Tango, Tragedia, Comedia, Quilombo*

Formative-album replay: Astor Piazzolla and his Quinteto Nuevo Tango, Tango: Zero Hour. What does time sound like? I’m not talking about meter or tempo but the sense of age, of lived experience, you can palpably hear in some music, whether it’s actually old, like folk music, or played by veteran artists, like Buena Vista Social Club or Johnny Cash in his Rick Rubin sessions. Some music’s breadth has a spatial or physical quality, like it plumbs deep into or shoots up from the earth—I think variously of Tuvan throat singers, Chris Squire’s bass, Tito Puente’s timbales, Joni Mitchell’s piano—while other music somehow suggests to me an expanse of years, of calendar pages flying off the wall. I hear it in Hank Williams’ tenor, in Ry Cooder’s guitar, in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s wail, in Rhiannon Giddens’s fiddle, in many (but not all) of Dylan’s songs. (Hendrix’s guitar also seems to convey a stretch of time, but in his case it points forward into the future rather than back into the past.)

The most intoxicatingly effective time machine I know, though, is Tango: Zero Hour, a 1986 masterpiece by Argentina’s great composer/bandoneonist, recording with the “new tango” quintet that was no longer so new (he’d been playing with them for decades). It’s not like this is a TARDIS delivering you to a specific other place or time (though it's certainly not hard to imagine a few); it’s more a mechanism that puts you inside of time somehow, like the interior of the biggest, jankiest old clock you can imagine, something Tinguely could have designed.

And all the parts are moving in sharp but subtle counterpoint, from the stop-start grind of “Tanguedia III” to the wheezing, anguished murmurs of “Mumuki.” I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a band that sounded more simpatico, or a studio album that sounded more live, as the musicians alternately purr and plough through jams long and short, mostly long, with paradoxical precision and looseness, as if they could play anything but are happily lashed to the interlocking gears of the music’s inexorable clockwork. Every instrument takes the lead at various points, and few disappear for long, from Fernando Suarez Paz’s keening violin to Horacio Malvicino’s muted but muscular jazz guitar, from Héctor Console’s serpentine bass to Pablo Ziegler’s tectonic piano, and of course Piazzolla’s monster bandoneon, the band’s main percussion instrument (for a record this propulsive, it is startling to realize that there is no credited percussion player).

Ziegler put it better than I can in naming exactly what comes through this album’s grooves:

By the time we recorded Zero Hour we knew each other by smell, and something had taken shape well beyond the scores. We all got along very well. We were very tight personally, we loved the music, and Astor loved the group. He loved his musicians. That’s what you hear. That and that stuff in the cracks of the music, the passion, the grime that came to the surface over years of playing together.

Passion and tenderness and grime—it’s all there, and it’s all the unfakeable residue of time spent breathing the same air and harmonizing a group of brains and bodies into a single music-making chimera. Piazzolla’s back catalogue has no shortage of gems—I especially relish this intense burst from an odd 1965 record he made with Jorge Luis Borges. But by the 1980s the often brash glint of his earlier music acquired the warm glow of a tarnished, scratched, but still brilliant old timepiece.

*These are the words of the chant that opens the record.