Piazzolla

He grew up in New York and was playing bandoneón in tango bands as a teenager. He went to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger and showed her his symphonic scores; she listened and said there was no Piazzolla in them, then asked him to play a tango — and told him that this was him.

Back in Buenos Aires he wrote what he called nuevo tango, bringing fugue, jazz harmony and dissonance into dance-hall music. The traditional tango world treated him as a traitor and some of them threatened violence. His quintet — bandoneón, violin, electric guitar, piano and double bass — is itself the manifesto: this is tango to be listened to, not danced to.