Full family name: Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla Bandoneonist, pianist, leader, composer and arranger. (March 11. 1921 - July 4, 1992)

Piazzolla perhaps is most celebrated musician in the world of tango. He brought tango to a new stage skipping the traditional rules of tango composition and this fact captivated the attention, chamber groups, and symphonic orchestras and other musical ensembles.

Born in Mar del Plata, on March 11th. 1921. His family move to United stated, he grew up in the Bronx in New York. He was 15 year old when he meet Carlos Gardel IN New York while filming "El día que me quieras" ("The day you love me"). Gardel has the oportunity to listen his bandoneon and was so impressed by his performance that he offered Piazzolla to go with him on a tour around South America. He rejected the offer, and went back to Buenos Aires. It might have been destiny, who knows? But the fact was that during that tour, that Gardel lost his life in a plane crash in Colombia.

He returned to Argentina and played with Anibal Troilo's band until 1944, when he created his own band and started to study classical composition, a recommendation of Arthur Rubinstein after listening a composition of Piazzola while in tour in Buenos Aires.

In 1954, he got a grant by Paris Conservatory of Music to study with Nadia Boulanger. Astor was ashamed of his beginning in cabarets as a tango player. But one day, Nadia Boulanger asked him about his early stage and Piazzolla performed one of his tangos for her. "This is Piazzolla", his mentor said, "You never give it up!" These words really sank in and Piazzolla started to overlap his tango background with classical jazz influences and from that mixture the real Piazzolla surfaced.

On his return to Buenos Aires, in the late 50' Piazzolla revolutionized the world of Tango, endowing it with new contents and taking it away from the lack of ideas it had fallen into. After trying different combinations, he formed the Quinteto Tango Nuevo (New Tango Quintet) in 1960. In that period, he composed pieces as splendid as "Adios Nonino" (in the memory of his father), and introduced contemporary and improvised jazz elements which were suspiciously observed by classical tango supporters, when not completely scorn. But Piazzolla managed to create a new music style which kept the romanticism, the passion and the violence of traditional tango.

The Maestro… If you wanted to reflect the pure concept of passion in tango, that would be Astor Piazzolla's music.