Vicente Piazzolla died in October 1959. Astor was in New York, on the trip that he later called the worst three years of his life. He asked to be left alone in his apartment, and in less than an hour he wrote a tango for his father, Vicente “Nonino” Piazzolla: Adiós Nonino.

What is in it

The piece opens slowly, turns fast and angry, and comes home. It is a tango in the sense that it has the bandoneon and the rhythm under it; it is not a tango to dance to, and he never claimed it was. Everything he would do afterwards, from the Quinteto to Libertango, is in the way it breathes in and out.

The bar

The photograph above is a bar in San Telmo, the old quarter of Buenos Aires, by Stefano Vigorelli (CC BY-SA 4.0).