For the world of Tango he was simply “el Viejo” or “el Maestro”. He definitely was the Master of all of us, but he was never old to anyone. On the contrary, quite a few regarded him as eternal, or one week less, as Macedonio Fernandez used to say. Osvaldo Pugliese lived longer than every other Master musician; like Horowitz and Gil Evans, he made an art of his longevity. Not one single tango slipped out of his fingers. In 1994, he celebrated at the same time his 75° anniversary in Tango, the 70° anniversary of Recuerdo, his most famous tune, and the 50° anniversary of his orchestra.
He lived so long that he arrived to know, among the infirmities the old age fatally brings over, the roaring solitude of senile deafness. This nuisance didn’t stop him: in 1992, three or four notes from his beloved Arolas’ “La cachila” were enough to move the audience to tears in Teatro Alvear, that was packed with people who came to listen to el Viejo playing with his Sexteto Tango’s old pals.
On the other hand the Pugliese’s real instrument was the orchestra he established in 1939 and kept alive till the end. Like a good and orthodox communist, he organized his band into a cooperative: all the musicians got paid according to a seniority scale and the duties assigned following the inclinations of each one. Nevertheless, only musical criteria were applied to allot the musical roles. Sometimes, this led to a big mess: the first bandoneòn by length of service played the forth bandoneòn’s part sitting on the second bandoneòn’s stool. Possibly for these reasons, also the detractors always considered the Pugliese Orchestra as the best Tango band of all times. Only  the finest dancers dared to dance Pugliese; the other ones sat down and listened. Its extremely plastic beat, its refined polyrhythm, its acrobatic rubato, made it a tough orchestra to dance to, but “linda para escuchar”.
Singing some Tango’s melody to oneself, or even humming it, is a daily practice for every music lover. With Pugliese it is as hard as following the course of certain unavailable mountain creeks that at times pour, then disappear, then come back two miles down, flow again from a stony ground and end up wedging in the subsurface.
Pugliese, like a magician, concealed or revealed, but mostly revealed: he always held the non-playing notes in great esteem. He could barely tolerate the singers, who were commercially indispensable in those years, for their habit of singing everything: not allowed to skip the syllables, they sang the commas as well. Pugliese was totally insensitive to lyrics. If his Orchestra was pure gold, his songs laddered the pantyhoses. It wasn’t a matter of bad taste: Pugliese was, because he wanted to be, a populist in poetry since he was an aristocratic in music.
Maybe he was afraid to be mistaken for one of those intellectuals who are isolated from the masses; he thought to himself rather as a “martillero”, a Popular Music’s worker and he was proud to be a Spartacist; very qualified on the matter too.
In fact, he used to travel to Italy, one of the few countries he never played, on his parents’ tracks (dad from Puglia, mom from Piemonte) and trailing the rebel slave Spartacus, who he pronounced Espartacus. He visited the Colosseum many times in order to affirm he wouldn’t ever take the side of circenses. And he felt like Espartacus when the peronist government put him in jail from time to time; it was just for snatches because of his popularity. In those cases, the Pugliese Orchestra used to play without Pugliese: a closed piano with a red carnation on the keyboard. Clavel rojo (red carnation) is also a tango dedicated to him by Carel Kraayenhof, namely the Sexteto Canyengue’s director as well as founder of the Tango Division at the Rotterdam Conservatory which Pugliese was Honorary President of.
As a composer he wasn’t prolific, yet he wrote four decisive tangos at least. Recuerdo, that many repute the best tango ever, was written in 1924 when he was just nineteen years old. It opened a new historical phase called Guardia Nueva in the music of Buenos Aires.
Twenty years later, when he was at last able to count on his own band, he composed a trilogy of masterpieces, La Yumba, Malandraca and Negracha, that made a synthesis of all the former Tango with a good part of what came afterwards, including Piazzolla. More than a composer, Pugliese was a distiller, likewise  Thelonious Monk: they both worked and modified the essence. With Monk he had in common also a certain metaphoric language: when he explained a syncopation to his musicians, he said that it was like the milongueras’ legs. His peculiar marcato was like a heavy wardrobe dragged around twice for measure or also the intermittent collapse of the furniture, on the beats 1 and 3.
During almost half century many marvellous musicians played at Pugliese’s side, like for example Osvaldo Ruggiero, king of bandoneòn, Enrique Camerano, first violin par excellence, Emilio Balcarce, great arranger and violinist or the powerful bassist Aniceto Rossi. Even though they already were talented musicians, with el Viejo they all became masters; they created a style that strongly marked almost three decades, up to the central sixties when in Argentina, as well as all over the world, everything changed. The Buenos Aires 600 orchestras crumbled in numberless small combos that financially were less demanding. The instrumental Tango changed once and for all under the Nuevo Tango’s driving force; on the other hand the danced Tango was abandoned for other anglo-american rhythms.
Pugliese survived. His old comrades’ desertion was a harder blow to him: they stabbed him in the back and left him pratically without band. They hadn’t been is speaking terms for twelve years, until his 75° anniversary’s celebration at the Buenos Aires’ Luna Park in front of 10.000 people.
Osvaldo Pugliese was celebrated also at the Colòn Theatre in 1985, with an unforgettable concert. During the final, thrilling Yumba, he could reunite all the members of his orchestra together, even those who had served just for a few months.
That night, the audience was even more touched by the emotion and the visible pride of an old man in his heighty who finally succeded in bringing his band, his musicians, his popular music, right inside the Sanctuary of the Great Art.
He was the noble Espartacus, at last in Heaven.

© Marco Castellani -  end of July 1995  

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