Horacio Malvecino – Tango and Jazz
Today you will hear an extraordinary edition of our podcast series The Masters of Music Count! Very welcome! On March 11, 2021, Astor Piazzolla would have turned one hundred years old. To celebrate this anniversary, we published some interviews with musicians who worked closely with the inventor of Tango Nuevo.
First of all, we introduce guitarist Horacio Malvicino. He was a close confidant of this great bandoneonist and composer from 1954 until Piazzolla’s death in 1992.
Horacio Malvicino was born on October 20, 1929 in Concordia, province of Entre Ríos. At the age of 19 he moved to Buenos Aires. Very soon he joined the Argentine bebop scene that met at the Bop Club Argentino in Buenos Aires.
Malvicino was one of the few of his generation who played the electric guitar. Every Monday night I would improvise at the Bop Club Argentino with Gato Barbieri, Lalo Schifrin and other jazz musicians.
From his youth in New York Astor Piazzolla loved jazz. He regularly came to listen to the Jam Sessions at the Bop Club Argentino. There he met Horacio Malvicino
When Piazzolla founded the Octeto Buenos Aires in 1954, he hired Malvicino along with Enrique Francini and Leopoldo Federico among others.
At that time, the electric guitar was a novelty and a provocation for the traditional tango scene. Piazzolla also allowed Malvicino to improvise. But I didn’t have to improvise on jazz scales, but use rhythms and other stylistic elements of traditional Tango for this.
What Horacio Malvicino told me in December 1998 about his friendship and collaboration with Astor Piazzolla was so exciting that I would like to share this interview with you! Have fun!
Purchase the full transcript of the interview
WIKIPEDIA
In 1964 it was published Horacio Malvicino Jazz Quinteto, album recorded by the Melopea label in the auditorium of the Radio Ciudad de Buenos Aires (where the most representative figures of different genres also played, and the jazz pianist Enrique also played there. Monkey Villegas, the Ábalos Brothers (folklore) and the tango pianist Horacio Salgán, among others.
They were short, fifteen-minute auditions, but they had an impressive audience. […] It was all totally improvised, as befits jazz. […] It was so lovely to live the encounters with that group! It was like playing in front of the national team. We knew each other so much that just by looking at each other we already knew what was going to happen. Needless to say, the recording is made with another technology, it was recorded with a single microphone and the technician had to take into account the location of all the instruments. And everything was going directly, without prior tests.
In Concordia, where he lived until he was 18, a collector friend introduced him to the music of Belgian gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) and African-American guitarist Charlie Christian (1916-1942). When he arrived in Buenos Aires he became fascinated with the so-called bopper movement, and together with musicians such as Gato Barbieri, Lalo Schifrin and the Monkey Villegas worshipped him at the Bop Club (in the Congreso neighborhood), the place where the first attempts to develop modern jazz in Argentina were born.
I had the satisfaction that the Tano [Piazzolla] called me every time it occurred to him. I have been in and out of their tango groups ten times. But I was the electric guitar: the cursed object within tango. At that time he received threats every day. Phone calls, anonymous, tomatazos, guys who me on the street, without much metaphor: Either you leave Piazzolla or we blow you up. […] I spent my life next to Piazzolla and his wonderful influence that I’m not going to leave just like that.2
In Piazzolla’s memoir he compiled Natalio Gorin reads the opinion of the bandoneonist about Horacio Malvicino: «He is the guitarist who best understood everything I wrote, perhaps because he is the most tango player of the three» (the other two guitarists were Cacho Tirao and Oscar López Ruiz).
Parallel to his career as a guitarist, under the pseudonym of Alain Debray recorded numerous LP albums as a conductor of light music orchestras (easy-listening) composed of session musicians, such as the so-called Des Champs-Elysées .
Among these albums are some of tangos performed “a la europea” in which solo accordion was included instead of bandoneon. Contrary to expectations, these versions were bestsellers in Argentina and Uruguay.
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