AVANTANGO

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.