Sometimes music from our childhood leaves our attention for a while, but it sits in our subconscious, waiting patiently to be rediscovered. We form an unbreakable link with the music that floated around us during our developmental years. Regardless of whether we choose to embrace it or not, we simply can’t escape it – that music is embedded in our lives. When we do grab it, the music becomes our passion and we attempt to capture its pure essence. We sometimes become the staunch traditionalist, holding onto the sounds and ideals that shaped our experience during our early years. When we leave the music in the past and then revisit it years later, we look at it through different eyes. It still holds deep meaning for us, but our perspective becomes skewed by all our new artistic experiences. We may find a place for our childhood music in our lives, but our interpretation looks and sounds very different than the original version. Just as life forces us to grow personally and artistically, the rediscovery of our early musical influences inspire a musical evolution.

By the time Pablo Aslan moved to New York, he had already rediscovered tango and dived headfirst into the style. The music had been a backdrop to Buenos Aires life in the seventies, appearing regularly, but never connecting with Aslan’s generation. He found himself passionately attracted to music though, and the young bassist looked for ways to develop as a professional. Aslan realized that a move to the States held the most potential for musical growth, so he researched college music programs. After a summer course at the Berklee School Of Music, Aslan opted for a liberal arts education and moved to Santa Cruz, California. He developed his orchestral skills in Santa Cruz and dove headfirst into the world of jazz. After graduating from Santa Cruz, Aslan shifted his attention to Southern California, where he continued his studies first at Cal Arts and then at UCLA. While pursuing graduated school, Aslan encountered a number of revelations that brought tango back into the center of his life. He began working consistently on the Los Angeles tango scene, performing traditional tango several nights a week and building his knowledge of repertoire and style. When a grant provided the opportunity for him to live in New York for a few months, he connected with the East Coast tango community and laid the foundation for a permanent move. As Aslan jumped from coast to coast, he carried a distinctly defined devotion to tango in its many forms.

New York served as the stepping-stone that would inspire Aslan to blend tango and jazz with a bold new conviction. In part one of our interview with Aslan, we discussed his early musical development, his experiences on the West Coast, and his discovery of tango. In the second piece of our three-part interview, we look at Aslan’s first collaborations with Raul Juarena in New York, the creation of Avantango, and the musical concept behind Aslan’s second album Buenos Aires Tango Standards.

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LATIN JAZZ CORNER: When did you head out to New York from L.A., and what drove you out there?

PABLO ASLAN: I walked into the music department at UCLA once day and there was this little flyer put up titled “New York Residency Scholarship.” Pia Gilbert, a modern dance composer at Juilliard, who used to be at UCLA, set up this scholarship. She fundraised for one music student and one band student to go to New York and spend a tri-mester there for credit. They gave you $5000 - this was back in the eighties - and they said New York is that way, come back in a few months and tell us about it. New York was always that scary place where all the music happens. I thought it was incredible and I put this proposal together that consisted of checking out the avant-garde. I said, “I’m going to go to The Knitting Factory, and I’m going to go to all these other clubs that I’ve read about.” She bought it; she thought it was a great proposal. So I went to New York to do that. At the same time, I had a contact through my tango buddies with the guys who were working in tango in New York. I spent my nights at The Knitting Factory and I eventually started picking up tango gigs. Instead of staying three months, I stayed six months and laid the foundations for coming back.

When I graduated, I was married to a modern dancer, and she also wanted to check out New York. So we packed up the U-Haul, attached it to the back of the car with the bass and the cat, and left. The funny thing is, I was working every night as a tango player, and I hadn’t been able to find a sub. So I packed the car, the cat, and the bass in the U-Haul, I went and played a gig at the restaurant where I was working, and then I drove off into the desert. I worked until the last minute when I was in L.A. We drove across the country, came here, and when I got here, I had my tango connections. Through them, I also started working as a Latin Pop musician in restaurants and things. It was incredible if you think of how hard it is to move to New York and work. It was still the day when you could have gigs, and I was working three or four nights a week at a Latin restaurant accompanying singers and then also in the tango scene. New York is New York - it’s something that at some point every musician should consider. Whether you can do it or not, even for a few months . . . Once again, I never looked back, I had no idea. I just wanted to be where things were for as long as I could hang on.

LJC: When you were out there, one of the first groups that you put together was The New York Tango Trio with Raul Juarena - how did that group come together?

PA: Well actually, there was something before that. I met Raul during that scholarship trip. When I came to New York, I called this guy, and Raul had just gotten into town from Venezuela with the same phone number. We both called this guy, and then in the basement of this Venezuelan club, we put together a tango show. Then he went back to Venezuela to get his family, I went back to UCLA to finish my degree. When I got back, he was back. I made some connections and got a couple of tango gigs. That was back when nobody was really playing tango formally, so anybody who wanted to present tango was in. I had a little bit more of the entrepreneurial spirit, I knew how to deal with Americans, and all the older Argentine guys didn’t quite. So I started organizing gigs.

Raul and I hooked up for some things and started a band called New York-Buenos Aires Connection. That was our first group and it was basically New Tango. We got a record deal, we recorded, and we did some gigs. When we started doing dance gigs, we very quickly realized that our Piazzolla and New Tango stuff was not appropriate for the dance world. Quite literally, we wrote a dance book overnight. It was really quite a shock, because you write these Nuevo Tango things that last over eight minutes and dancers don’t like it. We were at Stamford Tango Workshop, which is something that happens every year. After the first night and the looks that we got, we locked ourselves up and wrote some charts. Raul knew how to play the traditional stuff and I had played it, but we just never really focused on the dance crowd. This is really when tango really started being dominated by the dancers. We went back to New York and we started this other thing, which was traditional dance music. We called that The New York Tango Trio. That group, again, worked old fashioned steady gigs - we stayed at the same clubs for years - Friday nights at Labella Park for five years and Saturday nights at these dance studios for another five years.

We went through a number of pianists, and we were frustrated because we couldn’t find the right person. So I said, “Let’s send a flyer to all the conservatories that says we need a piano player for a tango group.” We sent it to Julliard, The Manhattan School Of Music, and NYU - that’s where Ethan Iverson (now of The Bad Plus) came up. He had just moved to New York, and was about to quit NYU - that wasn’t working out for him - and he needed a job. Ethan is a phenomenal musician. We had quite a disorganized book, but Ethan was already a monster. He just sight-read the whole book on the gig. He lasted a good five years with us and he made the record - there’s a lot of improvisation on that. On the gig, he and I would re-invent bass lines, and Raul really likes to leave things loose. Instead of developing arrangements, we would write skeletons and then we’d improvise. So that was the germ of all my other work - just realizing that you could improvise so much and having Ethan around to really push all kinds of ideas into the music.

One or two years into New York Tango Trio, I started Avantango. I wanted to play with Ethan and some of the other guys from the jazz scene, that said, “Oh, tango, that sounds interesting. Let’s do something someday.” Mostly, I remember Thomas Chapin being the one that pushed me over the hump. These incredible musicians all wanted to do something, so I decided to do something. I started Avantango with a lot of great improvisers. Without really knowing what I was doing, I just formed this band, I put some charts together where everybody could solo and improvise.

LJC: Was the early version of Avantango the same musicians that were on the record?

PA: The first version of Avantango in 1994 included Phil Haynes and Kenny Wolesen on drums, Ethan, Mark Feldman, Thomas Chapin, Greg Wahl, and some other jazz musicians. It was not really tango. Ethan could play those rhythms and stuff, so it had that flavor. My writing never really developed to the point where I could create the fusions that I wanted; it was more about improvising. Interesting stuff would happen, but I couldn’t necessarily say that it was real tango, which is what I was trying to do. Because of the way things happened, my sextet went down to a trio and it was Ethan, Thomas Chapin, and I. We started working quite a bit, and we made a record. It’s a very interesting recording - Thomas’ playing there is phenomenal. He died a couple of years after we made that record. I managed to get that out on a label in Argentina in 1998. When Thomas died, Donny McCaslin covered for him for a little bit. Eventually, I started trying it out with Argentine guys. I said, “O.K., let me try it and see if I can get a sound that’s closer to what I’m hearing using Argentine guys.”

Raul started working in Europe more and I started pushing Avantango as my main band. Eventually I got a call to do a big show at Town Hall with dancers, and I just said, “I’m going to use Avantango and put the name there. Even though this is my experimental group, I’m going to put it up there with dancers.” I did that for a few years and that’s what that first Zoho record is about. It’s basically the music for that first show at Town Hall. There’s some Piazzolla charts, my own chart, and some other stuff. A lot of that stuff was planned on stage. I went from being part of a small scene where we were the one working band who played tango in any fashion, getting calls from all over the place, to being more of an entrepreneur, doing all the stuff that it takes to be in business. I eventually burned out on that. I also realized that every time we sold the show, the expectation was the dancers. It felt weird. You go to concerts, and they want to see the stereotypical tango show and then they get this bass player guy who has horns instead of bandoneon. My heart wasn’t into creating this commercially successful tango show at all. Musically, I really wanted to keep exploring this thing of improvising and getting this loose feel with the tango.

In 2006, my wife, our two kids and I went to Argentina to live for a year. That way my kids would get their Spanish, and we could put them in those schools. That’s when I really got into the local scene in Buenos Aires. I started meeting players and getting gigs and stuff. Towards the end of our stay, my wife said, “So are you going to make a record or what?” That’s when I got these guys and I told them what my method is, which is to just play. I worked with Daniel Piazzolla - I showed him my rhythmic concepts, with all my rhythmic sheets and all the things that I do. I basically told him, we’ve got all freedom - it’s just like jazz. We’re playing tango, but we’ve got all this freedom and we’ve got all these responsibilities to make it happen. We rehearsed for a while and put together the second Zoho record, which I was quite happy with. I started to be able to say, “Well, it may not be good, but it’s more or less what I have in mind.”

LJC: That album really was a turning point for me where I realized that tango could be very jazz oriented.

PA: I appreciate that, and I registered that people liked it. It’s fuel not just for the ego, but it’s fuel for continuing to try. It was like - here’s the concept and it works. I had the right musicians there. That’s what was so frustrating before, I just didn’t have the right musicians. The tango guys couldn’t improvise and the improvisers couldn’t play tango. I’m bringing these guys in, we’re playing our classic tango, and it’s going somewhere else. I had to make an effort to realize that it’s not that music, it’s just something else. I’m not the kind so musician who will write everything out so that it sounds exactly like you want it. I want everything to be spontaneous.

Kevin Whitehead, the jazz writer, reviewed New York-Buenos Aires Connection very early on in our careers and he called me up the next day to interview me. He was writing for Coda magazine and he asked me, “What was it about - everybody is isolated musically and here you are trying to combine them.” I said, “I’m not really trying to combine it. The jazz players don’t play tango and the tango players don’t improvise. So no, I actually don’t want to do this, because it frustrates the hell out of me.” So he called me an isolationist! He said, “He’s the only fringe musician that I know with a good word for isolationism.” What it meant for me is that it’s too constraining.

Any musician of note in Buenos Aires these days is very familiar of what’s going on in New York and in the general jazz world. Some of them travel, the recordings are much more available, obviously the internet, and a lot more musicians come through Buenos Aires than ever. A lot of them studied here and then went back - there’s a lot of Berklee grads . . . so the level out there is very high. They really got it. With the specific players that I ended up with, none of them were doing this for the first time. Maybe they were getting a bigger dose of freedom - Buenos Aires musicians tend to overwrite in general. They all have quite a bit of training, and they don’t have this thing that’s like, let’s just play. Which is something that I had learned with the avant-garde people. “Let’s play.” “Play What?” “I don’t know, let’s play and we’ll see.” That was my bottom line, let’s just play. We’re playing tango, so let’s play tango.

LJC: So musicians were already blending jazz and tango in Buenos Aires?

PA: Yea, the only one who was resisting it, funny enough, was Pipi Piazzolla. He’s got that last name, you know? He said, “If I start playing tango, then the critics and everyone are going to start talking about this.” But I was the one who said, “You play tango! You’re good!” He was kind of avoiding it, he wasn’t ready - he plays jazz and fusion. Gustavo Bergalli had been experimenting with this, like a lot of the old jazzers did. Back in the days of Gato Barbieri and all those guys, they all wanted to improvise on tango. He had been in Europe for many years. He had done a tango jazz thing that was overwritten and included a little bit of soloing, but not really interactive improvisation. Jorge Retamoza, the saxophone player, had been working in the tango language. I really wanted to work with him and see where he would take things. Abel Rogantini, the pianist, was a find, because he was actually my third call. My first two guys couldn’t make it. It’s incredible how these things happen - he really has a finish in each camp. He’s a great jazz player, he knows all that harmonic stuff - he’s a great improviser. He’s got quite a bit of tango experience so he’s able to bring it together to the point where I don’t know if the first two guys that I called would have been able to do it the way he did. I got really lucky with that.

LJC: When Buenos Aires Tango Standards was submitted for the Latin Grammy Awards, and they rejected it – what was the story there?

PA: I wrote this letter in response with a sense of humor – I was mad, but I realized that I might as well just raise some hell and see what happens. Then it got picked up by Billboard and All About Jazz. I was basically just tired of the tango police. They would say, “It’s not tango.” “What do you mean it’s not tango? We’re all Argentines, we’re playing “La Cachila” from the 1920s and we’re playing all these standards. The rhythms are tango. It’s got trumpet and drums and no bandoneon, but you know . . .” It’s like someone saying that you couldn’t play jazz without a banjo. A lot of my most aggressive stuff in that letter was like, “Who are these people who decide that this music is not tango?” I’ve been working in the tango world for twenty years! So it was kind of amusing. I really had fun writing that!

The funny thing is that same year I won a Latin Grammy as a producer because Raul Juarena’s recording ended up winning and I was one of the producers. Raul wasn’t there so I actually got to get up, accept the Grammy, and make a little speech. They actually sent me a Grammy even though I was not the artist and I was not actually listed as a producer. I was listed as a mix engineer, which is mostly what I did. But I have a Grammy at home from that year!

I’ve spoken to a couple of people on the panel that I’ve met since then and there’s a lot of debate. But I know that there’s some old fashioned people on those panels and you know what – tango needs to come out of its shell and not just be this recreated old stuff. They should encourage people – especially Argentine musicians – to take it to the next level. That’s really what was sad about it. It was all Argentine musicians and I’d been playing tango for twenty years. I wasn’t mad because I didn’t win; I was mad because I didn’t get a chance to compete. It’s a tango record! It was 2007! In a way, they’re just encouraging people to write the same old stuff and for the bandoneon to be the only voice that can play tango. It’s ridiculous.

LJC: Do you find that type of reaction – like your music is too jazz oriented for traditionalists and too traditional for jazz audiences – do you find any of that catch-22?

PA: No, at this point I think it’s almost the opposite. When I want to play traditional tango, I play traditional tango. I don’t owe anything to anybody stylistically. This is my take on it, and it comes to a point where I can do whatever I want. On the other hand, I have a deep respect for the tradition in the sense that if you call your music tango, then you have to deal with it. Labels may work for you on a marketing basis, but if you use the word tango, let me hear you deal with it in some way. I want to hear the fact that you can actually play this music and you’re not just slapping it on because it’s a sexy name. So I have a lot of respect for tradition . . . and I thought that I had approached the record with a lot of respect. The liner notes are scholarly liner notes, compared to what people usually write. I talk about the composers and the context of when they were writing the pieces – I thought that it was done with a lot of respect. And when I started putting these bands up on stage with dancers, I know that I turned off a lot of people. That’s because they want the dancers. I can deal with that. If I want to please the traditional crowd, I can play.

I think that this new recording has a little bit of the answer to that – we did both. I combined everybody and I combined the repertoire in the sessions so that we would address the tradition. I’ve had some people in Buenos Aires saying, “This is a little too traditional.” A comment that I got from a colleague of mine was like, “Well, some of these interpretations . . . this is what we all know how to do. This other stuff is what’s really original.” Well, O.K., that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to go down to Buenos Aires and play tango that everybody knows how to play with the best musicians. I don’t get to do that all the time here in New York. Then I wanted to do some of my own take on it. At least this record should get considered for the tango category. I’m not saying that we’re going to win anything, but we should be safely inside the tango category. There’s a bandoneon, so . . .

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Don’t miss the first part of our interview with tango jazz bassist Pablo Aslan. We cover Aslan’s early musical development, his move to the States and subsequent experiences on the West Coast, as well as his discovery of tango. You can 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:
Album Of The Week: Buenos Aires Tango Standards, Pablo Aslan
Jazz Now: Extending The List
Album Of The Week: Avantango, Pablo Aslan
5 Latin Jazz Bass Players Driving Today’s Scene

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