Tango: Zero Hour

Astor Piazzolla

album cover

Music for the Hours Between Midnight and Dawn

When the Argentine composer and master of the accordion-like bandoneón Astor Piazzolla looked back on his career, which he'd devoted to a radical re-imagining of his country's staid ceremonial tango, he focused on this 1986 project with his New Tango Quintet. "This is absolutely the greatest record I've made in my entire life," the man sometimes referred to as the Argentine Duke Ellington said. "We gave our souls to [it]."

Through Piazzolla's trembling and lamenting melodies, these five musicians share what they know about life. They spin ordinary lines into great romantic swirls that are easygoing and generous, and not always tethered to tango. They're secret sharers, these players, and they slip their wisdom into your back pocket without your even knowing. Every melody depends on soul; it's audible in the nose-diving violin glissandos and the promenading beats, in the way forward-marching pulses melt into stillborn softness, and in Piazzolla's upper register, which seems forever on the verge of tears.

Piazzolla composed a lot of music in his nearly fifty-year career. Some of it was sultry bordering on bawdy, some distinguished by intricate ensemble passages, some devoted to sad laments over lost youth. Tango: Zero Hour distills all of Piazzolla's compositional tricks into music that is achingly beautiful and totally demanding, equally dependent on the spring-loaded precision of his band and pure emotion. Moving as one, the ensemble follows Piazzolla past the notes on the paper and into the magic hours between midnight and dawn, where they can freely give their souls.

Genre: World, Argentina
Released: 1986, American Clavé (Reissued 1998, Nonesuch)
Key Tracks: "Milonga del Angel," "Michelangelo '70"
Catalog Choice: The Vienna Concert
Next Stop: Dino Saluzzi: Rios (with David Samuels)
Book Pages: 599–600

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