Horacio: Yes, he was there a long, long time. We went to New York.

Terry: Do you know that in English he had a Lower East Side accent? I heard him speaking on the radio, and his accent is quite strange, especially when you consider that he's Argentine. Can you give us some comments about the elements of North American music, especially jazz, in Piazzolla's music?

Horacio: I think that really there are not too many jazz elements in Piazzolla's music. They're there, but they're not central. I think that Piazzolla's idea — well, maybe he attained something different from what he proposed — I think he was very essentially a tanguista, playing the bandoneón. That instrument is very specific to the tango.

Other things can be played on the bandoneón, like Bach's music, but the bandoneón is the very face of the tango, and he played the bandoneón. Besides he came from a race of tanguistas, because he played in Anibal Troilo's orchestra, who was a great innovator, and he was an admirer of Osvaldo Pugliese and De Caro, who had been the greatest of previous innovators. So that he was very involved, and all the elements of Piazzolla's music are of the tango.

What happens is that, in the harmonic and contrapuntal parts of his music, he finds things from other musical springs, like jazz, also from European classical music, with which he garnishes the dish. But the beef, the churrasco, is from Buenos Aires. The accompaniment, the decoration is from others, because, besides, he liked differentiating himself from the tangueros because he was different.

I believe he changed the very scale of the tango. And by changing the scale I mean that, before, in the western tradition, there was the 78-rpm record that could hold six or seven phrases of sixteen measures each. He extended that. And he is always passionate in whatever he does, in the beginning, the middle and the end, and so, that way, there are works that last six or eight minutes.

So he changed the scale of the tango, and always with the same depth of feeling. Because there are musicians that have a kind of elastic that is red in color, but when they stretch it, it gets pink. Not him. He's always red, what he does is always intense, it's always very human and very profound in its poetic musical discourse.

Terry: You come from Montevideo, don't you?

Horacio: I was born in Montevideo. I could have been born in Montevideo or Buenos Aires, which in reality are the same city.

Terry: But are there different musical elements in the tango montevideano?

Horacio: No, no. The school is porteño (i.e. from Buenos Aires). The school of the tango is porteño. What we do have in Montevideo is more black people. They've disappeared from Buenos Aires - in total, in all of Argentina now there remain only three thousand black families.

So in Montevideo, there's a lot of candombe and a lot of milonga. Because the milonga is Black. The tango has nothing of the Blacks in it; the milonga is totally Black. It contains the essence of the Blacks. And so Montevideo is more milonguera and more candombera than it is tanguera. But one doesn't know, in the end, which city is more or less tanguera, because the fact is it's the same cultural region, the same substance of customs and habits, with small differences.