Music serves as the soundtrack to our lives; sometimes it sits at the forefront of our attention and at other times it drifts in the background. For musicians at the height of their creative energy, music consistently demands focused attention. They intently listen to recordings, analyzing the artistic process and searching for new musical inspirations. They concentrate upon their own performances with intense attentiveness, keeping their ears wide open and their minds constantly thinking about their music. Their rapt listening sessions push their musicianship onto a higher plane and it makes the soundtrack of their lives much more vivid. Most people outside the performing artist community experience music in a much less active way, but it still makes a strong impact upon their lives. They might use music as background noise, filling the space behind menial chores and helping to alleviate boredom. Music enters their life through the television and movies, filtering through dramatic action and blatant advertisements. It accompanies exercise, long drives, homework, video games, internet surfing, more; whenever the opportunity arises, music becomes a part of their life journey, attaching itself to their consciousness like super glue. While both of these experiences value music, they share one special bond - they permanently embed vivid musical sound bytes in a person’s mind

Bassist Pablo Aslan experienced music in both these ways as a young musician, but the genre that would become his passion sat quietly in the background. Growing up in Buenos Aires during the seventies, Aslan showed early potential as an active music participant, grabbing any musical opportunity enthusiastically. Access to recordings was limited and live musicians rarely visited from outside Argentina, but Aslan grabbed what he could get. His parents owned a diverse collection of recordings, which Aslan investigated, and friends served as good sources of musical inspiration. Through all of this, traditional tango sat in the background, looking like the music of another generation. Although Aslan heard this music, it wasn’t the voice of his generation and it wasn’t at the forefront of his attention. Other music was on his mind though, and as Aslan grew, he continued on a steady course towards a career in music. This path led him out of Argentina, towards the States and a collegiate music education. He studied on both coasts, discovering both jazz and classical music, and eventually becoming an in-demand bassist. While attending graduate school in Los Angeles, Aslan finally came full circle and discovered a strong connection to tango. This bond laid the foundation for his future career as a professional and defined his artistic direction for years to come.

Now a leader in the tango jazz field, Aslan has taken bold strides in this arm of the Latin Jazz world. There was a myriad of experiences that led to that point though, and every story has a starting point. In the first piece of our three-part interview with Pablo Aslan, we look at his early musical development and the journey that led him back to tango.

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LATIN JAZZ CORNER: You grew up in Buenos Aires in the seventies, what got you interested in music initially?

PABLO ASLAN: I’m just viscerally attracted to music. I was one of those kids that liked to listen to music. Somehow I started to seek out instruments. My sisters were starting guitar; I wasn’t, but they were around. Little by little, I started going to concerts and started becoming fascinated by music. Just by myself - I wasn’t from one of those families where you got piano lessons or anything like that. I just started seeking out teachers and then started the guitar and the electric bass. Then I started playing with people - it was a spontaneous combustion type of thing. I have kids now and I make a huge effort to expose them to music, but I never had any of that. It really was spontaneous combustion. The kind of stuff that my parents had in their record collection was good - they had Piazzolla, they had Brazilian music, some jazz and classical music . . . and the Beatles, of course. That was sort of my menu. I was playing and a lot of my good friends were playing near the end of high school. My core group of friends were all in music - either around playing or being fanatical about listening and seeking out recordings. During the seventies in Buenos Aires, it was not easy to get a hold of a lot of the recordings that were out there in the world, so we would make due with what we could. We were always looking to people who traveled to bring records back.

I remember a neighbor of mine had a Berklee School Of Music catalog that he had gotten somehow and that completely turned me on. I realized two or three years before finishing high school that I wanted to do something like that. I wanted to leave Argentina; this was also during the dark years of the dictatorship - there really wasn’t a whole lot for musicians to do if you were serious about studying and really doing it professionally. So, I set my goals around coming up here. I used to get the magazines; I used to have a formal subscription to Downbeat through a local bookshop. I used to get copies of Guitar Player, Musician magazine, and all that stuff; I just really soaked it up. When I finished high school, I was able to come up here and study, which was something that was rather unusual. At that time, the economic policy of the military was that the dollar and the peso were pretty much equal. So it made it possible to come up here. I first did a summer course at Berklee and decided that it was not for me. There was just too much practicing and too much single-mindedness. I really was more of an open-minded and intellectual musician; in general I just didn’t like locking myself up in a three feet by three feet room and practicing. While I was at Berklee, my roommate who was a West Coast guitar player said, “What you want is a liberal arts education.” So I researched that, and it looked good. I knew nothing of how things worked, so I discovered everything as I went. I got accepted to University of California in Santa Cruz. You can kind of see where my head was at - I turned down Berklee to go to Santa Cruz and be a hippy! Before I left Argentina, I had a wonderful composition and harmony teacher who really prepared me, so that when I got to Santa Cruz, I skipped through the first year of theory and such. It wasn’t a great music program, and in hindsight, I almost wished I had gone to Berklee. On the other hand, it was relaxed, I got so much playing experience, I got into the Orchestra thing, and there was so much music that I got to participate in by being one of the very few bass players. I guess my decision to go to the West Coast and do it that way shaped where I’m at today.

LJC: The seventies was not really a great era for tango in Argentina. Was that something that you were interested in during your younger days that you took to Santa Cruz when you left?

PA: It was Piazzolla really; Piazzolla was very much present during that time. People will say that’s not tango, it’s something else, but it’s not just marginal. Piazzolla was part of our record collections. We went crazy over Piazzolla just like we went crazy of Gismonti or John Coltrane. In terms of tango, you are very much right, they were not good years. You would see it in T.V. in black and white and it was all these old guys basically. It was around - you’d hear it on the radio, in the taxi, or at the newsstand. It was everywhere; but it was just this old black and white thing. When I left for the States, I definitely had my Piazzolla cassettes. Then I started doing radio; I had a show on a free form community station. That’s when I started playing some more classic tango stuff, on that show. I had a few LPs that I must have picked up when I went back home. Little by little I became more interested in it. I remember back at Santa Cruz at one point, someone in the opera department was putting together a Latin American show, so I played bass and wrote some tango arrangements. Somehow it was part of my consciousness, but like I said, I think that Piazzolla was mainly all my contact with the music until much later.

LJC: When you were at Santa Cruz, were you playing jazz? And how did the jump to Los Angeles work out?

PA: In Santa Cruz, I was basically playing jazz. I immediately hooked up with a group of people - Graham Connah, Ben Goldberg, all the guys on the scene out there now. Graham was my roommate - we would get up at 8 in the morning and listen to Charlie Parker and Cecil Taylor. For an Argentine immigrant, it was quite an education. He would drag me over to the practice room, open up the Real Book, and say, “Let’s play this.” I played in a Latin Jazz trio with a guitar player and drums; we’d play at all the coffee shops on campus and started getting some work around town. The most important lesson at Berklee happened the second or third day there - I was practicing and someone knocked on the door and said, “Come on, I’m having a session.” So I went in there and this clarinet player had recruited quite a big band, he must have had his own arrangements. He got me to play bass, put a chart in front of me, and it was probably the first time that I had seen a chart. I saw a whole measure C major and then a whole measure of F major. There was a guy next to me, so I said, “O.K., this is measure of four, so I play C and count to four and then I go to F?” And he said, “Yes.” That was the most important lesson that I got, because I could read chord charts then! From there, I arrived in Santa Cruz and discovered the standards. But it took me a while to realize that none that really meant much to me. It wasn’t like I grew up listening to this stuff and now I was playing it. It was like, now there’s a song called “All The Things You Are,” and I play it almost every day for some reason. It was fun, it was fascinating, and I was learning an enormous amount from doing that; still, it was not my music, it was something else.

My studies were more towards the classical. My teacher was Mel Graves. He was great; he really shaped me up as a bass player. I don’t know if I would be a bass player without him. He really was very serious about me practicing bass - and I finally did! I was a late starter, I’m a small guy, and I had a bigger bass than me. The fact that I was raised in the third world kind of showed. Now I see that the exposure that kids have when they’re in middle school and high school really matters - I had none of that. I caught up with it somewhat. I graduated and I could play the Dragonetti concerto, so I must have spent some time in there practicing. As I was finishing my four years there, I hooked up with the Santa Cruz Symphony and the Monterey Symphony. I was working jazz gigs and I was doing the symphonies. I started to do Christmas music and freelance orchestras around the area, going up to San Jose, over to Gilroy, down to Carmel - doing both classical and jazz. There was also another important teacher, Randy Masters. He came in as the jazz teacher, and he turned us on to Latin music basically. He had his own charts and that’s when I discovered I could read - it was the same type of thing, they put a complex bass line in front of me and it was like, “O.K., that’s one, two, three, and four . . .” It’s funny you know, you do all these years of school, but sometimes you learn everything in the first five minutes when you’re on the spot! So that basically was it - I played quite a bit, I realized I had a facility for it, and I forced myself to practice, and little by little I became a bass player.

When school was over, I heard everyone talking about graduate school. I had no idea what that was, but a friend of mine was going to Cal Arts. I said, “Sign me up.” They gave me a full scholarship to be in the classical department. As it was, I wasn’t ready to go, and I stayed in Santa Cruz another year working in all these symphonies and jazz gigs. The next year, I said, “O.K., I’m ready.” They said, “Well, we don’t have a full scholarship anymore because it’s all based on what we need; we have a half-scholarship.” I said, “O.K.,” and I went down to Cal Arts in kind of miserable conditions. I had to take out loans and I also didn’t have enough money for housing so I was living in a trailer in the parking lot. Being at that school as a classical player was very frustrating because Charlie Haden was there and that was one of my all-time heroes. At the time when Charlie came in to teach this ensemble class, I had to be at orchestra. It just wasn’t working out for me, so I only spent a year there. Then I had hooked up with Lalo Schifrin; Lalo had a youth orchestra that he was directing through Young Musician’s Foundation. Even in my last year at Santa Cruz, I was commuting to Los Angeles to do rehearsals. When I found the opportunity, I said, “I’ve got to do this, no matter what.” I was driving down to L.A., sometimes sleeping in the car, to do these rehearsals and concerts with them. So when I moved to L.A., I was hooked up already with that scene. I also started playing shows, theater, and things like that.

When I decided to leave Cal Arts, I discovered tango, full blown. It was the summer right after that year at Cal Arts - I got a job playing in a show at the Roosevelt Hotel there in Hollywood. I was working in the second floor lounge which had been reconditioned as a set; there were several shows a week. I remember on a Sunday, between the matinee and the evening, going down to the lobby. Right next to the lobby was another big room, so I peeked my head in. There was a trio playing tango and a whole bunch of people dancing. The trio was piano, bass, and bandoneon. The bassist was playing upright bass; he was a classical guy that I ended up meeting many years later. I said, “That’s my gig; that sounds good, playing tango gigs.” There was nothing I could do, but the obsession was there. Then I had a second stroke of luck - when Tango Argentina the show was in L.A., I went to see the show, saw the bass player, and hung out with him. I realized that there was a huge thing for me there and it kind of brought everything around. It was played with the bow, it was popular music, but it was elaborate. Through listening and understanding Piazzolla and the Brazilians - especially Gismonti and those guys - I realized I was after some sort of arty Latin outlet for myself that incorporated the sophistication of all these musics. Also around the time that I was still at Cal Arts, Charlie Haden did some work with Dino Saluzzi. They were basically hanging out at Cal Arts, and I was hanging out with Dino. I heard every gig that they did - they played as a duo, bandoneon and bass, and it just flipped me out.

Then the last stroke of luck - the year after I left Cal Arts, I was living in L.A., and my neighbor who was living two doors down was this guy, Norman Brown. He was a guitar player, who since then has become quite popular. He saw me hauling my bass, and I saw him hauling his guitar. So finally one day, he came over and we played together. He invited me to come play at Donte’s, which was a club down there. Nothing came of it; I wasn’t a great jazz player, and this guy was really great. But I got offstage from playing a few duets with him and there were these guys there speaking Spanish - Argentine Spanish. We started talking and the guy said, “I own a tango club.” The other guy said, “I play the bandoneon at the tango club.” I said, “What?!?” So I showed up that weekend and they had this American bass player who didn’t know anything about tango. I didn’t know a whole lot, but I had the classical training and I was very eager to get in there. When they realized it, they gave me the gig, and that was the beginning. We were working the old fashioned way - three or four nights a week for years. That’s how I learned. They wrote some of these tangos down on napkins, and singers would come every weekend. I was serious enough, and I knew enough about how to learn music that if I didn’t know a tune, I would make it my business during the week to learn it. So I started learning the repertoire. The fact that different singers would come every week meant that there was more and more to learn. I started listening to different recordings, started to understand the history, and it just took off from there.

I eventually ended up going to UCLA, basically because I discovered that I could get paid to go to graduate school. I was the only graduate bass player . . . I was pretty much the only bass player. They needed me - as a graduate student, I wasn’t obligated to be in the orchestra, so the orchestra director gave me a teaching assistantship so that I would be assistant manager. I got paid to do that, I got paid to teach strings to education majors, and I got a scholarship. I was working just about every night, I had subsidized student housing, I was on scholarship, and I was going to graduate school. So it was great. The only conflict there was that my teacher wanted me to be a classical player, the same thing as at Cal Arts. I was working in a lot of orchestras in the area, but that was not my career. Just like at Cal Arts, I wasn’t able to put my idea of what I wanted to do into the curriculum. Ideally, I would have been studying composition, playing in some ensembles, and practicing the bass - but not necessarily to be an orchestra guy. At UCLA at least I was getting paid to be there!

The library had an enormous amount of tango books, so I read everything. I started collecting recordings, and when I went down to Argentina, much to everyone’s surprise, I was Mr. Tango Guy. This was back in the eighties - my parents were like, “What? You left for Santa Cruz and now you come back talking about tango all the time?” This was 1986 or ‘87. By the time that I got done at UCLA, my senior graduate recital was basically bringing in my guys from the tango clubs were I was working, putting together that with saxophone player Kim Richmond, and doing some improvising. I already had a germ of the work that I’m doing now which is to open up some stuff for solos and featuring the bass even more. But L.A. was incredible - I got to play with Lalo Schifrin and I also got to play in the Hollywood Studios. I was playing in some of the better symphonies, I was playing Latin Jazz with Bobby Matos and his band, and I was doing the tango thing three or four nights a week . . . I’m glad that I made that move. And literally, I went to L.A. because a friend of mine was going to graduate school and I said, “That’s what I’m supposed to do now. Let’s do that.” It was never part of a plan; I just kind of left home and never looked back.

LJC: I’ve heard about the master’s thesis that you put together while you were down in L.A., what did you do for your thesis?

PA: I just basically wanted to put the chronology together for myself. I called it something like Stylistic Evolution And Innovation. In the history of jazz, you can see who the players and the bands that were most influential in advancing the language; I wanted to do sort of the same thing for tango. This guy came, and then this guy came and built on it - like that until you get to Piazzolla. Basically it was condensing all those books into a chronological and evolutionary narrative. Just like you have that in jazz - first there was Louis Armstrong and then there was Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and so forth. That was the basic idea. It’s a modest work. It’s funny; there’s so little work out there that I still get requests for copies of it. I’m disowning it now, because I’ve learned so much since then! The reason why that paper is still in circulation is because there’s not a whole lot out there - I wish there was and that my paper wasn’t as well known. It was kind of a youthful indiscretion. I haven’t read it in a while, and I didn’t know as much as I do now. It certainly set the foundation for all the scholarly work that I’ve done since then. Even though I haven’t written a whole lot, I have an enormous amount of books and recordings. I’ve taught a lot of classes. Every time I travel to Argentina, I build up my record collection so that I would hear all these things that I was reading about; but I’ve never gone back and put it all together to be another book with that idea - an evolutionary chronology.

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Make sure that you check out Part Two of our conversation with tango jazz bassist Pablo Aslan. We talk to Aslan about his move to New York, his early tango groups, and his first experiments with tango jazz. Check it out HERE.

Also jump over to Part Three of our discussion with Aslan where we look into Tango Grill, playing “a la parrila,” and the future of tango jazz. Check it out HERE.
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Check Out These Related Posts:
Latin Jazz Conversations: Mark Weinstein (Part 1)
Weekly Latin Jazz Video Fix: Pablo Aslan
Latin Jazz Conversations: Poncho Sanchez (Part 1)
Weekly Latin Jazz Video Fix: Astor Piazzolla

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