Summit
Gerry Mulligan / Astor Piazzolla
| CD 68.842 |
1984, right at the beginning, Tropical Music released "Libertango", the first Astor Piazzolla LP ever in Germany. It was followed by other albums which were created in Italy in 1974 - 1979 and represent an important period in Piazzolla's music life: "Lumiere" (1975), "Persecuta" (1977) und "Biyuya" (1979).
With great pleasure we add to our PIAZZOLLA COLLECTION a rare Collectors‘ item of the same period: "Summit" - the legendary meeting between Astor Piazzolla and Gerry Mulligan with the authentic title and cover. In the past 30 years it has been released with several covers and titles, such as 'Tango Nuevo', 'Reunion Cumbre' or only '1974'.
These two 'classics' were recorded in 1974, both in Milano: "Libertango" und "Summit". In the same year "Libertango" won the Award of Italian Film Critics. While this one became the most famous album of Piazzolla as a new dimension of Tango, "Summit" is the first meeting of Tango with Jazz on an extraordinary high level. Surely, it is not Astor Piazzolla's first meeting with Jazz and it wasn't his last - after his one and only collaboration with Mulligan he worked with Gary Burton a.o.
Gerry Mulligan and Astor Piazzolla knew each other from Paris in 1954, where Piazzolla studied with Nadia Boulanger and Mulligan played the Festival Salon du Jazz. It took them 20 years to realise all the ideas, which their stage-encounter in Paris had stipulated, at the festival 'Rassegna International' in Venice and afterwards in this LP project. Piazzolla's musical impression of the Mulligan Octet initiated the foundation of his Octecto Buenos Aires in 1955. The enthusiasm, the group experience of harmonical highlights and as well the individual joy in playing improvisations - this all Astor Piazzolla had missed with Tango musicians. "It was necessary to liberate Tango from monotony which surrounded it harmonically and melodically", he wrote later. As well the period of his studies with Nadia Boulanger appears ever and ever in his life memories because Boulanger had helped to find himself, in Tango but not in European styles.
In April 1974, Astor Piazzolla had travelled again to Italy. La Opinión wrote on December 24, 1974 about the albums which had been recorded till then:
"Summit", to be seen from here is more far away then "Libertango", is not only the most wonderful or a long time expected album of Mulligan. It is also a confirmation that Piazzolla continues - in which context or city ever - to be a creator of incorruptible personality. It is shameful that he cannot be that in his home country."
Summit is reissued on 9-20-2004.