1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 607. Astor Piazzolla and Gary Burton – The New Tango (1987)

 

This is the first album in the list, remarkably, that doesn’t have a Wikipedia page for it. Some have had mere stubs, admittedly, but this one links to the “Nuevo Tango” musical movement itself, and I had to glean details from looking up the title performers instead. I also found a few comments from others using the “1001 Albums Generator” and there were a lot of quite shallow rejections of it, which was amusing. 

Piazolla is, was, one of the foremost figures in Argentina’s Neuvo Tango movement, which takes tango and blends in jazz and classical elements. He also plays the bandoneon, a South American variant accordion, which on this album he does largely in the background – I think he’s probably the bandleader as well, for a quintet of musicians that he has played with for decades.  

The Nuevo Tango isn’t, by 1987, that nuevo at all really, having been around since the 1950s. I get the impression that Piazolla managed to keep it going through the Junta, and here he and his quintet team up with American vibrophone player Burton at the Montreaux Festival – yes, this is a live performance. 

Now, thanks to watching Strictly Come Dancing (aka Dancing with the Stars in other countries) I’m familiar with the Argentine Tango as a dance – with its kicks and lifts and ochos, it’s both combative and sultry, like the “enemies to lovers” trope in dance form. But none of the music on here felt the least bit like you could do a dance like that to it.  

Operation Tango has passages in it that are more waltz-like, but the bits in between, perhaps, could be tango-like. And the Nuevo Tango track itself is frenetic and stressful, with Burton hammering away on the vibes as if Saint-Saen's fossils were attacking like a horde of undead. In some ways it wasn’t far off King Crimson’s Larks Tongues In Aspic, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as this album has the same blend of jazz and classical elements as King Crimson (which, as I recall, borrowed from Eastern European composers).  

Burton, like Piazzola varies in how prominent he features within a track; he’s most in the foreground in (obviously) Vibraphonissimo, and in the track Nuevo Tango. He apparently was a pioneer of the playing style of using two hammers in each hand, which you see pretty much every percussionist use these days (Evelyn Glennie, for example).  

It’s nice to get something a bit different, both a return to jazz elements (although this one felt closer to classical than jazz) and music from outside the Anglophone world. I didn’t hate it as much as some of the commentors; it’s not like being stuck on hold or in an elevator for hours (that’s bossa nova anyway) as some wrote, but I can appreciate it’s a bit of a curve-ball. Is it the best example of nuevo tango to be found? I’d suspect not. 

2025 Winner, footballer Kaz Carney and her partner Carlos, with their Peaky Blinders inspired Argentine tango to Nick Cave. It was bloody good.