Piazzolla was not the only tango composer to stretch the boundaries of the genre. Osvaldo Pugliese never abandoned the classic tango but injected a seismic shock into the music when his trademark repetitive rhythmic themes first appeared, most noticeably in the classic La Yumba. While Pugliese is a giant in the pantheon of tango composers and focused on his own music, he did also play and record some of Piazzolla's compositions including Adios Nonino, Marrón y azul, Verano porteño and today's featured video, Zum. In each case, Pugliese arranged the music to fit his signature sound. Piazzolla composed Zum in 1970 or 71 and it is one of the first of his pieces to signal the development of nuevo tango. Pugliese's arrangement and recording of the piece appeared in 1973. While Pugliese was one of the earliest of the traditional tango composers to recognize the importance of Piazzolla, the two did not appear on stage together until 1989 as discussed in a previous post in this blog.
Today's video features Sexteto Abran Cancha, a very talented group from Mar del Plata (birthplace of Piazzolla) which is recreating authentic sounding performances of many of the classic tango bands of the 40's and 50's. Members of the group are Marcos Peruzzo and Tomás Uriaguereca on bandoneón, Pablo Albornoz and Guillermo Olguin on violin, Sebastián Sartal on contrabass and Nicolás Dorzi on piano. They have four other videos available on this YouTube channel - every one of them is excellent. If you enjoy classic canyengue tango, watch them.
As a piece of related trivia, the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, reports that Piazzolla owned a dog named Zum. The music preceded the dog.
If the video does not appear below, click here.
To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.
No comments:
Post a Comment