The vibrant sound of tango danced through Auer Hall on Thursday night as the Latin American Music Center invited Latin Grammy winning tango-bassist Pablo Aslan to lead a tango-jazz concert celebrating his donation of his personal music archives.
"Salón Latino Chamber Music Series: 'Pablo Aslan and the Legacy of Tango'" was a two-hour performance featured two ensembles, a tango ensemble featuring Jacobs’ staff and invited guest artists, and a jazz-tango ensemble of Jacobs’ students.
Thursday night marked the finale of a weeklong tango festival that hosted workshops and lectures at IU. The event also celebrated the donations of four decades of tango recordings, scores, historical books and magazines to Jacobs from Aslan in fall 2024 and tango scholar Kristin Wendland in May 2025 after their retirements.
Javier Leon, the director of the Latin American Music Center, said the donations provided an opportunity to showcase the work and repertoire of the tango artists, which spawned the idea for a mini festival of tango music.
“A lot of the events today were kind of designed to highlight some of that same collection,” Leon said. “All these kind of important moments, and a lot of the things in the collections are basically key recordings and scores and transcriptions of materials.”
Aslan said he wanted to donate his personal tango archive to Jacobs because of his rewarding 15-year long relationship with the school. That relationship began when he was helping to sell a collection of Edouard Pecourt’s tango music to IU, now residing at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Over the past 15 years, Aslan has been invited back to perform and lecture at IU. Having that close relationship, Aslan said he thought IU would be the perfect space for his tango music archive, not wanting it to gather dust.
“I just felt like, instead of it sitting in boxes waiting for me to see what to do that it would immediately acquire a new life and in such a good library,” Aslan said. “You know, the fact that there’s a Latin American music specialty. I thought it was the perfect place.”
Aslan curated the performance Thursday night, hoping to reflect the inner contents of the collection and highlight the music he has played throughout his career.
The first act of the night featured Aslan playing alongside two Jacobs staff members, guitarist Jiji Kim and pianist Aram Arkelyan, and two guest artists that had Aslan invited, violinist Marcelo Rebuffi and bandoneonist Winnie Cheung. The bandoneon is an instrument which expands and contracts to create sounds.
The ensemble played four works by Argentine composer and bandoneónist Ástor Piazzolla: “Michelángelo ’70” (1969), “Milogna del ángel” (1965), “Verano porteño” (1964) and “Invierno porteño” (1970).
The pieces featured lively tango music with solos allowing each instrument to showcase its technique. Aslan said the music felt unreal in several moments during the performance.
“There’s one moment in one of the pieces that every time I get there, it’s one of those moments where it’s like, ‘I can't believe this sublime music I get to play,’” Aslan said. “Milogna del ángel has just always been a magical piece.”
The dim lighting of Auer Hall grew brighter as three members of the ensemble left the stage, leaving Rebuffi and Arkelyan to perform their duet of “Le grand tango” (1982), another one of Piazzola’s pieces.
As the melody dwindled, Aslan walked back onto the stage with a jazz ensemble of five Jacobs’ students, again picking up his bass preparing to play four more jazz-tango songs.
The student ensemble was organized by junior jazz-trumpetist Lucas Hendershot, who was approached by IU’s jazz program to put together a band for Aslan. Hendershot asked musicians within the jazz program who he thought would be a good fit, and the ensemble began rehearsing last week.
Hendershot said the opportunity to work with Aslan was a rewarding experience.
“I don’t know what I expected, but he was incredibly friendly, incredibly eager to just share this music with us,” Hendershot said. “You know, he came into our rehearsal and he was like ‘I’m not going to try and, like, teach you everything about tango. Let’s just make music.’”
The archives left by Aslan and Wendland will be an exhibition titled “From the Pampas to Indiana: Discovering Tango in Two Special Collections” in the Cook Music Library until March 15.
