Michelangelo 70

Galliano turns Piazzolla into big-band drama

A page that labels this an instrumental “lyric” offers no words to interpret; the meaningful story is in the arrangement. “Michelangelo 70” is Astor Piazzolla’s tango, appearing on Richard Galliano’s *Ten Years Ago*, recorded with the Brussels Jazz Orchestra. The album, released in 2008, was Galliano’s first big-band recording as a leader. For an accordionist whose career had moved among tango, jazz, chanson and classical contexts, the project posed a specific problem: how to place his instrument inside a large ensemble without reducing it to a soloist floating above a generic brass backdrop.

Chris May’s 2009 All About Jazz review identifies “Michelangelo 70” as one of only two tangos on the record and notes that Galliano arranged both. His solution was to make the orchestra behave, at times, like an expanded accordion: brass and reeds move in close harmonies, creating the instrument’s dense chords and sharp, percussive accents at a much larger scale. May describes the Piazzolla piece as receiving a dramatic, full-on arrangement. The track’s identity therefore rests not simply on quoting a tango classic, but on a translation of its rhythmic and harmonic force into the massed colours of a European jazz orchestra.

The review’s enthusiasm is album-wide rather than a separate single review: May calls *Ten Years Ago* a “thumping five-star triumph” and praises the balance between American big-band language and Galliano’s French chanson and tango influences. That context makes “Michelangelo 70” a telling centrepiece. Piazzolla’s composition supplies the tango lineage; Galliano’s accordion and arrangement recast it in a contemporary ensemble language; the Brussels Jazz Orchestra adds the scale and colour of a full band. Because the track is instrumental, the lyric-page stub should be corrected rather than expanded into invented words. The better listening question is how much orchestral force a tango can absorb while keeping its dance tension alive.