Once a musician has spent years developing their fundamental skills, they reach the true starting point of their career. The endless practicing and study is simply a precursor, not a launching point; it’s the materials that you need to build something wonderful. A musician’s honest artistic statements start when they have the tools to make a meaningful statement about their background, culture, and beliefs. From there, they can experiment intelligently with a relationship to history, offering their own perspective on a genre or style. They can develop a unique improvisational approach that draws upon technique, style, and a relationship to a musical lineage on their instrument. They have the opportunity to step into the forefront of their genre and promote true change, helping the music evolve into its next permutation. This is an exciting time, full of inspiration and enthusiasm – in a sense, the fun really begins here.

After spending years building his musicianship and developing a strong understanding of tango, Pablo Aslan began his artistic adventure in New York. At the time, New York’s music scene held a sparse representation of tango, but Aslan connected with the available musicians. He found an equally committed tango musician in bandoneon player Raul Juarena, and the two artists quickly organized a group and found work. Their first effort, the New York-Buenos Aires Connection, leaned heavily upon the Nuevo Tango repertoire and while they reach high artistic standards, they turned away the dance crowd. Anxious to win the tango dancers’ favor, Aslan and Juarena formed the New York Tango Trio, a more traditional group that performed for the straight-ahead tango audience. While looking for an ideal pianist for the trio, Aslan and Juarena hired jazz pianist Ethan Iverson, who began to push them in new directions. Inspired by possible combinations of tango and improvisation, Aslan formed another group, Avantango, which utilized Iverson and a group of young jazz musicians. The band evolved over the next decade, shrinking into a trio and then expanding back into a large group full of Argentinean musicians. Avantango helped establish Aslan as an artistic force in New York, but the balance between audience expectations and artistry soon tired the bassist. Aslan gathered his family and spent a year in Buenos Aires, digging into the local music scene. He collaborated with a number of local musicians, creating an ingenious blend of jazz and tango on his second album, Buenos Aires Tango Standards. This recording continued to make waves for Aslan, as he kept moving forward with his musical interests.

Aslan continues to push his combination of jazz and tango into new directions with his new album Tango Grill. It builds upon the ideas established in Buenos Aires Tango Standards, explores tradition, and integrates improvisation seamlessly; in many ways, it represents the next step in Aslan’s evolution. In part one of our interview with Aslan, we dug into his early musical development, his move to the States, and his discovery of tango. The second piece of our interview looked at Aslan’s move to New York, his groups with Juarena, the creation of Avantango, and Buenos Aires Tango Standards. In the last bit of our three-part interview, we discuss Tango Grill and Aslan’s concept of improvisation in tango.

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LATIN JAZZ CORNER: Tango Grill seems to lean towards the traditional side of tango a little more. When you were recording it, did you approach it in the same way or was the aesthetic different?

PABLO ASLAN: By the time that we got to that session, I had gone done to Buenos Aires and played with my jazz guys a few times. The “traditional guys” on the album had worked with Nicolas Ledesma and Néstor Marconi had worked with Lalo Schifrin. I had met violinist Ramiro Gallo over the years, but I had never played with him. On the session, we played standards and I just basically said, “Let’s play these pieces.” I didn’t have to explain a whole lot because of that – we all knew how to play. It was really, let’s just play. It’s unusual in a way, because everybody tends to want to arrange it. It was scary. You’re going into the studio spending all this money and you’re calling all these players – then you show up and you got nothing? A couple weeks before the recording I was like, “I’m going to show up and I’m just going to put this lead sheet in front of them and they’re going to think I’m a flake.” All I could do was practice and make sure that as a bass player I arrived at the sessions in shape. You know how it is with the bass – you stop playing because you’re writing and then you get to the gig and you can’t play! So I did the opposite – I made lead sheets and I practiced. Of course, I said, “Let’s play this tune” and it was like, “O.K., let’s play this tune.” I had to quiet my mind from saying, “These guys are thinking – this guy is making a record out of this?!? We’re just jamming on these tunes”

With the traditional stuff, it was a question of tune selection. I think that I picked out a lot of little nuggets and things that don’t get recorded as much, just from knowing the tunes. Others I thought, this will be a breeze to do. When I was done listening to the playback, I thought, “Were did this music come from?” I didn’t write this, and I didn’t tell them to do this. It just came from all these years of being on the bandstand and knowing these tunes. I think it’s wonderful – that’s what it’s about. It was scary – I thought, “They’ll read the melody literally and then they’ll ask what to do next.” This guy who helped me produce the whole record, he actually wanted to videotape the whole thing. He realized that here’s this guy coming from New York with this apparently simple idea, and not everybody’s going to go along with it. He wanted to go in with a video camera, and I said, “No, this is too much. On top of this, I can’t have three cameras trailing us.” I’m going to look like some type of gringo with the camera crew. I just want this to be the environment of trust. But he kept all the chatter between tunes. I got done explaining what I wanted briefly on the first tune, and Marconi, the bandoneon player says, “Why don’t we just run it once before we record?” Then you hear me say, “But what if we get it right?” Everybody cracked up, because what’s there to run? This is like A major, E7, and we know the tune – we’ve played it a thousand times. That take almost made it into the record. When we finished playing, we realized things like, “You did this, O.K., then I’ll do that. I see, we’re going to stop here.” So we made the little adjustments that you do and then play it again. Take two usually would be enough. That was basically the impetus.

Marconi – he’s number one. We’re playing this gig at Lincoln Center and Marconi was going to be part of the cast. He couldn’t make it, and I replaced him with two bandoneon players! The way that he plays traditional tango and the way that he improvises over changes – not everybody can do that. When I thought how to replace him, I thought – two guys! One who does this well and then someone who does the other well. So he’s a very special player.

LJC: Many people think that there’s no improvisation in tango and there’s no tango in jazz, but you found these guys that cross the worlds. Can the traditional tango musician who has never had any exposure to jazz sit down and play with much improvisation? Or would something like tango grill come out of that?

PA: Yea, because we could play the most traditional tangos and everybody would know them. There’s language called “a la parrila.” That is where the name tango grill comes from – playing on the grill. Basically it’s the simplest way to play a tune – from learned tradition. You can’t play very far and it may sound a little sloppy, but we do that a lot actually. You get together any group of players and say let’s play these tangos, and you won’t need the lead sheets. But nobody records that way – it’s looked down upon. “That’s just a la parrila.” Then we have this next stage that is called the organized parrila. The organized parrila is more or less what I did. A sketch of a formal thing, some instructions, and sometimes it’s all written out in chart. Otherwise, it just comes from working together at a club. But nobody records that way! So when you get these recordings, even those groups, it’s either intensely elaborated from years of playing together or it’s arranged. They have to write some arrangements if they’re going to record. They can’t just go and record a parrila. I wanted it to really have that feeling of like – this is serious. We’re improvising, so we better listen to each other and resolve these things by the second take.

LJC: What comes into my mind is a Cuban descarga – is it the same sort of open jam session aesthetic?

PA: No, because the form in those things is tons of percussion and a few chords with solos. I think it’s more like recording standards. Any old jazz musicians would go into the studio and record “All The Things You Are.” What do we need to rehearse? We don’t need an arrangement. We can do a couple of things – let’s do the intro, and roll it. If you’ve been playing together, you probably have a few things – you’ve changed this chord for that chord – but no more than that. At least that was the way that I was approaching it. And it’s complicated; one of the tunes I left out because there was a small train wreck and it was bugging the hell out of me; there’s even one on the recording. We tried to edit it out. Someone decided to do a little ritard before the end of the phrase and nobody followed. But that can happen – somebody’s used to doing a ritard there and we didn’t hear it. I heard it days later actually. I said, “Oh man, I wasn’t listening! He’s doing a ritard and I just kept playing.” You try to edit those out, but that’s the sort of thing that can happen in the music.

LJC: One of the things that strikes me on this album, you almost have to develop your own dialect of improvisation that doesn’t take the traditional bebop scales or anything like that. Is that something that naturally comes out of a session like this or is that something that you’ve had to develop?

PA: I think everybody has their own way of dealing with it. That’s why these particular musicians are on the recording – they’ve all dealt with it at some point or another or they are dealing with it. I think that we all are dealing with it in terms of developing the language. We don’t have a whole lot of tradition to fall back on and learn. A jazz player might transcribe solos or study patterns or things like that. We don’t have that training. But even though, that’s sort of where I’m going. I would like to, at some point, develop some sort of more methodical approach to it, which can be done. You just discover what the idiomatic phrases are, how they work against the harmony, practice them, and internalize them. But I think that everybody has dealt with tango phrasing and tango type melodies. You hear it in Gustavo’s trumpet playing. Even when he does bop it, it’s not really juxtaposed bop over tango. I think he’s trying to deal with it in Spanish, you know? The tango guys don’t even have to think about it – the track that we do as a quartet with bandoneon, piano, violin, and bass, they all basically are drawing from their experiences playing tango – perhaps the violinist is the one that is stretching more because he’s heard some jazz violinists. There’s a moment where they take an entire chorus or at least an entire A section of a tune, and they’re not used to that. They don’t get called to do that, because, there’s usually an arrangement. So when I said to them, play a whole chorus, I had to say that and keep a straight face because basically the answer would have been, “What?!?” When you hear tango, it wants to change the melodic lead every four or eight bars. It’s almost asks for it. I’ve used that before, I’ve done it, sharing the melody, but I wanted people to take a full chorus. When you hear the bandoneon play over changes, there’s parts that are just arpeggios and scales, but any time that he does anything expressive, it comes from playing tango.

LJC: You have this great album and people are going to want to hear it. After the Lincoln Center concert, how are you going to tackle playing this music live?

PA: I have a two-part strategy. One is to really try to internationalize these guys and see if I can take the next step in my career. I’ll say, “I’ve got this elite level group of musicians in Buenos Aires and that’s what it takes for my to do my show.” And then I’ll see if I can get away with it. Especially in Europe and places where we would have to travel anyways. I’m going to be pushing these guys quite a bit. The good news of this collaboration at Lincoln Center is that this could make Paquito D’Rivera’s next record for his record label. So when we have the mighty Paquito booking these things, I hope that we’ll at least be able to get the core musicians to do the touring. Then the other part of it is to focus a little more on the real core of musicians here in New York that I can do this stuff with and really develop that. It’s going back to my buddy Raul Juarena and a pianist here in New York that I would like to work with a lot deeper. I need someone who gravitates to tango naturally, I need that rhythmically. I need somebody who responds to my playing; otherwise I find that I work too hard to make things happen that should be spread around the band. I’m going to refocus on these few guys and try to get a project that represents us so that I can work locally and hold my head up. Now I have the recording, so I can say – this is what I need, can you do this or not?

LJC: There’s very much a cultural stereotype of tango with the woman dancing with the rose in her mouth and such. Do you find that you can be educational with audiences and change stereotypical perceptions of tango?

PA: Frankly, that’s been done already; I think that the dance has really re-educated everybody. The dance is huge now. That whole stereotyped image with the rose has been pretty much taken care of. That was the twenties. One thing about tango dancing, it’s huge right now. It seems like in every walk of life I run into people who are into tango, where it didn’t used to be this way. One of the great things about this core group of people around the world is that they actually like tango music. Unlike a lot of people in the music world who may like Piazzolla or even call themselves tango jazz guys, they don’t go home and listen to some of the classic recordings from the thirties, forties, and fifties. In fact, they don’t quite like them; these tango people, they really do. I’m on a discussion list of tango D.J.’s from around the world, and these guys are obsessed with all these recordings . . . so am I, so it’s a great thing! I have been part of that world off and on for the last twenty years.

I’ve taught musicality classes where I teach people to listen, break it down, and understand how it’s put together. I enjoy doing that and I think that it’s important work. There’s more and more people doing that. That also kind of relaxes me, because when I started with tango back in the eighties, it was still dormant. I felt like, this is such incredible music, we need to preserve this. I’ve met so many people over the years who are dealing with same problem and trying to find ways to do that, that I feel like I can just do my work. I can continue to be fascinated with the history and obviously if I get a teaching gig or somebody asks me to do a workshop, I’ll do it. That sense of mission perhaps is not as important as it is to continue to get this more creative work off the ground.

LJC: One of the things that I’ve been noticing is that there are a lot of different musicians from Argentina on the jazz scene today, doing different stuff. People like Emilio Solla, Pablo Ziegler, Guillermo Klein, Sofia Rei Koutsovitis – what do you think about the work being done today, and where do you see as the future of tango going?

PA: Tango jazz for me is a little more specific. I think that a lot of these people that you mentioned, they have a much wider section of things that they do. It’s great. What’s notable for me is that all these people are great musicians. We all know each other and we all support each other. I think it’s very inspiring. And it’s unique – Guillermo Klein, Emilio Solla, Fernando Otero, and people like that, they’re very unique, very professional, very creative, and extremely knowledgeable musicians. It’s just very inspiring to have a scene like that. I even wish that we had even more of a scene. I’ve tried over the years to create a concert series or have a regular night at a place where we could each just take over one night a week. It’s been hard to do but that’s because things are hard to produce in the America these days in general. So you do stay on top of each other’s work and we do see each other regularly. We all kind of have a connection with Buenos Aires too and there’s some great artists down there. If anything, I would love some of those artists to come up here and get some exposure, but as you know, the cultural scene in the United States has gotten kind of difficult to manage and make things happen.

I think that the level is going to keep going up. I think that the music that I’m doing will hopefully show one way to do work with tango and jazz. To me, it would be totally flattering to hear someone that does something similar to what I’m doing, but taking it to another level – or at least to a different conclusion and loosening it up, trusting the performer more than the arranger. Like I said, it’s tied a little bit with the business. We don’t live in a very fertile situation right now – the people that you mentioned, we’re all struggling right now for space and opportunities. Except for Pablo Ziegler, but Pablo Ziegler is the senior citizen of us – he better be touring around the world! Even knowing Pablo and his band though, none of us are really getting the exposure that we should as competent, creative musicians from a particular tradition. But that has to do more with what’s gong on in America – we don’t take it personally anymore!

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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.

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.

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Check Out These Related Posts:
Album Of The Week: Tango Grill, Pablo Aslan
Latin Jazz In The 2000s: A Diversification Of The Style
Album Of The Week: Bien Sur, Emilio Solla & The Tango Jazz Conspiracy
Moving Nuevo Tango Into The Next Generation: Buenos Aires Report, Pablo Ziegler

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