Reinventing Tango.

A feature documentary film on legendary tango master Astor Piazzolla, titled ASTOR PIAZZOLLA: REINVENTING TANGO, began production in Buenos Aires this week. The documentary, which is being scripted by Fernando Gonzalez, the Emmy award-winning screenwriter of NOTES FROM THE MAMBO INN, will be available for worldwide distribution from Mediamax.

Composer and bandleader Astor Piazzolla was accused by traditionalists to have killed tango. In fact, he might have saved it. His New Tango touched millions around the world watching the royal wedding of Dutch prince Willem Alexander, was once a hit for Grace Jones and continues to fill the great halls of music, played by artists like Yo Yo Ma, Mstislav Rostropovich, Emmanuel Ax and the Kronos Quartet. Forget what you know about tango. Piazzolla’s New Tango, is the tango of a new century.

For the first time ever, those who shared in the excitement of a musical revolution tell their stories of how Piazzolla never played it safe. The documentary features exclusive interviews with the bandleader’s surviving offspring, Daniel and Diana Piazzolla, fellow guitarist and composer Horacio Malvicino, and Piazzolla biographer Natalio Gorin. Shot on location in the composer’s residence and neighborhood haunts in Buenos Aires and Paris, this New Tango primer spans from concert performances in Miami’s South Beach to Tokyo ballrooms where tango is the latest craze.

This exciting, moving documentary is the first episode in an original new series titled LATIN MUSIC STORIES. The series explores the roots and the future of Latin music through the lives of some of its greatest artists: a must-see for anyone interested in the dazzling evolution of music celebrated around the world.

Mediamax founder Eric Mathis said: “This first episode of LATIN MUSIC STORIES has attracted the interest of potential European co-producers. Our goal at MIP is to close these deals.”

In Piazzolla’s music one can hear echoes of the old milongas, the neighborhood tango dances, but also of Bach, Ravel and Bartok, the lyrical Puccini and the accents of old Eastern European Jewish music, heard as a child in Greenwich Village. This is a music of deep passions but unsentimental; violent but also disarmingly tender; exquisitely constructed but always played on the edge, as if on a dare. It is a music that blurs the line between classical and popular; at once sophisticated and earthy, universal yet profoundly local.

“We are thrilled to have Fernando Gonzalez write the story of Piazzolla,” says Paola Prado, President of Prado Media, co-producer of ASTOR PIAZZOLLA: REINVENTING TANGO. “Gonzalez is a recognized Latin music expert who is intimately familiar with the origins of New Tango. In his work as music critic for The Washington Post, The Miami Herald and the TheBoston Globe, he has interviewed many of today’s best musicians and earned the respect of the music industry.”