Horacio Malvicino

Horacio Malvicino (born 20 October 1929, Concordia, Entre Ríos Province, Argentina) is a jazz and tango electric guitarist and composer who played for many years with the tango musician Ástor Piazzolla in several of his ensembles.

The son of Esteben Malvicino, a railway employee, Horacio grew up in Concordia where, between and ages of 6 and 14, he was taught to play the guitar by Augustin Satalia. His teacher would only allow him to play classical music and in those days jazz was rarely heard in the city. However, he got to know the music of the jazz guitarists Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt and the jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman, by listening to a friend’s records of these musicians. He also listened to the tango music of Ástor Piazzolla's Orquesta Típica on Radio Splendid.

Arriving in Buenos Aires in 1947, he studied medicine for five years until music took over his life and he became part of the bop generation centred on the Bop Club Argentino. This venue was frequented by the Argentine jazz tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri, the Argentine pianist Lalo Schifrin and Rubén López Furst. It was here that the first attempts to development modern jazz in Argentina were taking place in response to the great changes in the jazz world, initiated by the American jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker.

By the time Piazzolla met Malvicino for the first time in 1954, improvising in the Bop Club, Malvicino had already played with several orquesta típicas of the time including those of Fernando Roca, Eduardo Armani and Rene Cospito. In 1955 he joined Piazzolla’s Octeto Buenos Aires which would pioneer nuevo tango, a new approach to tango, until then dominated by the traditional orquesta típicas of the 1930s and 1940s. This would mark a watershed in the history of tango and set Piazzolla on a collision course with the tango establishment. The jazz-like improvisations of Malvicino on electric guitar in, for example, Piazzolla's 1955 composition Marron y Azul, had never been heard before in tango.

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