February 3rd, 2010

Jazz @ Lincoln Center presents:

“Tango Salon”

Featuring Pablo Aslan, Paquito D’Rivera and guest artists

March 26-27, 2010, 8p.m., Rose Theater

For over two decades, bassist, composer and bandleader Pablo Aslan has melded the elegance and melancholy of classic Argentine tango with the American jazz language.  Guest artist Paquito D’Rivera and a unique cast of Argentine musicians join Tango Jazz pioneer Aslan to play the intricate rhythms of the tango.

Click here for ticket information.

Jazz at Lincoln Center
Frederick P. Rose Hall: Broadway at 60th Street

http://www.jalc.org/

Featuring
Direct from Argentina – Only New York appearance:

Nicolas Ledesma, piano
Abel Rogantini, piano
Pablo Agri, violin

Gustavo Bergalli, trumpet
Daniel Piazzolla, drums

and featuring

Raul Jaurena, bandoneon

Michael Zisman, bandoneon

Special Guest Artist: Paquito D’Rivera, clarinet, sax

Pablo Aslan, bass, Music Director

New CD


Pablo Aslan Tango Grill (Zoho ZM 201003)

Street Date March 9, 2010 MORE INFORMATION

CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW at MySpace

Pablo Aslan, bass; Nestor Marconi, bandoneon; Nicolas Ledesma, piano ;
Abel Rogantini, piano; Ramiro Gallo, violin; Gustavo Bergalli, trumpet;
Daniel Piazzolla, drums

Recorded in Buenos Aires, Argentina, featuring a superb ensemble of tango and jazz musicians, “Tango Grill,” the new recording by Argentine-born, New York-based bassist Pablo Aslan, is a brilliant follow up to “Buenos Aires Tango Standards” (Zoho Music, 2007).

A pioneer and leading figure in tango jazz, a growing new style that blends the repertoire, instrumentation and vocabulary of tango with elements of jazz, Aslan set out here to reinvent twelve 20th century tango classics on the fly. The result is tradition with a razor’s edge.

The very title, “Tango Grill,” alludes to a la parrilla, which translates literally as the grill, but it’s also the bandstand term tango musicians use for improvised arrangements.

Aslan’s group in “Tango Grill” includes established tango masters such as bandoneón player Nestor Marconi and young pianist Nicolas Ledesma. But also drummer Daniel Piazzolla, the grandson of the late New Tango master Astor Piazzolla, and himself a leading figure in tango jazz as both player and bandleader, and trumpeter, composer and bandleader Gustavo Bergalli, an early believer in tango jazz.

The music in “Tango Grill” is not a fusion, in which the total is usually less than the sum of the parts, but rather, it suggests a musical bilingualism. For these musicians, this is lived-in music, the sum of a lifetime in both tango dancehalls and jazz clubs.

Pablo Aslan has performed and recorded with Grammy Award Winners Yo Yo Ma, Shakira, Joe Lovano, Gary Burton, Paquito D’Rivera, Lalo Schifrin, Pablo Ziegler, and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

For Interviews, Photos and Promos Contact:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jazzpromo at earthlink.net

Tango Salon – Artist bios

February 2nd, 2010

Trumpeter Gustavo Bergalli is one of the leading jazz musicians from Argentina. His work in the 1960s and ‘70s, blending jazz and traditional local styles, including tango, foreshadowed the globalization in contemporary jazz. In the mid-70s he moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where he was based for the next 30 years. While living in Europe, Bergalli led his own groups and worked with artists such as Joe Lovano, Jimmy Heath, John Scofield, Phil Woods, and Hank Jones. Also, he has been a member of the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra, as well as guest conductor and featured soloists for large ensembles such as the Finnish UMO Jazz Orchestra. Now based in Buenos Aires, Bergalli leads his own ensemble of jazz tango and continues to tour in Europe as a guest artist. In 2007, he was the featured soloist in Jazz@Lincoln Center’s “Todo Tango.”

Violinist Pablo Agri was educated in the best of the European classical tradition — and tango. The son of the late, great violinist Antonio Agri, Pablo was part of the Teatro Colón orchestra (the Buenos Aires equivalent to Milan’s La Scala or New York’s Carnegie Hall), studied chamber music as a fellow with the fabled Camerata Bariloche and appeared as featured soloist with Argentina’s National Symphony Orchestra. But he has also performed, and recorded, with his father and many top tango artists including Mariano Mores, Horacio Salgán, Julián Plaza, y Juan José Mosalini. As an educator, Agri has led tango seminars at the Conservatorio Municipal de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, the Rotterdam Conservatorium, Holland, and the conservatory at Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

From an early age, the tango education of pianist, composer and conductor Nicolas Ledesma included studies with Horacio Salgán, a major figure in the music´s history, and sharing the stage, and the recording studio, with artists and ensembles such as Leopoldo Federico, Orquesta de Tango de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Fernando Suárez Paz Quintet, and the late, great tango singer Roberto Goyeneche. Not surprisingly, his work caught the ear of vibraphonist and bandleader Gary Burton (who featured him in “Astor Piazzolla Reunion,” and “Libertango,” his tributes to Astor Piazzolla) and composer and producer Gustavo Santaolalla, who called on Ledesma for his tango project “El Cafe de los Maestros.” Ledesma leads his own quintet and also teaches piano at the Conservatorio Manuel de Falla, Buenos Aires, and the Universidad de Montevideo, in Uruguay.


Pianist Abel Rogantini has a 360 degree approach when it comes to music styles. His education and professional experience, as player, composer, arranger and educator, includes tango and European classical music, jazz and traditional Argentine folk music. Not surprisingly then, his work suggest a fusion of styles, anchored in jazz but also drawing from very diverse sources.

His credits include collaborations with tango singers as disparate as Maria Volonté and Raul Lavié, bandoneonist Walter Rios, pop rock bassist and singer Pedro Aznar, trumpeter Gustavo Bergalli and bassist Pablo Aslan. Rogantini has also been active as educator, teaching piano and improvisation at several top conservatories in Argentina.

Maestro Raul Jaurena learned to play the bandoneón from his father, while still a child. He was eight when he joined his first tango orchestra. Born and raised in Montevideo, Uruguay, he grew up listening, and playing, to a subtly different style of tango than that played across the river in the bigger, faster, more cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Argentina. And then the music took him around the world, to Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba, but also Germany, Finland, Israel and Austria. Since 1990, he’s been based in New York City. He met Astor Piazzolla in the 1960s, and the encounter proved deeply influential as it encouraged Jaurena to further opened his neo-traditional approach to include elements of jazz, classical music and Piazzolla’s own New Tango, creating a style at once classic and contemporary. In 2007, his work was recognized with a Latin Grammy for his recording “Te Amo Tango” (Soundbrush Records)


Michael Zisman is one of the young masters of the bandoneón, the melancholy-sounding button squeezebox that is the quintessential tango instrument. Born in Switzerland of an Argentine father (violinist Daniel Zisman, the long time concertmaster at the Berne Symphony Orchestra) and a Swiss mother, Michael made his first appearance in public at 11, as a surprise guest of leading bandoneonist Leopoldo Federico and pianist Atilio Stampone. Since, he studied both jazz (with Jim McNeely and also with Bert Joris and Andy Scherrer at the Swiss Jazz School ) and tango, with maestro Federico, Nestor Marconi, and Osvaldo Ruggiero, developing a highly personal vocabulary that organically includes elements of both jazz and tango. A composer and arranger, Zisman performs regularly with his father as part of a quintet and as a duo, and has appeared as featured soloist with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Brussels Jazz Orchestra, the Swiss Jazz Orchestra, and the Berne Symphony Orchestra.



A pioneer in tango jazz, Daniel Piazzolla, the grandson of the late New Tango master Astor Piazzolla, blends in his drumming style traditional tango patterns with the swing, drive and freedom of jazz. A composer and bandleader in his own right, Piazzolla is a much in-demand player and teacher whose resume include appearances with notables in tango, pop, and jazz, including Chick Corea, Miguel Zenón, Gary Burton, Gloria Estefan, Fito Páez, Alejandro Lerner, Nestor Marconi and Daniel Binelli. Also, Piazzolla was part of Pablo Aslan’s “Buenos Aires Tango Standards” and featured with the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra directed by Arturo O’Farrill at Jazz @Lincoln Center. Piazzolla leads the jazz sextet Escalandrum, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary with a series of concerts in Buenos Aires and a recording of “Astor por Escalandrum”.

Buenos Aires Tango Standards – lead sheets

February 1st, 2010

Click here to download PDF

Pablo Aslan quartet Live at the Buenos Aires Tango Festival – August 2009

October 27th, 2009

Todo Tango heard nationwide on NPR

November 13th, 2008

Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio – Featured show

Todo Tango: AFRO-LATIN JAZZ ORCHESTRA WITH ARTURO O’FARRILL

Special guest: Pablo Aslan

Listen here

Imagine the cabarets of Buenos Aires and the intimate jazz clubs of New York under one roof—in the House of Swing. Argentinean bassist and composer Pablo Aslan fuses sultry tango with cool jazz rhythms. He’s joined by the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra with Arturo O’Farrill

The Lincoln Center Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra with guest artists Gustavo Bergalli, Daniel Binelli, Pablo Aslan.

CD reviews

September 9th, 2008

  Buy Now

 

“There’s been a raft of tango albums from classical performers trying to give a different spin on Argentina’s musical gift to the world. But no really successful jazz spin on the tango until now. Aslan, a native of Buenos Aires, (…) has created a thoroughly-realized amalgam of both musical forms. A fascinating project and totally successful musically!” AUDIOPHILE AUDITION

“Led by double bassist Pablo Aslan, the ensemble brings us the best of both worlds as they rely on beautiful melodies to create a mood before launching into powerful improvisation.

The themes are clearly defined, while each improvised adventure comes complete with thrills and beauty. Recommended, Aslan’s Jazz/Tango project works wonders on the soul.” CADENCE

“Aslan creates improvisatory alchemy with artists at home in both genres. A subtle convergence results as the milonga and guajira roots of these familiar classics sound through in a brilliant jazz quintet setting. Tango as Miles, Coltrane, Evans and Chambers might have conceived it.” GLOBAL RHYTHM

“Pablo will continue to define the tango idiom in his musically inimitable way…Pablo Aslan..The right man….In the right way…At the right time for tango jazz.” EJAZZNEWS

“Buenos Aires Tango Standards is a leap forward from his well-received Avantango and a work, unlike many “fusion” projects, that so completely and artfully integrates two musical worlds, here tango and jazz, that it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. (…) a string of delicate numbers with all the characteristic elegance and melancholy of classic tango. From the level of play to the artistic conception, there is nothing “standard” about this work and that is both its strength and beauty.” JAZZ TIMES

“You may read about merging jazz with tango, or jazzing up tango, but the real goal here is to push tango to unimagined extremes.” TOM HULL (Village Voice) Pick Hits

“We’re in a golden age of jazz-tango fusion, and bassist Pablo Aslan is one of the main reasons. (…) His pulsing lines are the heartbeat of a new music.” JAZZIZ

“This is a very special recording, capturing the inherent longing of Tango and contextualizing it in a completely up-to-date jazz idiom. Quite an accomplishment.”

“Pablo Aslan, on his second release, proves he’s the absolute master of the New Tango. What we’ve got here is a very compelling blend of Tango and jazz, certainly never before so forcefully and beguiling presented. The results are nothing less that spectacular.” AMAZON.COM

Avantango Sextet 2008

September 9th, 2008

Jim Seeley, trumpet

Noah Bless, trombone

Oscar Feldman, saxophone

Victor Prieto, accordion

Emilio Solla, piano

Pablo Aslan, bass

Pablo Aslan – Raul Jaurena duo

September 1st, 2008

Argentine pianist Adrian Iaies w/Pablo Aslan

July 29th, 2008

Tom Hull, the music critic for the Village Voice, reviews Adrian Iaies’ newest CD

Recorded in Buenos Aires

Adrian Iaies, piano

Michael Zysman, bandoneon

Juan Cruz de Urquiza, trumpet

Pablo Aslan, bass

Pepi Taveira, drums

 

Iaies, Adrian - Vals De La 81street & Columbus CD Cover Art

More reviews

 

Buy it here

Todo Tango colaboration with Jazz @Lincoln Center- April 2007

July 14th, 2008

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