Horacio: Yes, we were there too a few years ago with María de Buenos Aires.

Terry: I'm going to go see María de Buenos Aires this Saturday, and I'd like to know how you wrote it. Where'd the idea come from?

Horacio: It came from two places: one is that, in 1965, I had written a book called Romancero Canyengue.

Terry: Yes, it's poetry.

Horacio: It's poetry. And it was the first book, or the first poems that had the good fortune to be in that book, in which I found that I had my own voice. The previous voice could have been OK, but it was like Manzí, it was like Espósito, it was like Lamadrid. But in that book I found myself...the voice in the tango, and Piazzolla liked it so much that he told me, "From now on you're working with me, because what you're doing in words, I'm doing in music." He invited me to do a piece. He said, "No, no, not a tango. Do a big work. I want to do something like West Side Story," he told me. So I went about writing what he'd asked me to write.

Terry: I imagine your heart was beating.

Horacio: Please. Please. Of course! But that meant I would abandon everything else, and I like that kind of thing. And, well, I wrote it in 1967, starting in August or September. And in December Piazzolla came to Montevideo and I read what I had written to him...it was almost everything. And we went to a little bar in Uruguay, and on my bandoneón...because I played the bandoneón too...he wrote the music. We finished it in Buenos Aires and we put it on for the first time on May 8, 1968. And it was so revolutionary. Raul Lavié was going to sing it for us, because he was in Mexico City doing "Man of La Mancha", but then he couldn't come. So now, for the first time, years later, he's singing with us on this tour now. It's fantastic, no?

So it was the first work we'd done with Astor, whom I'd known since 1948 when I was fifteen years old and I went to see his orchestra. I was a friend of his, and more so when I did La Guardia Nueva, which he loved. He always came to play, to talk, to feel like was with the young people, which he liked.

So that's how "María de Buenos Aires" got started: Romancero Canyengue and the time I spent with Piazzolla.

Terry: What are you working on now?

Horacio: I'm working on two books. One is called La Epopeya del Tango Cantado (The Epic Poem of the Tango Song). They're two volumes, five hundred pages, the same size as The Golden Age of the Tango.

Terry: Right. A real tome, eh?

Horacio: Yes, a tome. (Laughter) And I'm working on another one, at the request of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes de Argentina, that's called The National Artistic Heritage: An Inventory of the Tango. So it goes from 1850 to the present, year after year, and it's simply information, eh?