and SubCulture in New York City, as well as in New Orleans and Fort Myers.)
“The premise is simple,” says Karsten, who gives voice to Piazzolla on stage. “He’s dead, hates it and returns because he has unfinished business—with himself. He has regrets, struggles with isolation, memories of love lost. He gave what he had to give— and the music is astonishing— but he needs to set the record straight. There’s a price to be paid for immortality.”
Staged by Broadway director and co-writer Stephen Wadsworth, That’s Not Tango (the title mocks an old, common complaint among tango aficionados about this music) features Karsten and a quartet comprising JP Jofre on bandoneón, the button accordion that’s the quintessential sound of tango and Piazzolla’s instrument; Nick Danielson, violin; Brandt Fredriksen, piano and music director; and Pablo Aslan, bass.
Both drama and chamber concert, That’s Not Tango plays like a fugue of text and music. More than a mere narrative of facts, Karsten and Wadsworth’s writing opens views of the man that set his compositions at fresh angles. Conversely, Piazzolla’s music, presented here in full performances, is not offered as just the result of events but a purpose, a challenge, and the one true love of his life.
Born in Mar del Plata, a seaside city south of Buenos Aires, Piazzolla was only 3 years old when the family migrated to New York in 1924. They settled in the Lower East Side where they lived until 1937. “I was raised in New York,” said Piazzolla, and there probably would not be the Piazzolla we know without New York. Here’s where Piazzolla—an immigrant’s son, a lame, scrawny kid—learned to fight back and never back down. Here’s also where he saw the American story of possibility playing out over and over. Here’s where he heard tango from his father scratchy records, got his first bandoneón and learned to play it “just to please my dad.” And here’s also where he learned about Bach, Mozart and Rossini, klezmer music, Neapolitan songs, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway.
Years later, back in Argentina, he would do his tango apprenticeship with the great bandleader Anibal Troilo, and study composition formally with Alberto Ginastera (Piazzolla was his first student.) As a prize in a composition contest, he won lessons with the great French teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris. It was she, the story goes, who heard the vitality and originality of his music, his peculiar brand of tango, and told him to stop trying to imitate old European classical composers and be Piazzolla. His Nuevo Tango made him immortal.
Karsten first heard Piazzolla’s music as an encore at a concert by violinist Gidon Kremer. That night she bought a CD of Piazzolla’s music and for the next weeks she “played it until I ungrooved it.” Sometime later, at “a very difficult period in my life,” someone suggested a project featuring her reading Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to Piazzolla’s music.
“I thought it was a terrible idea, so I said ‘I'll write something’—and I have never written anything like this. I had no idea who Piazzolla the man was. And then I found Natalio Gorín’s book Astor Piazzolla: A Memoir, and because the translation [by music critic Fernando Gonzalez] was as good as it was, I heard his voice, and the minute I heard his voice I began to see him.”
“When I discovered that he had spent most of his childhood in New York, I began to explore the elements that he had to have been exposed to,” she says. “I’ve often wondered whether that ability he had to absorb every experience was a byproduct of always having to be vigilant, to watch his back, to survive the streets. In those days the Lower East Side was a really tough neighborhood of gangsters and people living on top of one another.”
By presenting That’s Not Tango at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Karsten brings Piazzolla back to his beloved New York.
“I'm very excited about it because I think he never left New York. I believe New York lived on in him in a very deep, enduring way,” she says. “And when he returned to New York in the 1980s and found producer Kip Hanrahan, an Irish-Jewish kid from the Bronx, another outsider, he created some of his best work. I think that was a homecoming for him.
“With That’s Not Tango, first and foremost I want the audience to be moved. I want them to have an experience,” says Karsten. “As for Astor, he's clearly a genius. His music affects people quite profoundly. But as a human being he was flawed—and we're still accountable for our choices no matter what kind of genius we may possess.”
Tuesday, July 30, 2019 at 8pm & Wednesday, July 31, 2019 at 8pm
The Appel Room
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
Broadway at 60th Street
New York, NY 10023
Tickets: $80, but $70 for City Guide readers with code CITYPIZAZZ70 ($15 student tickets available day of show)
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