In 1935, a 14-year-old Astor Piazzolla was invited to tour with tango superstar Carlos Gardel, and his strict father said no. Gardel’s plane then crashed, killing everyone on board. Piazzolla later joked that without that grounding he would be playing the harp in heaven instead of the bandoneon on earth. This episode traces the turbulent life of the Argentine composer whose musical awakening actually happened in the gritty streets of 1920s Greenwich Village, where traditional tango records inside the apartment collided with jazz on the corners and Bach pouring from neighbors’ windows.

Back in Argentina, Piazzolla played bandoneon in Anibal Troilo’s orchestra and spent his cabaret earnings on composition lessons with Alberto Ginastera, sneaking into the Teatro Colon at dawn to study orchestration. His 1953 symphony with two bandoneons sparked a fistfight in the concert hall and won him a French government grant, leading to the pivotal meeting in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who dismissed his Stravinsky imitations and told him his tango Triunfal was his true genius. We follow the birth of Nuevo Tango with the Octeto Buenos Aires, the grief that produced Adios Nonino in under an hour, and later collaborations with Gerry Mulligan, Jorge Luis Borges and the Kronos Quartet.

• The pawn shop bandoneon his father bought in 1929 and why its illogical button layout is so hard to master
• How Troilo begged him to simplify arrangements so customers could still dance
• Why bringing the bandoneon into a symphony orchestra was seen as class warfare and cultural treason
• The mechanics of Nuevo Tango: no singers, electric guitar, jazz improvisation, fugues and playing standing up
• Cab drivers refusing him rides, his years in Italy during the dictatorship, and the 1990 stroke that ended his career before his death in 1992