When Astor Piazzolla was born in 1921, the tango was already famous – notorious even – throughout the world. Yet Piazzolla is perhaps the name most closely associated with this elementally sensual, intoxicating dance form. The origins of the dance aren’t easy to define. All one can say with certainty is that it originated in the lands alongside the River Plate in Argentina and Uruguay, and the first people to dance it were almost certainly slaves. In the late eighteenth century the words tango and tambo were used to describe slave gatherings – big popular celebrations which the authorities regarded with anxiety and sometimes outright hostility. A rich mix of African, Argentinian, and Spanish-Cuban music resulted in something utterly distinctive: a dance for couples, unmistakably sexual in character, in which carefully regulated but highly suggestive touching plays a key part – significantly, the Portuguese word for ‘to touch’ is tanger. All this, plus the fact that it soon became popular in the brothels of Buenos Aires, meant guardians of public morality continued to view it with a mixture of fascination and horror until well into the twentieth century.

The dance also acquired a highly distinctive rhythm: four beats, but with a pronounced lean or push into the very last eighth-note of the bar – one – two – three – four-AND… The atmosphere that grew up around it was equally rich and heady: sex, the very motivating urge of life, remained central, but the flavor of uncultivated Argentinian life – a life lived very much on the edge – and the sweet, savage beauty of South American nature, all of this soon became ingrained in the sound of the tango. Astor Piazzolla’s early life switched between his native Mar del Plata and New York, but it was a hard, impoverished existence in both places, and he soon got used to fending for himself on rough streets. He heard a lot of Argentinian music, and by the time he was eight was learning to play the classic Argentine dance instrument the bandoneón, on which he was to become a virtuoso, but there was jazz, too, and his father had records of Bach, which fascinated him.

So culturally and musically the stage was set for Piazzolla early on. Hearing modern European classical music in his early twenties later inspired him to go to Paris to study with the great French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. At the time he was convinced that his destiny was to follow in the footsteps of Bartók and Stravinsky – both modernists who nevertheless maintained deep roots in folk music. But the ever-perceptive Boulanger soon realized that tango was his real vocation and, fortunately for us, Piazzolla took her at her word.

Nevertheless, Piazzolla’s American and European experiences left deep impressions on what soon came to be called his nuevo tango (‘new tango’) style – a style so comprehensive that it could include jazz-like improvisation and Bachian formal devices such as fugue or passacaglia without ever losing its vibrant Argentinian authenticity. Naturally some tango purists protested, but in the wider world there was far more admiration for the way Piazzolla had extended and enriched the coloristic, technical, and expressive range of an already highly distinctive dance form. A comparison might be made with the Mazurkas and Polonaises of Chopin in which, within the apparent limitations of a single dance-style, musical treasure chests – even whole imaginative worlds – are opened up.

Piazzolla had an enormous impact not only on tango itself, but also on jazz, film soundtracks, and modern classical music – the highly eclectic Argentine-Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov has cited him as a formative influence. In the contemporary classical field he achieved something else of fundamental importance too: he reminded composers, at a time when modern music was becoming increasingly rarefied, narrowly focused on abstractions, that invigoration – the energy that gives rise to genuine innovation – more often comes from contact with the music of ordinary people.