Horacio Ferrer

Horacio Ferrer (June 2, 1933 – December 21, 2014) was a Uruguayan poet, broadcaster, reciter and tango lyricist. Also he has done wide research of tango origins, having many books published on this topic. He is particularly well known for having composed the lyrics for tangos by Astor Piazzolla, such as "Balada para un loco" and "Chiquilín de Bachín". He studied architecture and engineering for eight years but never graduated. In the 1950s, when he was in his early 20s, he helped to produce the weekly radio programme Seleccion de Tangos in Montevideo which aimed to promote new developments in tango. Out of the programme grew El Club de la Guardia Nueva which he founded in Buenos Aires in 1954 to organise concerts in Montevideo for those musicians who were helping to revolutionise tango, such as Aníbal Troilo, Horacio Salgán and particularly Astor Piazzolla and his famous Octeto Buenos Aires. Ferrer’s first meeting with Piazzolla in 1955, after Piazzolla returned from France, would prove an important turning point in Ferrer’s life. For a period of seven years he edited, illustrated and directed the magazine Tangueando, while the tangos and poems he was writing at that time remained unpublished. Between 1956 and 1959 he studied the bandoneon and joined a small tango orchestra as a bandoneonist. He published his first book in 1959 entitled El Tango: su historia y evolución and until 1967 broadcast programmes about the history of tango for Sodre, one of the radio stations of the official Uruguayan network. Piazzolla and Ferrer started to compose a series of tangos in 1967-1968, with a clear social commitment, such as the well-known Chiquilín de Bachín and Juanito Laguna ayuda a su madre. In 1969 they composed a series of tangos in the form of ballads, among which stands out Balada para un loco, performed for the first time with the singer Amelita Baltar in the Buenos Aires Tango Festival. In 1983 he acquired Argentine citizenship, and was president of the Academia Nacional de Tango in Argentina from its foundation in 1990.