Vuelvo al Sur

Astor Piazzolla's "Vuelvo al Sur" — I Return to the South — is tango nuevo at its most cinematically complete. The song was written for Fernando Solanas's 1988 film of the same name, and it carries the narrative charge of cinema — this is music that knows it is accompanying something larger than itself, images of Buenos Aires and exile and the particular melancholy of being away from a city that has formed your nervous system. The bandoneon melody is Piazzolla at his most lyrical, the characteristic chromaticism and rhythmic dislocation of nuevo tango present but subordinated to the long expressive line. Roberto Goyeneche sings it on the original recording with a roughness that sounds like accumulated miles — his voice has none of Gardel's polish, and that's exactly right; Goyeneche sounds like the actual South, not its idealization. The production has the quality of good Buenos Aires recording from that era — warm but not lush, honest about the limits of the studio space. This song lives in the category of music that induces physical longing for places you may never have been, that constructs an elsewhere inside you and then makes you homesick for it.