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Traces of tango
Playing Astor Piazzolla

BY JOSH KUN

Astor Piazzolla played the bandoneón, a square squeezebox that bore traces of two squeezeboxes that came before it, the concertina and the accordion. The accordion itself bore traces of the harmonica, but instead of lips being placed on metal, one hand played a row of buttons while the other opened and closed a set of bellows that pushed air through tuned reeds. The mouth was replaced with the chest and stomach, the head with the body, the throat with lungs and fingers. "The thing breathes," conjunto accordionist Steve Jordan once said. "It breathes just like we do."

When the accordion breathes, each button is a chord. When the bandoneón breathes, each button is two notes: one for the air being pushed in, one for the air being pulled out. The blurred double-note breath of the bandoneón is synonymous with Argentinian tango, which is to say that its inhaling and exhaling are synonymous with what tango has so frequently given voice to since the late 1800s: the recollection of bygone eras and the remembrance of what has been lost to time. Tangos like "Cuando tallan los recuerdos" and "Alma de bandoneón" sing of the bandoneón as a squeezebox that squeezes memory, an instrument of traces that plays memory by breathing the past into a present of solitude and melancholy. In his poem "The Tango," Argentina’s greatest modern writer, Jorge Luis Borges (whose lyrics appear in a number of Piazzolla tangos), described the tango as a music of preservation, where the tough knife-fighting men who immigrated to lower-class Buenos Aires neighborhoods in the late 19th century are kept alive in melody "beyond time and misshapen Death." Tango songwriter Enrique Cadicamo once compared the bandoneón to a funeral, good only for making people cry.

Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer’s tribute to Piazzolla — who himself became part of tango memory when he died of a stroke, in 1991 — is fittingly titled Tracing Astor (Nonesuch). Kremer "traces" Piazzolla in that he re-creates him without reproducing him, making music that is Piazzolla without Piazzolla, an outline of him, a sketch, a skeleton. His tracing of Piazzolla in turn produces traces of Piazzolla, an album full of songs written by Piazzolla that are no longer wholly his, songs that now bear his resemblance but do not clearly show his face. For starters, there is no bandoneón on Tracing Astor, and there are none of Piazzolla’s trademark staccato swoons, only violins, cellos, and violas that touch down on the melancholic elegance and dapper violence his music could achieve but mainly linger above it in warm lullabies and jagged, gorgeous plucks and screeches. The closest we ever get to a Piazzolla who is not a trace is the poet Horacio Ferrer, Piazzolla’s most famous collaborator, who shows up to revisit the duo’s classic "Chiquilín de Bachín."

The rest of Tracing Astor is less interested in actuality. It’s music conceptualized and arranged for evocation, music meant to resurrect the past without retaining it. This is precisely what separates it from another Piazzolla tribute album, Sergio & Adair Assad’s deferential dual-guitar homage Sergio & Adair Assad Play Piazzolla (Nonesuch), which, as graceful and skilled as it is, colors in Piazzolla instead of tracing him.

By making music that treats Piazzolla as a trace (and not, say, as a mentor or a legend or a real person) Kremer pulls off a lesson in deconstruction tango, exemplifying in a series of accessible, nourishing performances what European philosophers like Emanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have long struggled to communicate in their writings on identity and language. Says Kremer’s Piazzolla: the past can appear in the present but only as a trace. Say Kremer’s strings: we are the trace that makes the past here but not present; we make the past have meaning, but we do not make it reappear.

One of Piazzolla’s collaborations with Borges, "Alguien le dice al tango," describes the difference between a man and a tango. A man must deal with death and become familiar with the art of memory, whereas the tango is immortal and can afford to look ahead always. "So many things have happened to us both," Borges tells the tango that comes from Piazzolla’s bandoneón. "The departures and the weight of loving and not being loved. I will have died and you will continue shoring in our life. Buenos Aires does not forget you, tango who was and who will be." Kremer understands this difference between mortal man and immortal music. On Tracing Astor, Piazzolla’s tangos still belong to both the "was" and the "will be," whereas Piazzolla himself is all "was," all memory, traced into a present that will someday be gone too.

Issue Date: November 29 - December 6, 2001

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