Jazz Tango (Zoho Music)
Pablo Ziegler Trio
Released May 2017
Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album 2018
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lAN0bd9Z_fcUld6KERIV6mi-EPLRRCS0A
Spotify:
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About:
Latin GRAMMY
Award winning composer, arranger, and virtuoso pianist Pablo Ziegler is the
world’s foremost practitioner and exponent of the Nuevo Tango musical form,
having learned its mysteries and nuances from the source. In the 1950s, the
legendary Astor Piazzolla began infusing the firmly entrenched, classic tango
style of the day with new harmonic and melodic sensibilities, as well as
incorporating modern instruments into the traditional tango ensemble, and thus
was gradually born what became known as Nuevo Tango. In 1978, the maestro hired
fellow Argentinian Ziegler as his regular pianist, who picked up the Nuevo
Tango torch when Piazzolla retired eleven years later and has carried it
without abandon ever since, while at the same time contemporizing the genre by
adding his own jazz and improvisational touches. While Ziegler may have started
his career as one of Piazolla’s acolytes, he has become one of the leading
lights of this art from – a veritable grandmaster. Quite simply, there is
nobody like Ziegler. He is in a league by himself.
As a pianist, Ziegler’s unique style and broad range have led to comparisons
with the disparate likes of Vladimir Horowitz and Bill Evans—no surprise given
that Ziegler began creating colorful jazz arrangements for classical music when
he was only eighteen. You can hear the classical influence quite clearly in all
of his work, though in keeping with the rhythmic requirements of Nuevo Tango,
he just as clearly plays the piano like the percussion instrument that it is.
That he can navigate the classical and jazz worlds so seamlessly is a demonstration
of how Ziegler is able to absorb material from multiple sources and create
something wholly new.
Since 1990, Ziegler has appeared as guest soloist in numerous orchestras around
the globe. Two stirring examples have been released on CD by the ZOHO label:
Amsterdam Meets new Tango with the Metropole Orkest, Amsterdam (ZOHO ZM 201307)
in 2013, and Sax To Tango, his collaboration with saxophonist Julio Botti and
the University of Southern Denmark Symphony Orchestra (ZOHO ZM 201607) in 2016.
Both of these albums have achieved nominations in the Tango category at the
Latin Grammys, as have Ziegler’s other three ZOHO releases as a leader or
collaborator with Julio Botti. His first ZOHO CD release Bajo Cero (ZOHO ZM
200504) even won the Tango category Latin Grammy in 2005!
Ziegler has continuously explored the musical contours of traditional, Nuevo,
and Neo tango forms, recording and touring internationally with his own duo,
trio, quartet, and quintet ensembles. He has performed this type of music in almost
every conceivable format, combination, and permutation. Suffice it to say that
there is nobody on the planet more artistically attuned to tango as a musical
style than Pablo Ziegler, and this live trio album, featuring Hector Del Curto
on the bandoneon—the accordion variant made famous by Piazzolla—and Claudio
Ragazzi on guitar, reveals the many faces of the genre in exquisite detail.
With its brisk and vigorous tempo and cascading melodic structure, the opening
track Michelangelo 70, composed by Piazzolla, provides an exhilarating and
breathless introduction to the Nuevo Tango sound. The title pays twin homage to
the famous Michelangelo tango club in Buenos Aires, where so much of the
genre’s history was written, and to the year 1970, when Piazzolla decided to
leave for Europe. It’s as if Ziegler is inviting us back in time, into a
once-hopping club, in which he will write the next chapter of Nuevo Tango that
we hear so lushly rendered on this album. The opening track sets the frame of
what’s to come: thoughtful compositions performed with blinding talent. There
is a word for Ziegler’s music: wow.
La Fundición or “The Foundry,” is a Ziegler original that he describes as “the
dissolution of metals expressed by the fusion of music,” and indeed, it instantly
and dramatically conjures up the mechanized heartbeat of a factory full of
pounding machinery. The repetitive and building lines undulate from pianissimo
to fortissimo, tugging relentlessly, until a space opens up for an elegant
piano solo evoked by Ziegler’s magical touch.
The wistful, stately, and haunting Milonga del Adiós is Ziegler’s own musical farewell to Piazzolla, composed shortly after the maestro’s death. It’s both searing and enchanting, capturing Ziegler’s affection towards the late great maestro. Buenos Aires Report, also composed by Ziegler, is an impressionistic tango riff on a news report emanating from the chaotic urban soul of the city. The pulsing left hand line conveys the frenetic and all-consuming energy found across the sprawling metropolis of this great Latin American city.
Ziegler’s twinkling piano solo radiates beautifully through a higher register. Blues Porteño demonstrates the adaptability of Nuevo Tango, as well as the impressive ease with which Ziegler straddles two distinct musical styles while remaining true to both. While this composition may be slower and calmer, it’s no less lively, stirring blues tonalities with powerful affect and ardent emotions.
Fuga y Misterio, a Piazzolla composition from his epic tango opera “Maria de Buenos Aires,” is both a musical episode in the original work and a subtle acknowledgment by Piazzolla of the contrapuntal debt of gratitude he owed to Johann Sebastian Bach. Ziegler’s Elegante Canyenguito playfully invokes the image of a nattily dressed, old school tango aficionado striding with confidence toward the dance floor and letting loose to much fanfare. On La Rayuela, Ziegler uses milonga, a proto-tango musical style first popularized in the 1870s, to express the rhythmic essence of hopscotch, with breathtaking results. Muchacha de Boedo is another intensely atmospheric cultural portrait, this time of a typical young lady from the Boedo neighborhood in Buenos Aires—a tango epicenter—strolling along its tree-lined streets.
The album concludes, appropriately enough, with Piazzolla’s classic Libertango which symbolized his breaking free from the structural confines of traditional tango and luxuriating in the greater rhythmic and melodic freedom of Nuevo Tango. While this song is the most recognized tango tune in the world, Ziegler always begins his performances of this classic with a unique introduction in which he puts his own stamp. By the time the melody kicks in, you almost forget you are listening to such a foundational song to tango tradition. This song captures the very soul of the genre, and the recording as a whole is a testament to Pablo Ziegler’s brilliant musicianship and his mastery and broadening of Piazzolla’s musically expansive vision. Ziegler has raised the bar once again with this album, with his own genre-defining compositions and fresh renditions of familiar classics. No doubt, it’s a joy to listen!
Kabir Sehgal (co-producer, Multi-GRAMMY & Latin GRAMMY Award winner)
Track Listing:
1. Michelangelo 70 (Astor Piazzolla) 5:14
2. La Fundición (Pablo Ziegler) 6:36
3. Milonga Del Adiós (Pablo Ziegler) 9:41
4. Buenos Aires Report (Pablo Ziegler) 5:14
5. Blues Porteño (Pablo Ziegler) 7:42
6. Fuga Y Misterio (Astor Piazzolla) 5:32
7. Elegante Canyenguito (Pablo Ziegler) 6:00
8. La Rayuela (Pablo Ziegler) 5:40
9. Muchacha De Boedo (Pablo Ziegler) 9:26
10. Libertango (Astor Piazzolla) 8:54
Personnel:
Pablo Ziegler: piano, compositions, arrangements
Hector Del Curto: bandoneon
Claudio Ragazzi: guitar
Recorded in 2015
Recording and Mastering: Oscar Zambrano
Producer: Kabir Sehgal.
Photography: Melanie Futorian
Package Design: Al Gold
Executive Producer: Joachim “Jochen” Becker
Review:
Jazz
Tango—winner
of the 2018 Grammy for “Best Latin Jazz Album”—is a distillation of
pianist Pablo Ziegler’s vision. Leading a trio of American-based
Argentinians, Ziegler delivers a program that perfectly encapsulates the
titular hybridized form that he knows so well.
This exhilarating outing opens on Nuevo Tango
patriarch Astor Piazzolla’s “Michelangelo 70,” a number
simultaneously referencing a famed Buenos Aires tango club and the composer’s
year of departure for Europe. With some chromatic zest and loads of virtuosic
appeal, it proves to be the perfect introduction to the combined forces of
Ziegler, bandoneon master Hector Del Curto, and guitarist Claudio
Ragazzi. From there, Ziegler introduces
his own work—the machinating “La Fundicion,” a plaintive
“Milongo Del Adios,” the wonderfully frenetic “Buenos Aires
Report,” and a breezy yet noirish “Blues Porteno.” Taken
together, those numbers paint him both as a Piazzolla acolyte and an original.
The second half of the album is bookended by Piazzolla works—the Bach-indebted “Fuga Y Misterio” (from tango operetta Maria de Buenos Aires) at the front end and the immortal “Libertango” at the back—but the compositions at the core belong to the man at the helm of this project. Ziegler’s “Elegante Canyenguito” points toward chic throwback dance-floor allure, this trio playfully bounds about on his milonga-mining “La Rayuela,” and these men paint a pensive portrait of a woman traversing the tango-rich Boeda neighborhood on “Muchacha De Boeda.” After experiencing the programmatically-aligned works of two masters here—one completely present and one no longer with us—the truth stands illuminated. Pablo Ziegler doesn’t merely carry the torch passed to him by Astor Piazzolla; he adds his own breadth of flame to it as well.
Dan Bilawsky (All About Jazz)
