Astor Piazzolla and the memory of an incomparable teacher who did not want to be asked for advice

I write with emotion on the surface and let my heart speak. Since my teenage years, Piazzolla has been the symbol of avant-garde, change, and the future. And now, every day, his music is always a nice antidote against mediocrity.

In 1977, Astor Piazzolla lived in Paris, on the island Saint-Louis, the smallest of the islands of the Seine. Just separated from the city center by a bridge, from which you can almost touch the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral. A quiet and silent place.

There, at number 13 St. Louis St. in Ille, in a house that, like many others in the same street, is a historic monument, Astor was waiting for me with a novelty.

– I just arrived from Milan. I have recorded with Italian musicians. Sit down, listen.

And from the burner appeared the new creations: Tango City, Pia basement-the-ground, Windy, Tangible moderate, Persecution, Song and fugue and Tangible length. But Astor has never been happy.

-It is very good to record and listen to the things I do, but a little bit of nothing more. Right now, it makes me want to do new things. The last thing is not that I look old, but playing the same repertoire after a few months does not entertain me.. I like to change …

We went out, we went through this neighborhood where the weather seemed to have stopped.

They have kept everything the same since the seventeenth century. The house where I lived was a corralón. This street goes from end to end of the island, and has only one direction, in the inhabited corner Georges Pompidou, over there Alain Delon and on the other side, Moustaki.

The area was home to other illustrious presences: the plaques on the walls remind us that Verlaine and Baudelaire They were some of your neighbors. And also the house in which Marie Antoinette She was detained until her execution.

But Astor was excited when we pbaded a small market.

– Look, look in this drawer … Blue Bun apples! Here there are fruits of Argentina …

The most universal of our musicians has initially felt Argentinian.

– Yes, absolutely … It's my biggest pride … for God's sake … I do not know if I'll be good or bad, but I'm an Argentine musician.

In the corner, a long line of people waiting to buy Barthillon, the most famous glacier of Paris. Piazzolla calls her Piazzolla: "They say it's the best ice cream shop in the world, but for me it's the most ridiculous ice cream shop in the world… because they also eat much richer ice cream in Buenos Aires. And I see that here, at the corner, they make
Queues sometimes in the rain, in winter, two or three degrees below zero. And they are not from the other world, they are fruits and they put it as a perfume. But the funny thing is that this glacier is closed in summer … It only opens three days a week and you are told at the door "to try our ice cream at such a time". Otherwise, do not eat ice cream. "

Posterity has dedicated Piazzolla's musical work and his enormous fondness for ice cream. The author of What will come He was a fanatic customer of dulce de leche of a traditional glacier, who is now in the Álvarez Thomas street, in Buenos Aires, includes it as a perfume "Astor"

About What will come: Astor created it with his first quintet in 1960, with a fantastic introduction to Szymsia's violin "Simón" Bajour. What would Astor say to the musicians of today, whom they admire and set as an intractable example? Perhaps something similar to what he said in this Parisian interview.

-The future of creation, the future of new music, is not intuitive. Because the great drama is the intuitive young man who does good and is surrounded by fifteen or twenty people who deify him. Then he says "well, I am a genius and I do not need to study". There is his big mistake. I think that a great intuitive must grasp the intuition, keep it, then, the next day, find a teacher and start studying music.

– Are you still studying?

-Yes, yes, I'm still studying. I study every day. I'm interested in anything new, which is unknown. The life of a creator is also an information and I must inform myself of everything that is going on.

I discovered Astor when I was still in elementary school. At that time, when a boy had a fever, he would go to bed and miss the school. It was glorious for me, because my father brought me the radio, which was called "combined" and whose frequency was no longer used, shortwave. It was used to listen to radio stations from other countries and, in its most developed expression, gave rise to "dixism" (distance D, X incognita). This same thing was replaced first by the Internet, then by apps like TuneIn.

And while listening to the flu wave of my school, I discovered a program broadcast on Saturday night by the international radio station WRUL in New York, with Argentinian speakers. Yago Blbad, Guillermo Caram and Mauricio Rosemberg. The audience was called Tangos from New York and I was very struck by the musical presentation curtain, because it was something that came out of the ordinary. I knew with the time that he was calling My temptation and that the version was of such a … Astor Piazzolla! It was in 1956.

At the age of fourteen, I wrote him a letter. She was received by the then secretary, Víctor Oliveros, the man who knows Piazzolla best in the world. All the writers who wrote about Astor turned to him and by the way they credit it at the beginning of their respective books.

– Astor, look. He's writing a kid. He praises you a lot. And he puts his phone …

When the bell rang from this 60-0648 from my childhood and from the other side The voice of Astor Piazzolla appearedmy father could not believe it.

Then I followed him on Radio Splendid, Calle Uruguay 1237, when he started with his first quintet, in 1960, with Bajour on violin, Jaime Gosis on piano, Kicho Díaz on double bbad and Horacio Malvicino on the guitar. And even though I was a teenager, I was going to listen to it in Jamaica, San Martin Street near Paraguay, a famous night bowling because Brazilian singer Maysa Matarazzo sang there, all jazz musicians from Buenos Aires played and Horacio Salgán also performed. And all the time it lasted, I was used to 676 Tucumán Street, a place that Astor fans have arranged for him.

In 676, Enrique Villegas also played and Joao Gilberto made his debut in Argentina with Os Cariocas; I was there that night and I have the recording. I followed Astor so much and my admiration for him was so strong that I inevitably started working in the newspaper. The world, in the sports section, my boss, the little village, called me Piazzollita.

Víctor Oliveros is a living document of the life and work of Astor Piazzolla. He was first a fan of Astor, then his personal secretary and finally his close friend. All books that have been written about the author of Goodbye Nonino they mention it and thank it for the information provided to the authors. His impressive archive of audios and images he gave in Rosario Carlos Kuri, who is currently preparing a book containing all this material.

Víctor is an inexhaustible source of data and references on Astor. Consider that Rubén Juárez was the favorite singer of the teacher and who always wanted to record with him. And this confirms the veracity of the curious story of the doll of Gardel.

-When Astor met Gardel in New York, he not only made a canill in The day you like me. CAs he spoke English, he accompanied Gardel everywhere, to buy clothes, to do paperwork. And Gardel was going to eat at Astor's, because he loved the pasta that Dona Asunta had prepared, the mother. The father, Don Vicente, took a lot of affection for Gardel. And he gave her a wood carving that he had made himself with the figure of a gaucho. Once, in the 60s, a friend of Piazzolla saw in the stained glbad window of an antiquities store in New York a burned engraving bearing the inscription "Object belonging to an Argentine singer who died in a plane crash ". He did not have the money to buy it and decided to buy it the next day. And when that was, the doll had already been sold…

Like any genius, Astor had no mean terms. One morning, in 1967, I went to his apartment in Callao and Avenida del Libertador. He was smoking his pipe, he was writing arrangementsI had the piano covered with sheet music.

-A shit that Phillips asked me, The history of tango… it's crap.

He came to record two albums of this series, The old guard and The romantic era, with some extraordinary musicians: Osvaldo Manzi on piano, Antonio Agri on violin, Oscar López Ruiz on guitar, Kicho Díaz on double bbad, with the participation of Enrique Mario Francini and Hugo Baralis on violin solos and José Bragato on cello. When it started The modern eraand after recording four tangos (A, Malena, South and Percentage) he quarreled with the directors of the record company and left the project.

He did not like that, he hated this job. However, today is a pleasure to listen to these recordings. Specially The corn, whose arrangement contains a bandoneon song from beginning to end, in one of the most extraordinary solos we can remember with this instrument.

But Piazzolla was like that. Fighter, aggressive, strict. I suffered it in my own flesh when it came to me to say that I loved it. Alberto Castillo.

– Son of a bitch, I left the view, I do not want to see you anymore!

It was not better for a young musician who once approached him respectfully and told him:

-Master, I would like to ask you for advice.

Astor looked at him.

– I do not give advice because the living do not need it and idiots understand us!!!

In these hours, radios and TV will remember Piazzolla.

They will flood us with Libertango and of Goodbye Nonino. It's logical, it will be fine.

Too bad that they ignore everything else from the monumental work of Astor, which includes wonders like setback, Tanguango, Prepare yourselves, To show. Rechecked, Melancholic Buenos Aires, Picbado, Bando, He was armed, Triumphant, Villeguitas o Chau Paris.

But as Astor said, do not give advice.