Astor Piazzolla
Tango: Zero Hour

This latest work by the man who reinvented modern tango, breathing new life and expressiveness into it, begins amid market noises and "healthy vitality." More than a regular album of songs, it is a true summa of the artistic (and human) journey of this artist, who for years was accused of "betrayal" by the more conservative movement of "classical Argentine tango." An artist who has managed to combine the "emotional tension" of the traditional tango language with the expressive capability of new European sounds derived from "rock" (although the word is slightly out of place despite being understood in its "break" exception) and the compositional complexity of certain experimental jazz.

An album that lets you breathe deeply the suffering and melancholic air of an author at the peak of his artistic journey. The ongoing dance between life and death is the main theme of the album, prophetically called "Ora Zero" (like a desire to break down the genre barriers to reclaim a "borderless" music like his own and start anew without strength limitations). An album imbued with poignant beauty and melancholic passion that infiltrates like an intangible breeze under the skin and transports us to sonic (and visual) suggestions that are rarely heard in contemporary music (listen to the poetic and suggestive counterpoint between Fernando Suarez's bandoneón and violin with the almost cinematic interlude of a Truffaut film in the piece "Concierto Para Quintetto").

Music that is pure poetry without words, notes that are light and relentless like stabs made with a fencing foil, suggestions of images that "become" sound where everything blends harmoniously creating a world of its own and reconstructing (and revisiting) anew all the melancholic beauty and bitter charm of Modern Tango. But the album is much more. The track "Milonga Loca" introduces us to an eclectic, syncopated, virtuosic Piazzola, constantly searching for expressive modes always on the brink of a modernity never self-serving, striving to recover those unique "visionary" aspects of his style. A memorable record to be enjoyed "with the ears" but also, and above all, through the suggestive scenes that the imagination is necessarily led to create, influenced by so much unexpressed cinematography (I challenge anyone not to "see" with closed eyes a scene of escape, a tormented farewell, or something equally "strong" while listening to a track like "Michelangelo '70"...)

The seductive and irresistibly sexy progression advances stealthily and inexorably with the introductory notes of "Contrabajisimo," a sui generis milonga that intersects the classicism of passages borrowed from Ravel's Bolero to open, almost magically, to moments of serene enchantment midway through the track, only to resume the initial "mad rush" in alternating duets of healthy virtuosity between violin, bandoneon, and the masterful piano of Pablo Ziegler (with Horacio Malvicino on guitar and Hector Console on bass, completing the quintet). With the final "Mamuki," our tango artist bids farewell to the album with 9 minutes of deeply sorrowful accords that tear at the soul even of those most prepared for emotional fluctuations of this magnitude.

An album that ends with a long wail, a final 30-second whistle, the swan song of an artistic personality unique in its genre, who would still have had so much to give to the music of the late century if only he had lived to the present day. For me, THE masterpiece (or at least one of his most mature and complex works ever to emerge from his pen).