Tango Actual

Raras Partituras 4 – Horacio Salgán (Epsa Music 2008)

2009-07-09T14:24:00.001-03:00

Pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader Horacio Salgán marked his 90^th birthday in 2006, and the nonprofit musical organization TangoVia Buenos Aires has been celebrating the milestone with a series of musical events, including concerts, film productions, and the recent release of this interesting recording. Salgán is one of the last living masters from the heyday of the genre: aside from his innovative orquesta work from the 1940s, he is also a founding member of the Quinteto Real, a cornerstone ensemble of post-golden age tango that is still active today in various formations (though no longer featuring Salgán himself at the piano). Several of Salgán’s compositions, including “Don Agustín Bardi” and “A fuego lento,” have become standard repertoire, and his work as an arranger is widely considered just as musically significant as his composing. His musical voice is distinctly but subtly modern, incorporating innovative melodic, harmonic, and formal features into the core gestural vocabulary of tango without embracing the more jarring kinds of musical ruptures favored by Piazzolla and some of his followers. Indeed, whereas one could argue that Piazzolla’s musical innovations only supercharged the already existing features of the genre’s core emotional vocabulary—passion, violence, oblivion—Salgán’s music expanded that vocabulary such that it could account for things like joy and exhilaration, resulting in an at times “happy tango” sound that would be something of an oxymoron in any less capable hands.

All this and more is on display in this album, the latest in a series that began with violinist Ramiro Gallo’s excellent recording of the same name, which I would translate as “unusual scores” (Epsa Music 2006). And the album is a bit unusual. Divided into three parts, the first 10 tracks feature new studio performances of Salgán’s solo piano music, most if not all of which has only previously been heard by Salgán’s students or close associates. The second part features four of Salgán’s compositions and/or arrangements for orquesta típica and other instrumental configurations from the 1940s and 50s, recorded live at a recent concert by the Gran Orquesta TangoVia under the direction of Salgán’s son César, who also plays piano with the group. The final three tracks of the album are indeed “unusual scores,” or, as the case may be, unusual archival recordings, which Salgán’s deliberately selected from his private collection for the occasion of this release. These include Salgán’s first commercial recording (a Brazilian chorro!), a previously unreleased 1946 demo of Salgán’s “Mis calles porteñas” (a solo piano arrangement of which starts off the album), and a 30 some year old home recording of an organ fueled jazz waltz dedicated to César Salgán.

The scope and range of Salgán’s musical appetite is immediately evident in the solo piano music included here. Nicely performed by Andrés Linetzky, one of the few important pianists active in the contemporary tango scene to have studied directly with Salgán, these pieces at once bring to mind the Romantic grandiosity of Gershwin, the intricate playfulness of Joplin, and even the wide-intervaled modernism of Herbie Hancock’s classic Blue Note recordings. The eclecticism of this material, which includes not only tangos but also zambas (a genre of Argentine folkloric music) and some Brazilian forms, is such that one could not be faulted for forgetting that this music is by one of the foremost composers of modern tango; the telltale síncopa accompaniment patterns and other typical gestures of the genre can be heard in these pieces, though often well below the surface. Such is not the case of the ensemble music included later in the recording, where the varied instrumentation of the larger orquesta brings out the driving bite of what are often rather cerebral compositions and arrangements. This is where Salgán’s unique contributions to the genre can most easily be heard and appreciated. Take, for example, his arrangement of the Expósitos’ hyper-standard “Naranjo en flor” (1944). Usually a vehicle for the kind of “grasa” vocal performances that are both the best and the worst thing about tango, here the orquesta supports the singer with an almost organically developing accompaniment that makes the rather unusual features of the arrangement—the countermelodies that extend across vocal phrases, the dense passages of rhythmic counterpoint—sound as if they were standard practice. These same tendencies can be heard in Salgán’s arrangement of De Caro’s “Flores negras” for piano and strings, though here the intricacy of the musical ideas at times bog down the overall flow of the piece.

This, of course, is the risk that Salgán necessarily takes with his particular musical approach, which, when considered in broader perspective, speaks to both the appeal and the somewhat polemic aspect of his musical legacy as a whole. While he is now clearly entrenched within the tango canon (as evidenced by connoisseur recordings such as this), many tango listeners continue to be somewhat reluctant if not suspicious about his work, feeling that his modernist tendencies depart too far from the popular musical roots of the genre. Either way, this recording clearly demonstrates that it is worth giving even the most “unusual” aspects of Salgán’s complex musical world another careful listen.

Tango Actual Returns; Astillero at the Montreal Jazz Festival, Joe's Pub (NYC)

2009-07-02T12:41:00.005-03:00

Between a new baby, finishing my dissertation, and working a new teaching job, it has been quite a complicated year for me, and the blog has unfortunately fallen by the wayside. Now that the proverbial dust has begun to settle, however, I hope to make more regular updates to the site. Stay tuned for more record reviews, news, and announcements from the world of contemporary tango music as I hear and hear of it.

This first announcement is that it looks like it is going to be another exciting year for contemporary tango at the Montreal Jazz Festival, following last year's showings by Melingo and the Orquesta Tipica Imperial. Astillero, a sextet of two bandoneones, two strings, piano and bass plus occasional vocalist that is at the very heart of the contemporary tango scene in Buenos Aires, is going to be playing two free shows on the festival's main outdoor stage the night of July 4th. The group plays only original compositions, something that is still relatively rare in Buenos Aires today, and their sound, which they describe as "the tango of rupture," is something to behold: bold, brash, and violent, drained of the nostalgia that fuels so much tango while still remaining a wonderfully Romantic (with a capital "R"). But don't let the sometimes shocking surface of their music fool you: their work has a formal sophistication that stands up to repeated listenings (it in fact gets better after repeated listenings, so attend both sets if you can) and an elaborate gestural vocabulary that is clearly rooted in an orthodox musical history of the genre. I will post a more detailed review of their work here in the coming weeks, and would love to hear from anyone who makes it to their show in Montreal (I, unfortunately, will not be there), but in the meantime I hope people can take advantage of this rare opportunity to hear one of Buenos Aires's really vital groups outside of Argentina.

Also: Astillero at Joe's Pub in NYC, Sunday July 5th, 9.30 pm. Not to be missed.

check out:

www.astillerotango.com.ar

www.montrealjazzfest.com

Fernando Otero at Joe’s Pub

2008-02-08T19:24:00.000-02:00

Wednesday, February 6, 2008.

Fernando Otero is an Argentine pianist and composer who has been based in New York for a number of years now. This concert—my first review of a live show in quite some time—marked the release of his first album on Nonesuch Records, Pagina de Buenos Aires (2008). This recording will no doubt go a long way towards making Otero a star here in the States, though he has already gotten a lot of attention from fellow musicians. Otero has recently performed and recorded some of his music with clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera, and the new music super group (and Nonesuch label mates) Kronos Quartet are scheduled to premiere a new piece of his at Carnegie Hall later this month. However, those who are not new to Otero’s music will be disappointed in that much if not most of the “new” recording has in fact been culled from previous releases, including 2003’s Plan, featuring mixed ensembles, and 2005’s Revision, a densely haunting duet recording with violinist Nick Danielson. I can understand why Otero’s new label would not want to title their first album with him “Fernando Otero’s Greatest Hits,” but I, for one, hope that Nonesuch gets sufficient return on their investment in Otero to warrant producing genuinely new material for future releases.

This concert featured Otero and violinist Danielson in their duo format, and illustrated the productively uncomfortable space Otero’s music straddles between tango, jazz, and “classical” composition. Given that mix, we may be tempted to think of Otero as some kind of heir apparent to Piazzolla, though listening to his music does not really justify such comparisons. While some of Otero’s recorded material nods at tango—with marcatos, síncopas, arrastres and other genre markers utilized sparingly—here the most obvious “tangoism” was the violinist’s occasional percussive scratching on the strings behind the bridge. That and the general violence of the music, though even that was taken to nearly unrecognizable extremes. At even his most bombastic, Piazzolla’s music is violent the way the knife-wielding malevos of early tango songs were violent, killing with honor, grace, skill, and dignity, but killing nonetheless. Otero’s music, on the other hand, goes at you with his bare hands, suddenly grabbing you and shaking you, tossing you aside abruptly and almost indifferently when it is all over.

Otero plays the piano with that same kind of manic energy, attacking the keyboard with his whole body so that hardly a moment goes by without all ten fingers solidly in the game. This makes for an exhilarating racket, especially when he concentrates in the lower register of the instrument, though I thought it was somewhat less effective in more mid range, melodic passages, especially given the sparse instrumentation. Danielson, for his part, matched this intensity throughout, skillfully executing pieces that unfolded like a series of disjointed outbursts rather than some kind of sequential journey. In a short piece for solo violin, Danielson sawed away at his instrument with the energy of an old time fiddler keeping a dancing room on its feet. And while dancing would be a highly unlikely response to Otero’s music, I could imagine how well his ideas would translate to the string quartet format, and I look forward to hearing his work for Kronos.

Indeed, Otero’s overall musical voice, at least on this night, seems to have much more in common with the edgy modernism of the composers that Kronos championed before they went on their world music binge than any kind of tango music, contemporary or otherwise. So while it might feel natural to mention Otero in the same breath as someone like Piazzolla, comparing his music to the dissonant expressiveness of composers like Shostakovich or Messiaen would in fact be more appropriate. Gratefully, Nonesuch does not seem to be promoting Otero as a tango musician for tango audiences, an association that, let’s face it, would probably either miss or close the ears of the listeners that will really be interested in this music. That said, Otero, for now, is living in the shadow of tango and seems to be enjoying it quite a bit. About half way through the set, he channeled Augustus Pablo by picking up a melodica and taking the audience on an avant-garde romp through “La Cumparsita.” Knowing glances flashed across the room as the many tango fans in the audience recognized the classic/cliché song. And while the musicians were clearly making an artistic statement with this inside joke, next time hopefully not so many people will get it.

http://www.fernandootero.com/

Julio Pane, Instantáneas (EPSA Music) 2007.

2008-01-07T22:22:00.000-02:00

Let’s start with the instrument itself. The bandoneón is a button squeezebox instrument of German origin originally designed to stand in for the pipe organ in poor Lutheran churches. With a range covering more than five octaves—from a rumbling low register to a rich but piercing high end—it is well suited to the task, though I doubt Bach chorales are the first thing that comes to anyone’s mind when hearing the instrument these days. Usually played sitting down, with the bellows resting on the lap, the bandoneón has 71 buttons distributed between left and right hand keyboards. Unlike the more familiar accordion, where the buttons sound whole chords, here each button sounds a single note. Or, rather, two single notes: one when the bellow is moved outwards and another when it is pushed inwards. That discrepancy effectively doubles the instrument’s number of keyboards to four, the complexity of which is compounded even further by the seeming randomness of the arrangement of pitches, which is different for the left and right hand. Like the layout of letters in the QWERTY keyboard, there must be some reasoned story as to how and why the pitches on the bandoneón ended up where they are, but it is by no means self-evident. A good image for playing the bandoneón, then, is like having four computer keyboards, two for each hand, one going in, one going out, that you have to play simultaneously—without looking—and with musicality. And you thought learning piano was hard!

Once you learn the basics, however, the possibilities of the instrument seem almost unlimited. To all the melodic and harmonic capacities of a piano the bandoneón adds expressiveness and control of a wind instrument: true sustain, crescendo and diminuendo, vibrato, popping accents, etc. It is a shame that its use has been limited almost entirely to tango. (As one classically trained player I met told me, only playing tango with the bandoneón is like only playing blues with the piano; both are great traditions, but the instruments are capable of a lot more.) At the same time, enduring through the difficulties of mastering an essentially extinct instrument and using it to create a rich musical world apart feels like an apt (if overly romantic) metaphor for tango itself, if not Argentina as a whole.

The full extent of that world apart is beautifully captured in Instantáneas (“snapshots”), the recent recording by Julio Pane (pronounced “pa-knee”). Many musicians I know consider Pane the best bandoneonist alive, if not the best of all time, and do so without hesitation. An absolute master of the instrument, Pane has performed with many of tango’s great figures—Salgán, Federico, Piazzolla—though he never reached their heights of fame. The consummate musicians’ musician, there are, to my knowledge, only two previous recordings that featuring Pane’s musical voice front and center, one a trio date (A las orquestas, EPSA Music 2000) and the other a duo with guitarist Juanjo Domínguez (Un placer, EPSA Music 2003). Here, all accompaniment is left aside in favor of Pane’s solo bandoneón, recreating the warmly intimate setting of Pane’s now legendary weekly gigs at the Miramar restaurant in the perennially unfashionable but deeply tanguero Buenos Aires neighborhood of Boedo. At Miramar, it was just Pane, his instrument, and his profound familiarity with the tango repertoire. He would improvise his way through the classics like a great jazz pianist playing near background music in a no-name bar, creating intricate musical worlds that are both familiar and new, disappearing forever just as effortlessly as they came into being.

In his brief liner notes to this disc, Pane expresses some reservation at attempting to recreate the informality of his Miramar gigs in the obviously less familiar context of the recording studio. “It is one thing to improvise in public and a very different thing to do a recording without a written note,” he says, “where there was no other option than to do everything in one take.” We all have producer Ignacio Varchausky to thank for talking Pane into it, because the results are truly stunning, all the more so because they are improvised. There are the playful melodic fantasies of “Chiclana” and the dissonant rhythmic bite of “Chiqué;” the syncopated frolic of “Shusheta” and the brooding melancholy of “Una emoción;” the lush romanticism of “Flores negras,” where the organ-like capacity of the bandoneón can be plainly heard, and the emotional whirlwind of “Los mareados.” The single notated arrangement included here, of Pane’s original composition “Mi María,” highlights his modern tendencies, with unexpected harmonic modulations under a motivic melodic gesture. It is a compelling piece, if lacking some of the playfulness of the improvised performances.

This is a great—if intense—recording, with none of the 14 pieces breaking the five minute mark. As accessible (and jaw dropping) as it is on the first spin, it will reward repeated close listening, opening up the individual pieces which, the first few times through, can begin to blend into one another. The best thing of all is that this is apparently the first in a series of solo bandoneón recordings that will be produced by Varchausky and his TangoVia Buenos Aires foundation and released by EPSA Music in the coming years. Rumor has it that future editions of this “art of the bandoneón” series, some of which are already in the works, will include the playing and music of Néstor Marconi and the legendary Leopoldo Federico. If anything like this recording, those future editions will be both musically and historically significant.

Walter “Chino” Laborde y Diego “Dipi” Kvitko, Tango Tango Volumen 1 (Típica Records) 2006.

2007-12-13T19:13:00.000-03:00

“Chino” Laborde is probably best known as the hyper-charismatic singer for the Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro. His performances with that group are both absolutely genuine and totally over the top: he sings about the deep pains of loss and nostalgia at the heart of many tango songs in a way that would bring water to the eyes if he were not sporting an electric blue afro wig, a Japanese kimono, or holding a grotesquely large (and empty) bottle of wine. His performances come off as ironically sincere, with the goofy visuals more about tempering the sometimes extreme sentiments of classic tango in a way that allows his generation of young Argentines to identify with the genre rather than be embarrassed by it. And it is all there musically: Laborde’s baritone ranges from a hushed speaking voice to near-operatic outbursts, and he steers each song through a carefully constructed dramatic arc based on attention to details, hanging on single words if not individual syllables.

Unfortunately, as the Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro has moved more firmly in the rockero direction over the past few years—with heavier accents, faster tempos, and (at times monotonously) louder volumes—they have left little if any room for the more subtle aspects of Laborde’s voice. This is too bad, not only because they essentially waste Laborde’s many real talents as a singer, but because without the musical nuance his goofball performances with the group can begin to border on kitsch. Listening to the recent recording Tango Tango Volumen 1, then, I can’t help but imagine that Laborde has been feeling the same way.

Here, in lieu of the large orquesta, the setting is reduced to the bare minimum of Laborde’s voice and the single guitar of Diego “Dipi” Kvitko. They focus on the greatest of the great songs from the classic tango repertoire, which are supplemented by one original vals by Laborde and an instrumental milonga by Kvitko. Their devotion to this repertoire is articulated through genre designations that operate as a lexicon of enthusiastic Argentine slang, and provide the title of the album. These songs are not just tangos, but tango tangos or tangazos (including “Cristal,” “Cuando me entrés a fallar,” “9 de Julio,” and other classiscs).

Lyrics for the songs are usefully printed in the liner notes, and while there is no English translation provided, cracking open the Spanish dictionary would be highly rewarded as understanding even the gist of the texts will greatly enhance your appreciation of the songs. It will also help you understand why the disc comes packaged with a small dagger: when, at the final verse of “Antiguo reloj de cobre,” an apparition of the desperately broke narrator’s dead mother appears before him to tell him that his deceased father forgives him for pawning the family’s heirloom copper watch for just “four dirty pesos,” you are going to want to plunge the metaphoric blade in your heart like Romeo over Juliet. That’s why they call it tango tango!

If the songs are great, the performances are good. The duo format makes the songs flexible as if made of soft clay, which I am sure is thrilling for musicians who might feel suffocated by larger ensembles. But all too often that same flexibility impedes the overall drive of a song, especially at the conclusions, where songs that you want to explode with a bang here tend to fade with a quiet sigh. Kvitko, who also plays in the quartet of legendary guitarist Aníbal Arias, is a proficient guitarist and nice arranger, but he just does not have the power to keep up with Laborde in this intimate of a setting. On the recording, the mismatch between the two performers is at worst distracting; when playing live (I heard them last year in Buenos Aires) Kvitko might as well be in another room. The record picks up on the handful of tracks that feature an ensemble of three or four guitarists, a more familiar instrumentation for accompanying sung tangos like these, and for good reason. These songs are often larger than life, as are those, like Laborde, who sing them convincingly. If his work with large ensembles has not given Laborde enough space with the songs, the duo, almost ironically, gives him too much.

Cuarteto Cedrón, Frisón Frisón (Acqua Records) 2006.

2007-10-05T19:31:00.000-03:00

Wrestling with categories is a cliché of criticism. When trying to describe the work of real artists, labeling their music X or describing their style as Y seems to always leave too much out and gloss over too much of what is left. (Just ask Ken Burns about “jazz.”) In the case of Juan “Tata” Cedrón, it really does feel difficult if not unfair to describe him as a tango singer, a tango guitarist, or even a tango composer. As trite as it may sound, these categories just do not begin to cover the depth and range of Cedrón’s music. He is an artist, plain and simple. And his music makes one of the most compelling cases for why tango as a genre might still be relevant today.
Cedrón does this not by bridging tango’s post-Piazzolla tendencies towards either the popular or the erudite—party music or concert music—but by obliterating them. With its lumbering, lunging rhythmic base and its organic approach to melodic and harmonic development, Cedrón’s music renders tango’s dearly held divisions between high and low, popular and art, simple and complex irrelevant and, frankly, almost embarrassing. That it does this in an unobtrusive way makes it all that much more refreshing. Cedrón’s music does not bang you over the head: it is not going to start an artistic revolution or launch a thousand ships. No, like the knife-wielding compadritos that inhabit Borges’ fictions, Cedrón’s music waits patiently along the edge of the action, absorbed in its immediate concerns, almost unnoticed. It will strike only when provoked, but kill you with the flair of an artist when it does… Ok, Ok, I am getting carried away, but you need to hear this guy!

Cedrón is quite a bit older than many of the artists I write about here, a member of the so-called “lost generation” of musicians committed to tango between the end of its “golden age” in the late 1950s and the current renovation of the genre. Even within that group, Cedrón is something of an outsider, having lived in France for nearly thirty years and only recently returning to Buenos Aires for good. During his years abroad, Cedrón released a long series of excellent recordings that together trace the evolutionary consistency of his unique music, of which this recent disc, Frisón Frisón, is a logical extension. His compositions, often rooted in the traditional rhythmic and structural frameworks of tango, milonga campera, and vals, grumble along in a space between oblivion and ecstasy, violence and tenderness, hope and abandonment, but without sentimentality. His arrangements and ensemble favor the lower registers, highlighting the left hand of the bandoneón and substituting a viola for the violin, which do not support his voice as much as dance around it. And what a voice it is. Imagine if Neil Young had been born in Argentina and spent thirty years in Latin Quarter cafes smoking cigarettes and sipping vino tinto with soda late into the night, giving him an oddly delicate and nasal high register and a gravelly, almost coughing low end. Add a PhD in Latin American literature to that image we begin to approach Juan Cedrón. Indeed, Cedrón’s near scholarly engagement with literature is at the heart of his musical concept, which involves setting preexisting texts by Argentine writers to new, original music. These texts, of course, were usually not intended to be used this way, but one would never know it when listening to Cedrón’s careful settings. Many of his recordings concentrate on the work of a singe author—often giants like Cortázar or Tuñón. With Frisón Frisón, Cedrón applies himself to the unedited material of super lyricist Homero Manzi (1907—1951).

Marking the centennial year of Manzi’s birth, the songs heard here are alternately reserved and bawdy, and feature Cedrón’s voice not only in the company of his eponymous quartet of guitar, bandoneón, viola and bass but also an ensemble of four guitars (a classic setting for tango song) and even an orquesta típica. This last group is featured on an (ironically) instrumental piece by one of Manzi’s most celebrated collaborators, Aníbal Troilo. This large ensemble piece gives a nice sense of context for the kind of music Manzi was listening to in his day, but the project really shines on Cedrón’s original compositions. The slow agony of “Espejito de agua” dissolves into a concluding passage of solo viola, over which Cedrón, in a speaking voice, almost whispers the final lines. “Mala estrella” features lovely interplay between the voice, the viola, and the bandoneón, making it sound as if it was conceived as a trio for tango ensemble rather than a tango song. The texts themselves, of course, are a pleasure, though I am not enough of an expert on Manzi to know how big of a contribution releasing these songs will make to our understanding of him as an artist and historical figure. Though all in all, this recording makes a great introduction to two fascinating figures, Manzi and Cedrón.

La Chicana at the Torcuato Tasso

2007-05-28T17:26:00.000-03:00

Saturday, May 26, 2007

This was the last of four shows that La Chicana played at the Torcuato Tasso over the past two weekends, and the place was more crowded than I have ever seen it. They even had extra tables set up in the back hallway by the bathrooms, and every seat was taken. For good reason, too: while La Chicana is well known and liked in Argentina, you would probably be more likely to see them play live in London or Madrid, where they tour regularly, than you would here in Buenos Aires, where they play only a few times a year. Maybe it was the size of the crowd or the rarity of the occasion—or maybe it was the simple excitement of it being Saturday night in Buenos Aires again—but there was a real charge in the air before the music got started. That energy made for a great temporary adieu to the Tasso itself, which is going to be closed for at least the next month while the building is renovated.

The cosmopolitanism of La Chicana’s performance schedule is reflected in their music, making them sound like much more than a tango band, though their songs, style, and attitude are clearly rooted in the genre. Or, I should say, in the genre’s roots. Centered around the core duo of singer Dolores Solá and songwriter/guitarist Acho Estol, La Chicana draws their inspiration from tango’s formative moment in the early 20th century, when the genre was just beginning to emerge from the social and musical mix of immigrant Buenos Aires. So while they are one of the few contemporary groups to write and perform original tangos—no small feat in the highly critical and nostalgic atmosphere that surrounds the genre today—the group positions themselves more as time traveling participants in early tango history than some kind of contemporary vanguard. Which is not to say that their music sounds old. Indeed, their poppy mix of guitar, electric bass, violin, bandoneón, and percussion would probably go over as well if not better in international world music venues like Joe’s Pub in New York than it would in some Buenos Aires tango clubs.

At the same time, they are not a world music band: while La Chicana’s overall style and instrumentation are clearly influenced by international pop music of all sorts, at the musical level Estol’s original songs adhere quite strictly to the general characteristics of tango and its two related sub-genres, milonga and vals. In other words, when they play tango they play tango, they just also happen to play cumbias, chacarreras, fados, and Tom Waits covers (translated into Spanish, of course). They even do a funky rendition of the first movement from J.S. Bach’s concerto for two violins, BWV 1043! Violinist Osiris Rodríguez—who along with being the hardest working man in tango, playing not only with La Chicana but also other key groups such as El Arranque and Astillero, is also an accomplished classical musician—knocked out the Bach piece from memory. Meanwhile bandoneonist Patricio “Tripa” Bonfiglio, who played the second violin part and whose experience in baroque chamber music is probably a bit more limited, was glued to his music, sweating away.

Aside from these and other instrumental acrobatics, the real star of the show was singer Dolores Solá, a woman who has more glamour in her French-manicured pinky finger than all the rest of the tango musicians in town combined. On stage Solá comes off as larger than life, like a move star on the screen (she in fact did appear in the recent Argentine film Ciudad en Celo (City in Heat), whose soundtrack was done by Estol). Her stage presence is backed up by her voice, which is at once powerful and delicate, both serious and playful. She brings little to none of the “grasa” tear-jerking so standard among mainstream tango singers with her to the stage, instead relying on an expressive nimbleness that can have her sounding like a seductive lover in one phrase and a scolding mother in the next, all the while keeping firmly at the helm of the party that is La Chicana’s live show.

Combined with Estol’s highly original, varied, and memorable songs, Solá and the band come across as quirky and irreverent without being ironic or distanced, rooted in the tango tradition without loosing themselves in devotion to it. It is a refreshing combination, and I am ready to wait it out for my next chance to hear them live, however long that might be.

Related Recording
La Chicana, Lejos (Acqua Records) 2006.

Related Link
http://www.lachicanatango.com/

Dino Saluzzi Familia at the 6th Buenos Aires Jazz y Otras Músicas Festival

2007-05-21T15:31:00.000-03:00

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Dino Saluzzi is one of those musicians who should be put in the “unclassifiable” section of your iTunes library. A master bandoneón player originally from the Salta province in northern Argentina who has spend long periods living in Buenos Aires and in Europe, Saluzzi sounds equally comfortable playing regional folk music, tango, modern jazz, and contemporary classical music, as attested to by his extensive and wide ranging discography as both a leader and a sideman. His original music sounds simultaneously committed to each of these styles, making it both highly complex but also deeply expressive and feelingful. His bandoneón playing echoes these same tendencies, ranging from edgy, almost crystalline improvisatory lines that bring to mind the work of brainiac saxophonist Steve Coleman to fantastically low, barely rhythmic rumblings that evoke both the oppressive heat of a summer in Salta and the origins of the bandoneón as a pipe organ replacement in poor German churches circa 1860. To that expressive range, Saluzzi adds an attention to sonic detail that, in my experience, is nearly unrivaled: you know a guy is serious about sound when he brings his own microphones and mixing equipment to the gig! This focus on sound makes Saluzzi the perfect artist for German music producer Manfred Eicher’s ECM record label, for which Saluzzi has been recording in one way or another since 1985.

Not only is Saluzzi a talented guy, but he also has a talented family: aside from Dino on the bandoneón, tonight’s band featured Dino’s brother Félix Saluzzi on saxophone and clarinet; his son José Saluzzi on guitar; his other son Matías Saluzzi on electric bass; and (I believe) his son-in-law Gabriel Said on drums and percussion. He even brought out his niece, whose name I did not catch (it was "something Saluzzi"), as a guest artist to play flute on a few songs. This kind of “family band” setup would surely feel gimmicky if they were not so damn good, and I left the concert convinced that there must be a gene for musical talent and creativity that has yet to be discovered. Either that or there is something special in the water back at the Saluzzi family home. Whatever it is, the Saluzzi familia, as individuals and as a whole, has got it. The concert unfolded as a series of flawlessly executed compositions of tremendous scope and range, each of which was approached with a calm, poised intensity that kept much of the large audience rapt despite the deliberately low volume levels, which made some passages sound like little more than a whisper. Guitarist José Saluzzi brought a particularly delicate touch to the group, shining on a folkloric-tinged homage to Argentine icon Atahualpa Yupanqui, which, like much of what played this night, was at once rooted in the sound and tradition of Argentine music and extended far beyond it.

But despite my ravings, not everyone in the audience liked the betwixt and between approach of the band as much as I did. After the second song a real heckler approached the stage—a young guy with a guitar bag over his shoulder and a whole bottle of wine in his hand—yelling “this is a jazz festival: play jazz, play jazz!!!” As the security guards gently escorted him away from the stage and out of the venue, Dino replied “This is the youth of today for you! A bunch of drunks and drug addicts!” This in turn elicited loud cries to the contrary from the largely young audience, who clearly did not appreciate being dismissed as a generation en masse because one joker who happened to be young acted out. A few more songs had to go by before the audience felt like it had really settled down from this incident, and in that time a small stream of people who clearly did not like what they were hearing also headed for the doors. At least they did not feel like they had to yell about it too.

Saluzzi’s music, for all its expressiveness, is not the most accessible, even compared to some of the modern jazz figures that are sharing the bill at this city government sponsored festival, so I am not surprised that not everyone enjoyed it. (I should also say that the vast majority stayed and gave the group a standing ovation and demanded encores in typical Argentine fashion.) But I also wonder, however, if there might be a more generalized hostility towards Saluzzi here in Argentina, because he won’t play tango (or jazz, or folklore, or...) “the right way,” or because he has spent so much time living abroad? I will have to ask around to really find out about that, but even Saluzzi found the tension coming from the audience noteworthy. “It is always hard to play at home,” he announced from the stage early in the concert. “Tonight, after the concert, I am not going back to the hotel, I am going to my house. I am at home.” Instead of responding to this with cheers, as I would have expected from such a speech in such a context, the audience let out little more than a murmur peppered with some lackluster applause, and waited for the next song to start.

Related Recording
Dino Saluzzi Group, Juan Condori (ECM) 2005.

Related Links
www.saluzzimusic.com
http://www.musicaba.buenosaires.gov.ar/

Rodolfo Mederos Orquesta Típica at Parque Lezama

2007-05-14T16:27:00.000-03:00

Sunday, May 13, 2007

This was the first in a series of city-sponsored concerts in the lovely if bustling park that lies on the border between the San Telmo and La Boca neighborhoods in the southern section of Buenos Aires. Though sponsored in part by the tourism board of the city, the event felt like it was focused more on making something special happen for the people who live in the neighborhood than drawing the throngs of tourists down the hill from the relentless San Telmo antiques market taking place just a few blocks up the street. It was also a way for the Torcuato Tasso, which is located across the street from the park, to give something back to its neighbors: all three of the bands featured in this series have recently played in the Tasso, where cover charges can range upwards of $30 or $40 pesos. Those are fair prices for the quality of what is heard at the club (and shockingly low if you are a foreign tourist with dollars or euros in your bank account), but they are, unfortunately, much more than many Argentines can afford to pay. This show, on the other hand, was free. With that incentive, and despite the brisk temperatures, a lot of people turned out, and the festive atmosphere of most public events here—vendors hawking sandwiches and sweets, dogs running around, children playing, people huddled together sharing mate tea, etc—was well established even before the band took the stage.

Born in 1940, bandoneonist, composer, and arranger Rodolfo Mederos is what I think of as a “middle generation” tanguero: in his youth he played with some of the genre’s legendary figures, and now, as one of the genre’s living maestros, he has extended himself to a younger generation of musicians who never even had the chance to see those legends play live. That outreach has not always been 100% positive, and Mederos is something of a polemical figure today, though his impact as a performer and educator is undeniable. Even this concert had a bit of an educational slant to it, with Mederos treating the audience to a veritable encyclopedia of tango styles and ensembles. He started the show with a haunting bandoneón solo, followed by a few selections in a trio format with bass and guitar. As he announced from the stage, these songs were selected from the early tango repertoire, circa 1915, and performed in an unadorned style that he believed maintained their brutish urgency. He next invited the pianist and a violinist to the stage and performed a few pieces from his own quintet repertoire with them, modern tangos that were almost dizzying with melodic twists and harmonic modulations yet remained intuitively connected to the repertoire heard just before.

Eventually the full orquesta made it to the stage—thirteen musicians in all—and launched into a long series of classic and original tangos for dancing. Indeed, Mederos made a huge (almost browbeating) point of how tango music is first and foremost popular dance music, and how his return to the orquesta típica format and its danceable repertoire represented a renewed political commitment to that vision on his part. Despite this pontificating, the vast majority of the audience stayed put for most of the show, though several dancers were eventually roused from their seats (the couple that got it started just happened to be passing by, coming over to dance a few songs while on their way to somewhere else). The spontaneous appearance of the dancers proved not only that tango as a popular dance genre is still alive in Buenos Aires, but also that like the music, the dance is not exactly what it might have once been: along with the older couple and the few aficionados, there was a group of two women dancing together, and, even more noteworthy, a woman dancing by herself. Mederos seemed pleased if not exactly happy: “I am glad to see that some people have understood what this is all about,” he said of the dancers/to the rest of us, “next time maybe more of you will.”

Related Recording
Rodolfo Mederos Orquesta Típica, Comunidad (DBN) 2007.

El Arranque at Velma Café

2007-04-17T13:41:00.000-03:00

Friday, April 13, 2007

El Arranque is one of the pillar groups of the contemporary tango scene in Buenos Aires, having gotten their start a bit more than ten years ago when most everyone was writing tango off for dead, especially among younger audiences and musicians. What a difference a decade makes: the group has since made five acclaimed discs, toured the world several times over (including a recent jaunt to Hong Kong), collaborated with international institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, and helped build a newly committed audience for tango here in Argentina. Several key artists of the new generation of tango have passed through the group’s ranks—including the singer Ariel Ardit and violinist and composer Ramiro Gallo, both of whom I have written about in previous entries—and the group has developed highly productive collaborations with several “grandes” of the previous generation, including Raul Garello, Julio Pane, and Nestor Marconi. They have also been committed to cultivating a new generation of young musicians through their relationship with the Orquesta Escuela del Tango, a training group supported by the city government of Buenos Aires that has cranked out what feels like an army of highly trained young players over the past several years.

The band is a septet of two bandoneones, two violins, piano, bass, and guitar plus singer. This instrumentation, though somewhat augmented by the addition of guitar, puts the group, in my mind at least, within the well worn sextet tradition of tango, represented most recently (and most famously) by the Sexteto Mayor. It is an interesting instrumental mix, because it gives the ensemble a density and power that you just don’t get from even slightly smaller groups such as quintets while at the same time retaining a nimbleness and dexterity that is hard to cultivate in the larger Orquesta Típica format (which usually feature ten to twelve players). One of the pleasures of hearing El Arranque is following how they take advantage of and balance these different tendencies. On the one hand, both their arrangements and original pieces have a compositional and contrapuntal density that at moments can rival that of chamber music, making each piece a real musical journey for the close listener. On the other hand, they lay down the rhythmic base of the music in a way that gets people out of their chairs and onto the dance floor. Striking that balance between the artistic and the popular tendencies of the genre—especially in the post-Piazzolla age that seems to emphasize either/or—is one of the strongest features of the group. That the band seems to take genuine pleasure from playing makes it all that much better.

On this night, the only thing really working against them was the performance space itself. I hate to say it, but the main concert space at Velma Café just does not sound very good. This is a shame, because I know a lot of thought and money went into designing the place, and it is not like there is an overabundance of higher-end performance venues in Buenos Aires that are committed to presenting tango the way Velma is coming to do. Indeed, El Arranque will be setting up shop there every Friday night in April and May, continuing a tradition of weekly gigs they had going for nearly five years at the now defunct Club del Vino, which sadly closed its doors last September. The flat acoustics of the cavernous space seem to be the real killer (the ceilings are at least 25 feet high). Because of that, almost no acoustic sound from the band makes it past the fourth wall, which in turn makes them sound and feel very, very far away even from only halfway back in the audience. There must be some kind of solution (acoustic reflectors above the stage like they have at the Royal Albert Hall?), probably none of which would be cheap. I am no expert in these matters, of course, but I do hope something can be worked out over time, because as it is, taking in a concert at Velma Cafe, to rev up the old cliché, feels so close, yet so far.

Ariel Ardit at the Torcuato Tasso

2007-03-29T14:28:00.000-03:00

Saturday, March 24, 2007

I caught just the last few songs of Ariel Ardit’s show at the Buenos Aires Tango Festival a few weeks back. I didn’t think it was enough to warrant an entry here, but it was enough to leave a big impression. Hundreds of people had turned out to see him, one of the largest crowds I had seen at the festival. As each song came to its conclusion with the gradual tempo downshift typical of tango the crowd erupted into rapturous applause that made it sound like there was a huge thunderstorm going on outside. I had never really seen anything like it, and thought to myself “this guy is a real star.”

Ardit launched his career singing with the Orquesta El Arranque, a kind of younger-generation super-group that has produced several artists now making their way, like Ardit, as soloists. Following his work with this larger ensemble, Ardit has put together a smaller group of two guitar accompanists, an instrumentation that obviously keeps him and his voice front and center. This kind of singer-plus-guitarists set up is typical of sung tango going back to Carlos Gardel (1880-1935), who sang with up to four guitarists backing him up. Comparisons between Ardit and Gardel don’t end there, either. Like Gardel, Ardit is incredibly charming and polished, with a infectious smile and a personality that makes him feel larger than life, his personality filling the room from wall to wall. At the end of the day, however, it is about the voice and the music, and Ardit warrants comparisons to Gardel in those departments too.

Backed up by his regular guitarist Ariel Argañaraz and guest Hernán Reinaudo at this recent show, Ardit pushed and pulled his way through each song, coaxing the last drops of sentiment from each of them. The instrumentation he works with allows for a lot of flexibility, with the ensemble able to follow his particular textual emphases and slight fluctuations in tempo without any hesitation or doubt. His material is drawn mainly from the canon of classic tangos by writers such as Manzi and Expósito, though it consciously emphasizes the lesser-known edges of that repertoire. Because of that, the set sounded fresh throughout, never eliciting the pleasant but sometimes corny feeling that can be brought forth by hearing “El choclo” for the nth time. Instead, Ardit made the typical tango stories of the old barrio and lost loves not only believable but really compelling, which is no small feat. All the while he was helped along by the truly incredible support work of Argañaraz and Reinaudo, which was at once hyper-virtuosic, deeply musical, and completely present with the singer. (They played one instrumental duo that left a lot of jaws dropped in the audience; they are apparently working on a record of duos that I eagerly anticipate.)

Hearing Ardit in a more relaxed, intimate setting such as this was a real treat. I have always been impressed when I have heard him with other groups in other settings, but this was the first time that I really understood just exactly what he is brining to the table as an artist. That is a talent and a sound that is truly special, and needs to be heard.

Related Link

www.arielardit.com.ar

Juan Carlos Caceres at the Centro Cultural Borges

2007-03-20T15:35:00.000-03:00

Friday, March 16, 2007

Juan Carlos Caceres is an expatriate Argentine singer and piano player who has been based in Paris since 1968. He has worked not only as a musician and composer, but also a visual artist and a professor of art history, a job from which he has recently retired. Caceres’s musical project is centered on what he calls “tango negro,” or “black tango,” that is, a rather personalized and poetic interpretation of the theory that tango originated in the musical practices of Afro-Argentines who have since been written out of the genre’s history and folklore (not to mention the history of Argentina more broadly).

On the face of it, this is quite an interesting proposition. What role, if any, Afro-Argentines might have had in the historic origins of tango is a topic of some dispute, and a lot of ink has been spilled on the issue. Real evidence from the time period in question is both expansive and limited enough that any number of yarns can easily be spun: etymological conjectures that the word “tango” is derived from West African languages; conclusions made seemingly self-evident by the single famous (and derogatorily caricatured) image of a black couple dancing with the word “tango” printed above it; the fact that tango music does (or does not) feature “black” rhythmic syncopations; etc, etc, etc. The fact is that no one really knows that much about the origins of tango. Moreover, ever since it was canonized as a national genre in Argentina following World War I, tango’s history has been only further entrenched in legend and myth (with serious scrutiny of some topics becoming nearly untouchable in the process). That said, it is undeniable that Afro-Argentines as a whole have been systematically and unjustly excluded from their place in Argentine history, be it musical or otherwise. Therefore I feel that any real effort to reexamine and interrogate those histories should be applauded.

The problem then becomes, of course, how you define “real effort.” Unfortunately, I don’t think Caceres’s project would meet that standard by any definition. While apparently based on some kind of research and investigation (the program notes state that Caceres is a “studious researcher of tango”), tonight “black tango” seemed to mean little more than adding several percussion instruments to the more standard tango instrumentation of piano and bandoneón. These included cajón, a wooden box percussion instrument of Peruvian origin, the “bombo porteño,” which is the bass drum and cymbal combination heard in Argentine murga (a genre associated with neighborhood carnival organizations not unlike Brazilian samba schools but with a different rhythmic vocabulary), and a general percussionist who played a set of snare drum, hanging cymbal, djimbe, and an Uruguayan candombe drum.

It was an interesting combination, to be sure, and there were moments when the band really had everyone’s head bobbing, but does just adding some drums make this “black” music? Earlier this very evening I had gone to hear the ultra-establishment tango singer Susana Rinaldi perform for the inaugural event of the 2007 “bares notables” music series, and she had a cajón-playing percussionist in her band too. Was she therefore playing “tango negro?” Are all the many bands that feature percussionists playing it? They don’t seem to think so, or at least don’t make a point of it. The real story, as even Caceres announced from stage, is that the cajón, which has a long history in Peru and elsewhere, became a fashionable “world music” instrument in Paris the 1990s, and found its way into current groups through that route rather than through any historical connection to tango. Caceres just chooses to be precious about it.

As the night went on it became clear to me that the narrative being performed by Caceres and his band was not one of a new historic revisionism vis-à-vis the black contribution to tango music but the tired (but still very much alive) trope of the insatiable European thirst for the exotic. The banality of Caceres’s lyrics, over and above the idea that simply putting a drum on stage makes the music “black,” very much brought this point home to me. Lines that translate into something like “Drums, drums, the black people play the drums. They play tango on the drums, the black people play the drums” were typical. Despite the overly reverent and at times condescending attitude regarding the whole “tango negro” matter that Caceres projected from the stage, with lyrics like these the show began to border on minstrelsy. I might be accused of bringing an overly American viewpoint to this topic, but judging by this concert, it seems like the black contribution to tango, at least as seen from Caceres’s perch in Paris, has not really changed all that much between 1911 and 2007.

Sexteto Mayor at the IX Buenos Aires Tango Festival

2007-03-05T14:24:00.000-03:00

Saturday, March 3, 2007

Ok, what I said in the last entry about the outdoor milonga being cancelled due to rain turned out to not be entirely true. At the last minute it was moved to the massive indoor performance space at La Rural. I heard about this change only after the Fernández Fierro concert, where the news was announced on hand-written signs pasted to the windows of the box office. Since the bus we needed to get back to our neighborhood went directly to La Rural, we decided to go check it out.

We missed the first band entirely, the Orquesta Típica Cerda Negra, and caught only the last two songs of the second, the Orquesta Típica Sans Souci. This second band was noteworthy for, among other things, having the same singer as the Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro, the fantastic Walter “Chino” Laborde, whom we had just seen performing on the other side of town not more than an hour ago. (And in Buenos Aires the other side of town means the other side of town: it took us more than 45 minutes on a dangerously fast bus to get from one show to the other.) With Fernández Fierro, Laborde sang wearing a black kimono and an opaque face mask with an electric blue wig gathered in pigtails. With Sans Souci, which is a much, much, much more traditional kind of orquesta, Laborde wore a three piece beige suit cut in a 1930s style and black wing tips with his hair slicked back like Carlos Gardel. And the band was finishing their set when we showed up!

The evening’s headlining band was the famed Sexteto Mayor, a group formed in the 1970s that has been one of the major torch bearers of traditional tango since that time. They have toured the world with many of the broadway-style shows such as “Tango Argentino.” These shows are largely responsible for re-igniting international interest in the genre in the 1980s and 1990s, and local events like the tango festival have benefited from their success and are in many ways designed to take advantage of it. The band itself has seen a lot of changes over the years, including the deaths of several of their founding members. Their pianist, Oscar Palermo, passed away just last month and has been replaced by Cristian Zárate, at least for now. Aside from Zárate, the band featured a mix of old guard and new guard performers, including relatively young bandoneonist Pablo Mainetti and very young Horacio Romo, the latter of whom was serving as the group’s musical director. Romo, who (I believe) is only 28, has certainly made it. I saw him play with Rubén Juárez at the opening concert of the festival, and here he was leading the band that was headlining the closing event, and leading it with confidence and poise. His playing, too, is top notch, as was that of the band as a whole, though I don’t know if they exactly get your pulse going. It depends on what you want from tango, I suppose. The Sexteto, like all of the groups that I saw play at La Rural during the festival, seemed to struggle against the acoustics of the massive space, which gobbled up much of the detail in a relentless echo. This was a shame, because many of the most lovely moments centered around delicate interchanges between the group’s two violinists. The band as a whole, while very polished, also seemed to be defeated by the space, with much of their presence and energy falling off the front edge of the stage and onto the ground rather than being projected outward and filling up the room. The city obviously needs to use such a large indoor space for these types of headlining concerts, but I wonder if there is any alternative, more music-friendly space that could be used in future festivals?

After two concerts in one night and a week of other festival-going we were pretty exhausted and ended up leaving as the band was finishing their last encore, hitting a cheap “free fork” Chinese restaurant before heading home. Back at La Rural, dancing to recorded music apparently continued on for many more hours. Some people can never really get enough of el 2x4, and this is where they come to get it.

Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro at the IX Buenos Aires Tango Festival

2007-03-05T11:48:00.000-03:00

Saturday, March 3, 2007

This was the night of the “gran milonga al aire libre,” a massive tango dance to live music that is the main closing event of the festival. The city closes one of the main downtown streets for the show—it was to be Diagonal Norte this year—and thousands of people come to dance outside with the famous Buenos Aires obelisk as the atmospheric backdrop. Unfortunately, if it rains the event is cancelled, and, you guessed it, after what was a beautiful if breezy day a thick blanket of dark clouds began to roll in over the city around four pm. By seven it was starting to drizzle. There goes the milonga.

Still having “ganas” to see something that night, I decided to head down to the Teatro de la Ribera in La Boca to see the Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro, one of several other events planned for that night that was sure not to be rained out. Thanks to the city government, all the events at the tango festival are free, but many require tickets that can be picked up earlier in the day from the venues. Knowing how popular the Fernández Fierro is, I knew I was taking a risk by showing up without a ticket, and sure enough, the concert was sold out. My friend and I mulled around for a while, wondering what we should do, when we heard a rumor that a restaurant down the street from the theater had extra tickets. This sounded strange, but we went to check it out and sure enough, the owner of the place was standing outside with about a dozen tickets in her hand, giving them away first come first served. It turns out that several people from the restaurant had gone to get tickets earlier in the day (they start giving them out at 10 am) but that in the end a lot of them could not go. So despite the rain and our short moment of disappointment upon arrival, things were going our way.

Back at the theater the crowded house was anxiously waiting for the band to take the stage. When they finally did come out the audience erupted with loud applause, which was followed by an awkward moment in which the band took several minutes to tune their instruments in the complete darkness. When they finally launched into their first piece the lights came up to display the group in all their scruffy glory: T-shirts, dreadlocks, ripped pants, etc. Not your grandfather’s tango orchestra (see my earlier piece on the group elsewhere in this blog). After this opening piece the crowd went absolutely wild, and their enthusiasm never diminished throughout the show. These guys are rock stars.

And they play like rock stars: aside from their look, their music has, over the years, become very hard edged and loud, to the point of lacking any real nuance and at times bordering on sloppiness. Like some noisy tango engine they were either on or off, at zero or at eleven with no in-between. While this extremity makes for an exciting show, especially the first time you see them and are expecting something much more square from a tango band like this, it works against them in the long run. What was exciting the first time becomes interesting the second, predictable the third, and then monotonous later, at least for me. That this show was song for song and even banter for banter almost exactly same as the show I saw a few months ago makes me think that, also like rock stars, the group must depend on die hard fans and/or a constant circulation of first timers to pull it off. In the Buenos Aires tango scene, that means playing mostly for tourists. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it does make me think that the band’s once key position within the city’s popular culture, especially among younger people, must have eroded over time.

That said, the theater was packed, and the audience was going wild. Can all those people be wrong? No, of course not: the band is great and should be heard. But when, between songs, the band asked how many people were seeing their first tango concert that night about half the hands in the audience went up.

Orquesta Escuela de Tango at the IX Buenos Aires Tango Festival

2007-03-03T16:52:00.000-03:00

Thursday, March 1, 2007

The Orquesta Escuela de Tango is exactly what its name implies, a tango orchestra that operates as a school in which young musicians can learn the principle styles of the classic tango orchestras. Supported by the city government of Buenos Aires, the orquesta escuela offers a two year program to Argentine and international musicians and has, in the years since its founding in 2000, trained literally hundreds of players. (There is an interesting semi-documentary film about the founding and development of the orquesta escuela called “Si sos brujo: a tango story.” Made by American filmmaker Caroline Neal, who is married to the founder of the school, Ignacio Varchausky, it was released in 2005 and is very much worth seeing.) The main idea behind the school was to bring musicians who were active in the golden age of tango music (roughly between 1925-1960) who are still alive and willing to teach together with younger musicians who are eager to learn these styles but have had little aside from old recordings to model themselves on.

While the escuela has brought several such “maestros” on board over the years, the main figure for the school has been Emilio Balcarce, a musician and composer who has served as the orchestra’s director since its inception. Time has apparently caught up with the now 89 year old Balcarce, who is retiring from the orchestra and passing the baton of its directorship to bandoneonist Nestor Marconi. Tonight was Balcarce’s farewell concert, and as such was full of not only music but highly emotional pomp and circumstance. Balcarce was presented with awards from SADAIC (the Argentine equivalent of ASCAP), from friends and colleagues; a letter from the mayor of Buenos Aires marking the occasion was read, and the city’s minister of culture gave a short speech, announcing that the band, as of that night, would be renamed the Orquesta Escuela “Emilio Balcarce.” An older woman from the audience spontaneously took the stage mid-concert to give the director a gift and some flowers, hugging him and kissing him before being escorted back to her seat by the stagehands. At the end of the evening Balcarce was presented with a huge bouquet of flowers that he had immediately passed back to his wife, who was watching from about the fifth row of the audience. It was all very emotional, and many people were in tears. Even I had a hard time holding them back.

And then there was the music. Crisp and clean renditions of tango classics in a variety of styles for which the orchestra is famous: “La yumba” a la Pugliese, “El choclo” a la D’Arrienzo, etc. I have heard the group play many times before, and have always been impressed by their technical execution and stylistic fluidity. The musical highlight of this night was when a huge group of the orquesta’s alumni took the stage for the evening’s final song, a rendition of Balcarce’s own “La bordona.” With nearly fifty musicians on stage, the performance pushed the audience over the edge. The standing ovation that followed the piece was such that the group came out and played it over again. A real encore.

Though bittersweet, the whole evening was very special, and I feel lucky to have been there. (Despite the torrential rains earlier that day, the free tickets for the concert had been quickly gobbled up, leaving a ticket-less crowd mulling outside the concert hall beforehand hoping to catch a lucky break and be let in.) Talking with some of the musicians outside afterwards, they seemed both elated and melancholic, with many believing that Balcarce, in one way or another, would be back. “He has talked about retiring for years,” I was told. “He has always said ‘My ears are getting too bad, I can’t hear anymore: I need to retire,’ and then would be back the next week with a new arrangement or composition for the orchestra. We will be hearing from him again.”

Related Link

http://www.buenosaires.gov.ar/areas/cultura/musica/orquesta_tango/escuela.php?menu_id=9466

Luciano Jungman and Alejandro Schwarz at the IX Buenos Aires Tango Festival

2007-03-03T15:41:00.000-03:00

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

This concert was the one show of the tango festival that was booked specifically to feature “the creators of today and tomorrow,” that is, new tango composers. The whole idea of writing original tangos these days is shrouded in a seemingly never-lifting but light fog of doubt and suspicion. I don’t know how many times I have heard things like “no one today can write a tango worth a damn,” “where are the new lyricists? Nowhere! They don’t exist,” and “tango is doomed because no one can write anything new.” I have heard these kinds severe statements declared with gusto, almost triumphantly, as if those who say them don’t want there to be any new composers, lyricists, etc. From my experience, I think these attitudes constitute a willful deafness on the part of tango listeners to a lot of new, great tango music that is being made right under their noses but completely off their radar screens, to mix metaphors. Looking no further than this year’s festival we can hear, among others: El Arranque, The Ramiro Gallo Quinteto, Malena Muyala, El Yotivenco, and Buenos Aires Negro; the Proyecto Ciudad Oculta (which focuses on new tango lyricists); electrotango groups Ultratango, Sudestada Tango Lounge, and Tanghetto (the last of which wins the award for the worst band name of all time); as well as many of the new Orquestas Típicas, including Imperial, La Furca, Cerda Negra, Fernández Fierro, Fervor de Buenos Aires, and La Brava. Each of these groups play at least some original music, and many of them play entirely original material. Beyond that, many of the artists I consider to be among the most significant compositional voices today were not represented in the festival at all. So, while one can arugue about the enduring value and overall contribution to the tango canon the work of these artists may or may not make over time, basta of the claim that there are no new or original voices out there. That is just not true.

But, you may be asking, if there is so much original music being played at the tango festival, what makes this concert stand apart as the composers concert? As far as I can tell, what made Jungman and Schwarz stand out as “creators” is that they create “serious” tango music, that is, the highly elaborate, through-composed, post-Piazzolla version of tango music that strives towards classicism. Both Jungman and Schwarz are protégées of Gustavo Beytelmann, a top-notch expat Argentine pianist who has lived in Paris for the past thirty years and who has apparently trained a small army of tango musicians over there. I heard Beytelmann give a talk as part of the festival and he came off as an exceptionally knowledgeable, bright and open minded musician and teacher. His students have clearly learned a lot: Jungman’s music was at once dense and crisp, utilizing the expanded forces of clarinet and ‘cello added to the somewhat standard quintet of bandoneón, piano, bass, violin, and guitar to nice effect on his piece “Concierto 3 + 4.” Schwarz, an Argentine guitarist who left the country for Europe after the 2001 economic crisis, also drew upon a somewhat extended instrumentation, featuring a tenor saxophone on his “Continuidad de los parques.” This was a semi-programmatic piece based on the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar’s famous short story of the same name. As a whole Schwarz’s music was more delicate and romantic.

Because of the resistance to new and original tango music mentioned above, I applaud the festival’s producers for booking this show and really forcing the issue. At the same time, a lot of this new music—much of which was having its debut this night—sounded uncannily familiar, as if I had heard it before (mostly on Piazzolla records). Following this concert, I think the real culprit regarding new tango is not the perceived lack of new tango music but how that music is recognized and acknowledged as such. If new tango is defined only as classically minded tango, which seems to be the case here, it seems like something important is lost. I hate to be the one saying this, but tango music is popular music. That does not mean that more “popular” minded groups can not or do not write highly complex and virtuosic original compositions—check out El Arranque, for instance. It means that those kinds of groups have people dancing in the back rows. At least on this night, the music of Jungman and Schwarz was not really moving in that or any other way.

Escalandrum and Pablo Ziegler Trío at the IX Buenos Aires Tango Festival

2007-02-26T14:39:00.000-03:00

Sunday, February 25, 2007

This was jazz and tango night at the festival, and I have to say, given the eclecticism of the groups I had heard the night before, that I am impressed with the broad understanding of contemporary tango that the producers of the festival obviously brought to the table when making their booking decisions.

Escalandrum is a jazz sextet led by drummer Daniel “Pipi” Piazzolla, Astor’s grandson. They are one of the key groups among what is by now a large, well established, and highly organized local jazz scene here in Buenos Aires. I don’t make a point of keeping up with the jazz scene here, partially because aside from a few players like pianist Adirán Iaies I have not really liked a lot of what I have heard, either live or on disc. Call me a jazz snob, I probably deserve it, but this was very much the case the first and last time I heard Escalandrum play at a local club, which was over two years ago now. Bringing my preexisting doubts to this concert, I was happy and, I hate to say, surprised to hear how much better this group has gotten since the last time I heard them. Piazzolla’s drumming has gotten much more subtle, and the group’s pianist, whose name I don’t know, played several compelling solos. The group’s original compositions and arrangements are also much more diverse and robust than before. While they don’t depart too far from modern jazz a la Miles Davis’s quintet with Wayne Shorter et al, they have something to say and they say it. The band did indulge in a few moments of nearly arrhythmic fluff, which seems to be popular among jazz players here, and the three saxophone horn section seems a little limited, but all in all I was quite impressed and think I need to get over myself and go hear more local jazz.

The real draw of the night was pianist Pablo Ziegler, who now lives (I think) in New York and makes relatively infrequent appearances here in Buenos Aires. Ziegler played with Astor Piazzolla for many years, and is featured on Piazzolla’s quintet recordings on the Nonesuch label that are well known in the US. His performances always incorporate a fair amount of Piazzolla’s music as well as his own original compositions that depart more or less directly from those of his ex-boss. They are punchy, edgy, and extremely virtuosic, making for music that is at times more jaw dropping than really memorable, but always worth seeing. The main difference that Ziegler brings to this modern tango repertoire is jazz-like improvisation, opening up each song for sometimes extended improvised solos. This is interesting to listen to not only for what the musicians have to say with each piece, but because the “swing” of tango, its overall rhythmic feel, is in many ways the exact opposite of that heard in jazz. (Jazz emphasizes the second and fourth beat of the bar, whereas tango emphasizes the first and third, just for starters.)

The band Ziegler featured tonight was a trio of piano, bandoneón, and guitar. The bandoneónist ripped through his charts and solos with blistering speed and precision; the guitarist was all over his instrument but remained calm and collected throughout. Ziegler himself attacked his instrument with his characteristic virtuosity, intensity, and romanticism, which was made more impressive by the fact that it all appeared to be so easy for him that he seemed like he was almost bored at times. I think that bored look, in all honesty, is a characteristic feature of truly great musicianship, if not a truly great musician.

Despite all the fireworks going off on stage, the band seemed to lack an overall driving energy or groove, which I think, like the night before, was due more to the extreme echo of the performance space than the musicians. Especially with a group as subtle as this, and one that lacks a bass player, drummer, or other driving instrument, the sonic muddiness of the room could easily swallow up any musical oomph put out into it. My theory was proved right when Pipi Piazzolla joined the group on drums for a quick rendition of Astor’s hyper-famous “Libertango.” The drums brought the energy up a notch, which could be noted in the more enthusiastic response from the audience during and after that song. I hate to complain about the space so much, because there would be nothing to do about it except not use it, and that, for now, is not a viable option. It is, however, a shame to hear a band as good as this be impeded by their venue.

Related Links

www.mdrrecords.com.ar/ziegler

Omar Giammarco Quinteto and Malena Muyala at the IX Buenos Aires Tango Festival

2007-02-26T13:03:00.000-03:00

Saturday, February 24, 2007

When inviting an Argentine friend of mine to go to this show with me she declined, instead choosing to go to a different festival event. She gave as her excuse the fact that “those guys don’t really play tango.” This is a criticism you hear a lot in Buenos Aires these days, especially regarding relatively younger musicians or people who try to change up tango even the slightest bit. That is not to say that everyone here is musically closed minded, just that the boundaries of tango—just like any so-called “national” genre—are policed pretty vigilantly in some circles.

In this case, it turns out that this perennial criticism was somewhat well deserved, especially regarding Giammarco, whose group was oriented around Uruguayan candombe, the Argentine carnival music called murga, and contemporary singer-songwriterism as much if not more than tango. Any and all of those genres were taken equally as launching pads and landing points for Giammarco’s original songs, which were arranged for a band that included guitar, violin, drums, accordion (not bandoneón), and several other instruments. I can understand why a tango purist would hate this band, but I thought they were a lot of fun, if at times overly ironic and acid. (Giammarco’s stage presence and personality is not the most instantly likeable). That said, the main drawback of the evening had nothing to do with the band or their music, but with the acoustics of the performance space, which was inside one of the massive exhibition halls at the fair complex known as “La Rural.” With the speakers pumping out volume suitable for a concert of thousands (there were probably several hundred people there, if that), some key features of the music—like the lyrics and the violin part—were drowned out in a relentless echo.

The following group, lead by lovely Uruguayan singer Malena Muyala, suffered some of the same fate, though as their instrumentation was oriented around a more quiet sound—bass, cello, guitar, bandoneón and percussion—they were not entirely overwhelmed by the acoustics of the space. Muyala also seemed more clearly centered around tango, though she lacked the typical aggressive sexuality that many singers rely upon. Instead, her music was more quiet and introspective, creating a seemingly intimate emotional space and leading the audience into it rather than banging them over the head with love and loss, which tango does so well. This kind of performance strategy made me think that Muyala could do well in the international world music circuit. Because of her engagement with other styles and genres, her sound is somewhat more accessible than traditional tango. That accessibility, almost ironically, makes the words she is singing seem less central if not less important to the overall effect of what happens on stage, which is so different from other tango singing styles where the words are key. I don’t know how much traveling she has done, but I can imagine her doing well in New York or Europe, as long as her audiences and producers there are not thirsting for the authentic.

Related Links

www.omargiammarco.com.ar
www.malenamuyala.com

Rubén Juárez with the Cristian Zárate Sexteto at the IX Buenos Aires Tango Festival

2007-02-26T12:55:00.000-03:00

Friday, February 23, 2007

This was the opening concert of the annual Buenos Aires Tango Festival, which is going to keep me pretty busy over the next ten days. The concert took place at the main outdoor stage of the city’s summer music program, a large field near the municipal airport. It was a lovely night, pleasantly mild for what has been a hot summer, and there were at least 1,000 people at the show, perhaps many more.

Everyone was there to hear Rubén Juárez, a near legendary singer and bandoneón player. Juárez is one of the principle figures to carry tango through its slump following the end of the genre’s “golden age” in the 1960s, when many earlier practitioners were passing away or passing into obscurity as other forms of music became more popular in Argentina. The minute he took the stage I instantly understood why Juárez, who I had only seen in videos before, has such a large and devoted following. His presence reached back to the last audience member and probably much further, no small feat given the scale of this performance space. He had equal command of the music, which consisted mostly of songs from the classic tango repertoire that were at once raucous and tender. He did a solo rendition of “Desencuentro” (one of the most heart-wrenching tango songs of them all), and with just his voice and his bandoneón Juárez had the audience hanging on every note, as if afraid to breathe. When the excellent backing band led by pianist Christian Zárate was added to that power, the group could really break the scales.

Unfortunately, the pace of what was becoming an unforgettable concert was interrupted by a small stream of special guests, each of which took the stage and chatted with Juárez at a small table for a few minutes before performing one song with the band. The guests included rock-turned-tango singer Javier Calamaro, blues-turned-tango singer Celeste Carballo—whose rendition of the classic “Nada,” I hate to say, was truly atrocious—and expatriate pianist Gustavo Beytelmann, who is a special guest at the festival. Pianist Osvaldo Belringieri also took the stage for a few songs, announcing that he did not want to talk, he wanted to play. That was more like it. I understand that these and other guests gave the evening a star-studded quality that the organizers must have wanted for the opening of the festival, but for me they only deflated what the real attraction of the evening was.

After all the guests had come and gone Juárez ran down a few more songs before announcing “We’re out of here, I’m hungry!” After a few of the requisite encores, we were off.

Related Links
www.rubenjuarez.net
www.festivaldetango.gov.ar

No Bailarás at the Teatro Maipo

2007-02-20T16:47:00.000-03:00

Monday, February 19, 2007

Here is the hook: according to the program, No Bailarás was “born as the result of a useless search for solace en the feverish night.” Nice. The line: the wonderfully and outrageously typical title of this show was “grotesca pasion trasnochada,” which I don’t think really needs translation. And the sinker: the main publicity photo of the group, which is plastered on posters all over town, shows a completely naked woman embraced from behind by her dance partner with her breasts and crotch barely covered by the strategically outstretched arms of one dancing couple and the kicking leg of another. Hmmmmm. What are you doing on Monday night?

No Bailarás, which translates as “you will not dance,” is a young tango dance company run by choreographer Silvana Grill. This show, which is running on Mondays for several weeks at the lovely art deco Teatro Maipo, features a selection of dances for three couples set to the original music of the Ramiro Gallo Quinteto. Gallo’s group, which I have written about here before, plays live on stage throughout the show, and hearing them again was the real reason I was interested in it. Indeed, even though tango dance shows—especially the extremely expensive “cena shows” at the city’s many tourist-oriented tango clubs—are the bread and butter of many a young tango musician and dancer, I have to admit that this was the first time I have been to such an espectaculo.

The show itself, while quite sexy at moments (and yes, that scene in the poster is in the show) was also refreshingly playful. The over the top passion of much staged tango can easily come off as corny at best, especially when performed with utmost sincerity, which it almost always is. In contrast, Grill and her dancers, while clearly dedicated to the fundamentals, also incorporated subtle humor, interesting twists on the stereotypical gender dynamics of tango, and interesting uses of augmented couples (three or more dancers together instead of two). Best of all, for me, was that Grill gave Gallo and his band plenty of room to show their stuff, with six of the fifteen songs incorporated into the show left as instrumental performances without dance accompaniment.

Gallo, who as far as I know did not write any of the music specifically for this show but instead gathered it from his now growing repertoire of original compositions, clearly treats tango as a classical music, with all the detailed technique and specific modes of performance and listening that implies. That project was not always served by the various crotch grabs and other semi-lewd movements incorporated into the dances, to the point that my co-attendee thought that the dancers were just making fun of things while the musicians were really trying to say something. I don’t entirely agree, and think that on the whole the choreographed pieces were quite successful, if not exactly harmonious with the music. At the very least, Grill and Gallo seem to be on the same page vis-à-vis a larger artistic projects of incorporating their own voices into the traditions of their respective mediums, work which needs to be applauded even if specific instances are not necessarily sublime.

Related Links

www.nobailaras.blogspot.com
www.ramirogallo.com.ar

Raul Garello Sextet at Velma Café

2007-02-20T15:33:00.000-03:00

Saturday, February 17, 2007

When one has the chance, it is always worth it to go see Raul Garello. If not exactly a “grande” of the genre, he is one of the few players to have made significant contributions to tango in its heyday that is still around and very active. A bandoneón player in the post-Piazzolla lineage, Garello spent many years in the orchestra of Anibal Triolo, contributing both original compositions and arrangements to the group in the 60s and 70s. These days, he can most commonly be seen leading up the city government’s official tango orchestra, a large ensemble that is legally charged with providing porteños with a season of free tango concerts. It is a large group, whose stylistic orientation draws the work of 1970s groups like the Salsoul Orchestra to mind, but tango. Again: always worth it!

This night, Garello had put together a sextet of bandoneón, piano, acoustic bass guitar, violin, flute and drum kit. That relatively unorthodox instrumentation alone—especially the snare-less, double tom-tom drum set—tells you exactly where the band is coming from: the so-called “modern” tango as made famous by Piazzolla. Despite this instrumentation, the band interestingly concentrated on more “classic” repertoire such as Triolo’s “Che bandoneón” and “Como dos extraños.” The latter was sung by guest singer Jesus Hidalgo, who looked like he could not be more than 18 years old, which, when placed alongside his septuagenarian band mates, made his low, husky voice look and sound almost uncanny. I also enjoyed the work of drummer Jose Maria Lavandera very much. Though having drums in tango can often come off as awkward, Lavandera, in the Piazzolla style, brought a surgical precision to his crashing tom-tom rolls and complex cymbal work.

As a whole the concert was very enjoyable, if not rousing. Hearing tango in this style reminds me of looking at high-modernist architecture, both being at once futuristic and old fashioned, relentlessly visionary and hopelessly dated. It was one of the few times here where I have been self consciously aware of being young. That feeling was only amplified by the environment of the Velma Café, a new venue that has become important in the local tango music scene following the abrupt closing of the Club del Vino last August. While the cool professionalism that the Velma Café strives for and largely achieves needs to be applauded, the venue as a whole feels like it could or even should be in a place like suburban Maryland. Since I am American, I of course could be criticized for taking the kind of “first worldliness” one can experience at the Velma Café for granted. That said, for me, the place, like the concert, was enjoyable if not rousing.

Related Links
www.velmacafe.com.ar

Néstor Marconi and Amelita Baltar at the Escenario Planetario

2007-01-15T15:38:00.000-03:00

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Buenos Aires slows down a lot come summertime, with those who are able to heading for the beach resorts along the Atlantic coast of Argentina and Uruguay. I have been out of town for some time myself (thus the lack of recent entries on this site), and knew that things would be quiet when I got back. While away I read an article on Clarin.com that said there were 40% fewer vehicles on the streets, though the usual number of traffic accidents have been happening because people here drive even faster and crazier with the extra space on the road. Despite keeping up with info like this, I was still surprised to see just how calm the city has become following the new year: many stores are closed with their owners on vacation, there is much less movement on the street, and things are a lot quieter at night, at least in my neighborhood. Of course, not everyone leaves. Buenos Aires seems to “shut down” in January the way New York “shuts down” in August. There is a palpable change in the energy of these cities at these times, but the idea that everyone goes out to the Hamptons (or Mar del Plata and Punta del Este) applies only to members of specific social classes. In reality, the vast majority of people stick around and sweat it out. And those people, like me, are looking for something to do.

Thank god, then, for the city government of Buenos Aires, who has put together an impressive roster of free events taking place throughout the city during the summer months to be enjoyed by those who are still around. This concert was a part of that larger series, and featured a set by bandoneonist Marconi and his trio followed by a set featuring singer Baltar and her band. It took place on a large outdoor stage facing the city planetarium, another weirdly interesting building that looks like a spaceship grounded in the hyper-future of the 1970s. It was a lovely setting visually. The breeze carried the scent of eucalyptus trees through the air while groups of herons flew overhead; stars began to appear as it got dark, echoed by the pointillist lighting design on the roof of the planetarium. I even saw a shooting star. Sonically, however, there were some drawbacks. The stage managed to be located quite close to both a busy train track and the municipal airport, the noises from which were quite loud at times and clearly annoyed the musicians. Nothing is perfect, I suppose.

Néstor Marconi is one of the most well-known bandoneón players active today. I have seen him perform several times over the years, and it is always a treat. He is a virtuoso player in the Piazzolla lineage, though he tends to concentrate on the modern tango repertoire of other composers, especially Anibal Troilo, Horacio Salgan, and himself. This approach requires and rewards detail-oriented listening, and there were several quietly breathtaking moments peppered throughout the concert. The musical interactions between Marconi and his bass player were particularly impressive; those two gentlemen can apparently read one another’s minds. At the same time, the sheer scope of the outdoor concert seemed to work against the group. The electric keyboard used by the piano player sounded very tinny at high volume, and was unable to provide the rumbling lower register that this kind of group really needs in order to take you by the collar and shake you, which is what tango is all about. And when the trains went by, forget about any subtlety or even continuity. The musicians seemed to take it in stride, though, and left the crowd enthusiastically applauding if not cheering.

Baltar raised the energy level just by taking the stage. She is famous from her association with the work of Piazzolla and poet Horacio Ferrer (she played Maria in the original production of their “operita” Maria de Buenos Aires and has made the definitive recordings of many of their songs) and she knows how to play the diva role en serio. Just being a singer gave her the upper hand over the technical challenges that nearly overwhelmed Marconi’s group. The faint echo of her voice could be heard reverberating off the distant buildings as she belted out her songs. Not to say that she lacked subtlety. Indeed, while she was clearly focused on the overall dramatic arch of each song, her articulation of individual words and notes was impeccable. Her voice has clearly lost some of the power it once had; she could not sustain some notes as long as she seemed to want to and hit breaks on several high passages. Placed on her voice by age, these restrictions, to my ears at least, added an emotional depth and sense of intimacy that served her well, reminding me of some senior jazz singers such as Abbey Lincoln. Baltar’s set consisted mostly of Piazzolla pieces, both well- and lesser- known, and concluded with a heartfelt rendition of the famous “Balada para un loco” that had the crowd on its feet. And a crowd there was. Who said everything was going on at the coast?

Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro at La Trastienda

2006-12-05T13:40:00.000-03:00

Sunday, December 3, 2006

The Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro is the granddaddy of the contemporary orquesta típica movement in Buenos Aires, having pioneered the rough-edged approach to large ensemble tango that has served as a model for many of the orquestas tipicas playing today.

Tonight, the group was presenting their fourth CD, titled “Mucha Mierda.” A cultural translation of that title would be something like “break a leg.” However, judging by the set and props the band had on stage—a backdrop that made the wall look like a tiled bathroom, a giant chain for flushing the toilet hanging from the ceiling, a massive roll of toilet paper set to the side of the bandoneón section, and a large disco ball with fake flies attached to it—I think they had a more literal translation in mind: “lots of shit.”

I have seen this group play many times over the past several years, and am always impressed by the sheer power of their sound and performance. With their singer—Walter “Chino” Laborde, who is just fabulous—the band has a dozen members on stage. And though most of them play relatively “delicate” instruments like the violin and bandoneón, when the group gets going they can really shake the walls. The bandoneón players just smash the music out of their instruments, replacing the delicate bounce of most players with an aggressive thrashing that is wildly exciting visually and musically compelling as well. It may not be too healthy for the instruments, though. Towards the end of the set the band had to take a lengthy pause while one of the banoneonists fixed his instrument. He had been broken it during the previous song.

During the pause the singer talked and joked with the audience, asking the crowd of several hundred how many were seeing tango live for the first time that night, and how many were seeing Fernandez Fierro for the first time. Judging by the show of hands, a pretty high percentage of the audience were newcomers, both to the genre and to the band. (He also asked if there were any Argentines in the audience, receiving an enthusiastic but not overwhelming cheer in response. I would guess that about 40% of the audience was foreign.)

For those who had never seen this band play live before, much less not heard tango live before, the evening must have been quite an event. However, for a more dedicated fan like me, I fear that the band's once innovative and indeed revolutionary approach to tango might be descending into the realm of shtick. They have added some new and very original material to their repertoire—I especially liked a new arrangement of an Argentine zamba that featured the violin section accompanied by only the piano—but they also continue to play many of the same songs in the same way that they have for the past several years. That, of course, is no sin, just ask the Rolling Stones. But when the same songs also appear on several of their recordings, I begin to doubt. That said, and especially for newcomers, Fernandez Fierro probably still makes for one of the most exciting musical nights out in Buenos Aires, and should not be missed.

Related Recording
Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro, Mucha Mierda (Derechos del Autor) 2006.

Related Links
http://www.fernandezfierro.com/
http://www.latrastienda.com/

Orquesta Típica Fervor de Buenos Aires in San Telmo

2006-12-02T15:35:00.000-03:00

Friday, December 1, 2006

This was one of those hot Buenos Aires nights in which we could go out to dinner at 11 pm, eat at a comfortable pace, take two different buses to the concert on the other side of town, and still arrive early. Lesson learned: if you want to see and hear tango in Buenos Aires you have to love these late nights, or at least be up for them.

Fervor de Buenos Aires is one of the many new Orquestas Típicas playing in Buenos Aires today. Orquestas Típicas are like tango big bands, with sections of several violins and bandoneones accompanied by a rhythm section of piano and bass. It is an instrumentation that can pack quite a punch, and make you feel why tango, despite its complexity, is really a visceral dance music before anything else.

Directed by pianist Javier Arias, Fervor de Buenos Aires takes its inspirational cue from the writings of J.L. Borges (from whose work they take their name) and the stylistic approach to tango associated with pianist, composer, and bandleader Carlos Di Sarli (1903-1960). Di Sarli, who is one of the key figures from the earlier “golden age” of orchestral tango, was known for a crisp style that emphasized quick interchanges between sections and a mostly rhythmic rather than melodic use of the bandoneones. And while they do not play with the hard driving energy I have heard in other Orquestas, Fervor de Buenos Aires executes the Di Sarli style with clarity and grace. I especially liked how seamlessly the piano would interject quick musical ideas in the cracks of the violin parts. They have clearly been doing their homework—intense study of their musical predecessors—and that work is paying off: the band played several of Arias’ original compositions that both fit within the Di Sarli mold and brought something new and distinct to it. It is from this kind of work that tango is going to move forward in the years ahead.

By the end of the concert, the small room where the performance took place was so overheated that everyone almost ran out into the patio to get some fresh air. The band was really feeling it. Sweating entirely through their nearly matching green shirts, they looked more like a rough and tumble Boston bar band than a refined tango orchestra. You have to suffer for your art, so they say. Outside, it had cooled off a bit from what had been a sweltering day. It was December first, and just starting to become summer. I really felt like I had been part of something special, and look forward to feeling the fervor on many more such nights.

Related Recording
Orquesta Típica Fervor de Buenos Aires, Quién Sos (Derechos del Autor) 2006.

Related Link
http://www.fervordebuenosaires.com/

Saturday Night at Baar Fun Fun in Montevideo, Uruguay

2006-10-31T14:35:00.000-03:00

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Founded in 1895, Baar Fun Fun is the place to hear tango in Montevideo, or so I was told by some musicians in Buenos Aires. Though has been in its current location for only the last 18 years or so, the bar oozes its history through the many photographs plastered on the walls, including an autographed photo of the legendary Carlos Gardel, who apparently visited the bar in 1933. The story goes that upon tasting an “uvita,” a sweet wine drink that is the specialty of the house, Gardel was so inspired he burst into a tango song right there and then, belly up to the bar, without any accompaniment. I did not taste one myself, but if that story is even partly true it must be pretty good.

We were seated at a table right next to the small stage, upon which were seated a bandoneonist and a guitar player. These musicians accompanied two different singers who alternated short sets of six or seven songs. One of the singers was a woman who could have been in her late sixties or seventies, the other was a man who was probably forty. They were both dressed in outfits that were at once outrageous and entirely appropriate. For her a short white dress, white high heel shoes, a white lace shirt with a white bra; for him a dark suit with no tie, unbuttoned far down the chest with a silver cross around the neck. This is the visual definition of a “grasa” tango singer, a “fatty” or “greasy” style that can often come off as too much, but which, in this context, felt—and sounded—absolutely great.

The singers stood on the floor in front of the small stage and pranced around the room as they sang, kissing friends on the cheek as they came in, approaching people at tables and singing right into their eyes then quickly moving on. A very old waiter who has worked at the bar for many years was celebrating his 78th birthday that night, and the singers would have him sing lines into the microphone as he walked by with orders.

The bar itself is rather small, and many people without reservations were turned away at the door, but those who were there seemed to enjoy themselves immensely, singing along to the classics of the tango repertoire that were played well into the next morning. Among the most impressive musical moments came later into the evening, as audience members shouted out many different requests to the male singer. “I can’t do all of those,” he said, “I can’t do all of those.” Then, with a gleam in his eye, he shouted, “Yes, yes! I will do all of them!” He then launched into a medley of about six classic tango songs that he strung together on the spot through nods and winks to the musicians, who kept right there with him throughout. The audience, of course, went crazy over this, singing along and shouting approval and applause when the singer finally winded up on the last chord. It was an amazing feat, something I fell very lucky to have been a part of.

For a visitor like me, going to the Baar Fun Fun was more about temporarily participating in a joyous and exuberant musical community than in hearing a concert of a specific musician or singer. It was refreshing for me to hear tango, at least on this night and at this place, as truly popular music.

Related Link
http://www.barfunfun.com/

34 puñaladas at Bar Tuñón

2006-10-22T13:12:00.000-03:00

Friday, October 20, 2006

The 34 puñaladas describe themselves as “an orchestra of tense strings and singer,” and that is exactly what they are: a quartet of three guitars plus guitarrón (a lower pitched guitar) that accompany a vocalist. This instrumentation is one of the classic formats for backing up tango singers, dating from the time of Carlos Gardel (1890-1935) and even earlier, though it is relatively rare to hear today. Therefore the very use of this instrumentation makes a complicated statement regarding the history of tango, and that same sense of complexity applies to almost every aspect of the 34 puñaladas’s music, from their selection of repertoire to their musical arrangements.

The unusual name of the group, which translates as “34 stabs,” is taken from the final line of the famous tango song “Amablemente” (“Nicely,” lyrics by Iván Diaz, music by Edmundo Rivero). Like the rest of the “prison tango” repertoire that the group specializes in, most of which dates from the early 20th century, “Amablemente” is a musical depiction of the heroically desperate lives of the urban poor at the margins of Argentine society: immigrants, criminals, street toughs, prostitutes. In this particular song, a man returns home to find his wife in the arms of another man. After dismissing the woman’s lover, because “the man is not responsible in these cases,” he sits down and asks his wife to make him a drink, which she does. After relaxing with his drink, he approaches his wife and “with great tranquility and nicely” stabs her 34 times, killing her.

Aside from the sometimes shockingly violent content of these songs—which are recognized by everyone as being misogynist and extremely non-P.C.—this repertoire is also famous for its use of lunfardo, a highly Italianized slang form of Spanish that is unique to Buenos Aires and almost entirely unintelligible to those not familiar with it, including most Argentines. (They sell lunfardo dictionaries in the bookshops here.) Revisiting this particular repertoire therefore necessarily means revisiting lunfardo as well. However, despite the barriers to intelligibility lunfardo presents, the age of the songs, and the perhaps not so radically different social worlds depicted in them, this repertoire still seems to have a lot to say to contemporary audiences.

The man who does the saying in the 34 puñaladas is Alejandro Guyot, whom I consider to be one of the best tango singers active today. Moving fluently between a solemnly spoken and forcefully sung voice, Guyot seems to embody the songs more than sing them. He creates a stage persona that makes the songs both believable and effective without being overly precious, and knows exactly how long to hold a note. Guyot is supported by musical arrangements that are as equally dark and atmospheric as the stories the songs depict. Relying heavily on biting dissonances, sequential layering of textures, and impressive use of space and silence, the group of guitarists play with the virtuosity and precision of a professional string quartet. While utilizing the complete resources of the instruments, the virtuosity of the group never came off as empty or simply impressive, even on the several instrumental pieces they played.

Taken together, this performance struck me as one of the most complicated, intense, and ultimately rewarding listening experiences I have had here. As the 34 puñaladas begin to incorporate more original material into their repertoire—they played three original songs here and are preparing a recording of entirely original material—we may hear that, in the underbelly of Buenos Aires, not that much has changed.

Related Recording
34 puñaladas, Argot (Acqua Records) 2006.

Related Link
www.34punaladas.com.ar

Alfredo Piro at the Torquato Tasso

2006-10-19T15:42:00.000-03:00

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Take a young singer, add two parts tango, one part rock, add band, shake well, place on stage, turn on microphones, then sit back and enjoy! That was the recipe for this great mid-week concert by Alfredo Piro at the Torquato Tasso, one of the best venues in Buenos Aires for hearing live tango music.

Son of tango legends Osvaldo Piro and Susana Rinaldi (who were recently reunited on stage for the closing concert of the tango in the Teatro Colón series), Alfredo brings a certain edginess to his music that began with how he looks: a black on black striped tie, a black, nearly skin-tight dress T-shirt, black jeans, a black belt, and yes, black shoes. Along with his chiseled features and his firm but not overbearing stage presence, Alfredo struck me as something like a cross between the actor Liev Schreiber and the lead singer of Green Day but tanguero. And authentically tanguero at that. It was an interesting mix, to be sure.

That mix could be heard in all parts of Alfredo’s music, too. His repertoire featured well-worked tango classics like as “El Choclo” and “Ventarrón” alongside such decidedly non-tango songs as “So Close to Me” by the British alternative rock band The Cure (which was translated here as “Tan Cerca de Mi”) and a few songs by Argentine rock legend Charly García. Alfredo, alongside his musical director, arranger, and guitarist Hernán Reinaudo, was not only able to find a common musical ground between these seemingly disparate repertoires, but made the space between them feel seamless. El Choclo was treated to a fascinating, extended, and atmospheric arrangement that switched between free time passages and the strict, chomping rhythm familiar to more standard renditions of the song (though even the rhythmic sections moved between single and double times at different moments). The rock tunes were not simply given the tango treatment, but approached with a similarly original between-genre sensibility that brought out tango elements in the songs that sounded as if they must have always been there. And this was not a “fusion” band: the only slightly atypical instrument added to the tango group of two guitars, violin, and bass was the cajón, a percussion instrument which is not entirely uncommon in tango groups today.

That Alfredo and his band could pull off such elaborate genre jumping and have it not come off as pretentious or contrived but as if it were second nature seemed amazing to me. But is it amazing? While these musicians are obviously very thoughtful about how they go about doing what it is they do, almost all of us do exactly this kind of genre switching in our daily listening habits without giving it a second thought. (I recognized the different songs they played, for example.) With that in mind, Alfredo’s music, while strikingly original, is not really experimental or vanguard at all. It is simply the product of what young musicians in Buenos Aires are into today—rock, pop, jazz, and tango. What is really amazing about Alfredo Piro, then, is his willingness to be his complete musical self on stage.

Ramiro Gallo Quinteto at the Biblioteca Nacional

2006-10-16T22:44:00.000-03:00

Sunday, October 15, 2006

A violinist, composer, arranger, and educator of note, I think of Ramiro Gallo as something like the Wynton Marsalis of contemporary tango. Like Marsalis, Ramiro’s music is steeped in the tradition in which he works but has a very modern, original sound. Furthermore, while jazz and tango were once “popular” forms, both Marsalis and Gallo clearly understand and deal with them as “high art.” And while he is quite a bit younger than Marsalis, Gallo is equally professional, elegant, and charismatic. If this is the kind of musical sound, historical perspective, and institutional position that you are attracted to, Gallo, like Marsalis, is at the top of the scene. If not, again like Marsalis, you might find a lot worth complaining about regarding Ramiro’s overall artistic project.

This concert took place at the national library (which is one of the truly shocking architectural facts of Buenos Aires), and was the first in a series of concerts by the group commemorating the library’s recuperation and cataloguing of almost 300,000 pieces of sheet music, many of them old and largely forgotten tangos, that have sat for years in unorganized piles. This kind of cataloguing project, as humdrum as it may seem, cannot be applauded enough, for collections and archives of all sorts are kept in notoriously bad shape here in Argentina. As Gallo announced from the stage, these pieces represent “the sonic memory of Argentina.”

Following the performance of several original pieces featured on the group’s new recording (including a lovely series of miniatures and the haunting “mi gaucha”), the concert featured pieces Gallo had selected from the library’s newly organized collection and arranged for his ensemble. He narrowed his choices down by sticking to the lesser- or un-known work of four composers he feels particularly close to: Joaquín Mora, Francisco de Caro, Juan Carlos Cobián, and Enrique Delfino. The work of each of these composers, he said, provided both rich melodies and space for harmonic interpretation, which was key for his work as an arranger. The result was a surprising mix of the rhythmic snap of early tango with the intricate, almost crystalline density of Gallo’s compositional voice. The band approached the music with poise and vigor, creating an enthusiastic energy that at moments almost broke the scales, especially on the few pieces that featured the endlessly charming singer Ariel Ardit as invited artist.

It was refreshing to hear a group of young musicians approach this older repertoire as if it were a living part of the music being made today, rather than the dusty archival material that it in fact is. These pieces, like old photos, he said, shine a light on the moment in which they were created in unique and special ways. And judging by the group’s performance, this music can shine a light on the contemporary moment in equal measure.

Related Recording
Ramiro Gallo Quinteto, Espejada (EPSA Music) 2006.

Related Link
http://www.ramirogallo.com.ar/

Alfredo “Tape” Rubin at the Centro Cultural San Martín

2006-10-16T19:37:00.000-03:00

Thursday, October 12, 2006

I have been a little lazy keeping up with the posts, though my lack of energy somehow feels appropriate given my overall impression of this concert. Alfredo “Tape” Rubin is a middle aged tango singer and guitarist who was accompanied here by two younger guitar players. Their repertoire consisted on mainly original tangos that were composed by the various members of the group. Several were instrumental, though most of them had lyrics which, while newly composed, kept very self-consciously within the topical guidelines of the genre. That is, there were songs about bad women, heartbroken women, beautiful women, young women in love with older men, women who dance tango, disgraced women, women of the night, women who inspire tango songs, lonely women, etc. There was a song about hard life in the barrio and one about tango nightlife in general, too, though I think enjoyment of this concert really depended on one’s endurance for songs on a certain, specific topic.

Musically, Rubin has a nice tenor voice that made each vocal phrase a real journey, and the guitar arrangements were subtly complex and well executed by the ensemble. I especially liked their frequent use of the guitar’s low register for melodic passages and the quick interchanges between Alfredo’s two accompanists. Like the lyrics, however, the music also seemed to rely too heavily on material that came off sounding somewhat cliché. Some songs, like a tango based on blues phrases, were more adventurous, though to my ears the original material as a whole sounded overly familiar.

That sonic familiarity is the symptom of a problem that I think lies at the core of a lot of current tango composition and performance: a problem of over-identification or over-respect for what tango was. While serious study of and respect for the genre is obviously necessary for any successful rendition of tango today, it seems to me that many musicians, especially composers, can be overly enamored with the limits of the genre. Rather than looking for what new or fresh things their particular experiences can bring to the genre, they seem to be focused on creating compositions that are “passable” vis-à-vis the classic tango repertoire. That, of course, is the definition of academicism. While it makes for music that is enjoyable and often lovely, it also makes for music that, like this week-after-the-fact blog entry, lacks a sense of urgency.

Related Recordings
Alfredo “Tape” Rubin, Reina Noche (Acqua Records) 2004.

Colonizados at Pigmalion Tango

2006-10-08T15:36:00.000-03:00

Saturday, October 7, 2006

Colonizados is a sextet of violin, bandoneón, guitar, bass, tres, and percussion. Given that instrumentation, you could guess that the group is up to something different, and you would be right.

The artistic project of the group is to mix tango with various kinds of Cuban music, especially son. This fusion is conducted mostly by playing traditional tangos such as “El Choclo” and “Uno” in a son style, though they also give some Cuban songs like “Dos Gardenias” and “Lágrimas Negras” the tango treatment. Some of these experiments were more successful than others, of course, but having initially been somewhat suspicious I was pleasantly surprised by how well the two styles went together. The group opened up the perennial “Libertango” into an extended groove that had everyone’s head bobbing, and which featured improvised solos from several band members among whom bandoneónist Matias Rubino and tres player Eduardo Suárez were particularly impressive. They performed a very original arrangement of Anibal Troilo’s milonga “La Trampera” that moved abruptly but fluently between half time and double time tempos. The two or three songs that featured the singing of violinist Geovanny Ruiz were especially enjoyable.

Chatting with percussionist Jorge Romero after the show, it was explained to me that the fusion of tango and son in fact is not such far-fetched idea because both styles share historical roots in common genres like the habanera. Thinking about it that way, fusion projects such as this one seem like they would almost be second nature for contemporary musicians, though I know a lot of tangueros have a certain distain for musical fusions of any sort these days. “Tango is tango,” I have heard several times and in several ways. “It does not need jazz, rock, classical music, etc. It is what it is.” I can understand that perspective too, but I wonder whose loss it is in the end?

Come April, those of you in the US can judge for yourself. Bassist and bandleader Roberto Amerise, who I met at the Nestór Tomassini concert described below and who invited me to this concert, told me that the band will be doing a tour of the US next year, playing at S.O.B.’s in New York City among many other places.

One final note on the venue: this is the third time I have been to the upstairs space of Pigmalion, a relatively new tango venue in Buenos Aires that seems to have everything going for it but which, for me at least, always ends up feeling like more of an impediment than an enabler. It does not help that the most aggressive waiter in the southern hemisphere works there: he is the only person who has seemed genuinely angry when I don’t order the $25 cheese and meat plate, and scoffs when friends order only a glass of wine rather than a whole bottle. I know it is their job to make money, but it is not our job to fill up on meat and cheese on demand. More serious issues are an overly resonant acoustics that swallows up and muddies the sound, and decor that make the room feel more like a highly formal dance studio with a bar than a music venue. I hate to complain, because there is by no means an overabundance of music venues in Buenos Aires these days, many of which were closed following a tragic nightclub fire in December 2004 in which almost 200 people died. The musicians, too, seem grateful to have the opportunity to perform there. But for me, going to concerts at this place always feels a little more like work than I wish it did.

Related Recordings
Colonizados, TangoSon (La Salsera A.C.) 2006.

Related Links
www.lasalsera.com/colonizados
http://www.pigmalioncasatango.com.ar/

Orquesta Típica Cerda Negra at the Club Atletico Fernandez Fierro

2006-10-08T13:08:00.000-03:00

Friday, October 6, 2006

“We have a sad past in Argentina. We have studied that past, and we are going to make the present as good as possible.” That was the send-off message from the stage as Orquesta Típica Cerda Negra finished their under-attended set at the Club Atletico Fernandez Fierro (CAFF) last Friday night.

Some of that sad past was laid out in detail by a massive poster that covered part of two walls in the back corner of the club. The poster, originally in German but translated into Spanish, outlined political and economic connections between corporations like Mercedez Benz, the Nazis, and the Argentine government of Juan Perón, the selling off of Argentine national lands to foreign companies like Benetton in the 1990s and the consequences it has had for indigenous groups, and the horrors of the last military dictatorship, during which as many as 30,000 civilians were kidnapped, tortured, and “disappeared” by the government under a policy of state terror. And this more than “sad” past is still frighteningly alive here today: the newspaper headlines of the last several weeks have been dominated by the current government’s increasingly desperate search for a key witness in the trial of a former police repressor and torturer who vanished the day before the trial concluded. The government and human rights groups fear that he may have been “disappeared” for having come forward to testify (though the use of that specific term has been highly controversial). The same night as this concert, nearly 100,000 people marched to the Plaza de Mayo, the main public square in front of the president’s house, demanding the reappearance of the missing witness alive.

The CAFF and the groups who play there are obviously deeply engaged with the political past of Argentina: what other music club would have this kind of poster on the wall? That said, the Orquesta Típica Cerda Negra has clearly studied their musical past as well. An ensemble of eleven members in the historically resonant orquesta típica format (a tango big band of bandoneónes, violins, piano, bass, ‘cello, and singer), the group ripped through nearly flawless renditions of tango classics such as Pugliese’s “La Yumba” and Piazzolla’s “Libertango.” The precision of their performance was all the more impressive because almost every member of the band is under twenty years old, with some of them as young as sixteen. I mean, my high school funk band was pretty good, but these kids are really talented.

The band really came alive, however, when playing their original compositions. These both drew upon and extended the musical vocabulary of the genre and the sonic palate of the orquesta típica in very interesting and original ways: they used dense and lush harmonies that moved in unexpected but not jarring progressions; they had moments of rhythmic counterpoint that were at once highly tense and totally static; and they had the most fluid, extreme, and effective use of dynamics I have ever heard in an orquesta típica. Most of the compositions were written, I think, by seventeen-year-old pianist and bandleader Agustín Guerrero, who has clearly been listening to his Debussy and Stravinsky records along with his Triolo and Pugliese tango discs.

Given the age of the group, the quality of their performance, and the strength of their original compositions, Orquesta Típica Cerda Negra, having studied the past, is not only making the present of tango music “as good as possible,” but laying the groundwork for the future as well.

Related Links
www.cerdanegra.com.ar
www.fernandezfierro.com/caff

Néstor Tomassini at Bar Tuñón

2006-10-05T13:34:00.000-03:00

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Bar Tuñón is a fantastic little place on Maipu between Córdoba y Paraguay. There is a restaurant on the first floor, with the performance space downstairs. Named in homage to the militant writer and poet of Argentine street life Raúl González Tuñón (1905-1974), Bar Tuñón oozes an infectiously pleasant atmosphere, even more so now that the new anti-smoking laws have gone into effect in Buenos Aires. You read that right, folks: no more smoking in public places in Buenos Aires as of last Sunday. It’s hard to believe but true.

We were there to hear the tango clarinetist Néstor Tomassini present his new CD, De Corte Antiguo. You read that right, too: tango clarinetist. Because I myself play saxophone and clarinet—instruments rarely heard in contemporary tango—this concert was all the more interesting and special for me. Néstor was accompanied throughout the concert by a singe guitarist, and was joined on several selections by a bassist and percussionist who played the cajón, a musical wooden box that the player sits on top of and slaps with their hands like a skinned drum. The group's repertoire was dominated by both classic and lesser known tangos and milongas (an upbeat sub genre of tango) from the early history of the music, which, given the instrumentation they had, they played in a very romping and rollicking style. Tomassini attacked his clarinet lines with an intensity that was reminiscent of klezmer clarinet playing, slipping and sliding around the edge of the instrument’s capabilities to the point that some notes and a few whole phrases were squawked away and lost in the air. As a clarinet player, I could identify with this energetic, agressive, and joyful style playing, and was impressed by how different it was from the crisp precision you hear in a lot of tango music, due probably to the instrumental qualities of the bandoneón, where there are no "inbetween" notes.

This kind of groove heavy, percussion added tango music seems to be something of a phenomenon these days. While this style is obviously contemporary (it would not be too much of a stretch for some listeners to hear it as “world music”), it is interesting that the musicians themselves often imagine it as being more closely related to how tango originally sounded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when wind instruments such as the flute or clarinet were much more common in tango music. Today this kind of playing can be heard as making certain kinds of claims regarding the Afro-Argentine influence in early tango, which some people believe has been ignored or neglected in common understandings of the genre's origins and history. That, of course, is a big debate, and I am not going to go there in this blog entry, but if you are interested you can check out the recent (and polemical) book Tango: an Art History of Love by Yale art history professor Robert Farris Thompson (Pantheon 2005). No such claims were made from the stage last night, however, at least not verbally.

Aside from Tomassini, the MVP of this concert was guitarist Hernán Reinaudo, who I know from the fantastic group 34 puñaladas and who had invited me to the concert. Hernán contributed the only original song to the program (which unfortunately is not on the CD) and was given space for a solo rendition of the vals “Ojos azules” by (I think) composer and guitarist Miguel Cafre (1881-1936), which was among the evening’s highlights. Hernán has an instrumental voice that is at once virtuosic and tender, deeply expressive and lighthearted: quite a winning combination in my opinion.

Related Recordings
Néstor Tomassini, De Corte Antiguo (Art Menu/EPSA Music) 2006.

Related Links
http://www.nestortomassini.com.ar/
http://www.tunon.com.ar/

33 de Mano and Ricardo Reches at the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación

2006-10-04T00:24:00.000-03:00

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

There is a regular Tuesday evening tango series hosted by the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación (CCC) on Avenida Corrientes which I try to make it to semi-regularly, though tonight was the first time I have been there in a long time. The place itself is very interesting. Privately funded by a cooperative Argentine bank called Banco Credicoop, the CCC is, according to their own literature, “a space dedicated to the arts and social sciences...whose orientation is inscribed in the principles and values of cooperation, which it affirms in an anti-capitalist sensibility and through social and cultural progress.” The CCC features several spaces for theatrical and musical performances, hosts lectures and discussion on all kinds of political and artistic topics, has an art gallery, a leftist bookstore, a cafe, and spaces for different research groups hosted by the institution, etc. The Tuesday night tango series can be hit or miss, but it books less well known performers that you would probably not hear elsewhere and it is free, so you can’t really go wrong.

Tonight the music was more of a miss, I am afraid. I saw a double bill of a group called 33 de Mano and a singer named Ricardo Reches. 33 de Mano is a trio of two guitars plus a singer. They concentrated on classic tango repertoire, especially that of bandoneón virtuoso and bandleader Anibal Troilo and guitarist Roberto Grela. The guitarists were quite good, though they seemed overly distracted by minute tuning issues and played in a somewhat lackluster, academic style. Maybe they were nervous, but their songs seemed more to fall off the page than to really end (though they were playing from memory). The singer was doing his part, though he too was rather unanimated. The audience, which seemed to be a mix of regular attendees (mostly senior citizens) and friends of the group, seemed to like it well enough, with someone calling out to the musicians to tell them how lovely they thought their selection of songs was. The hall for the tango concerts at the CCC is quite intimate, which facilitates these kinds of interactions between the musicians and their very vocal audiences, which are quite common.

The second group, Ricardo Reches, did not go over so well. Ricardo is a singer and guitarist who specializes in original tango songs. He was accompanied on a few of his songs by his brother Miguel Reches, who sang, and by his cousin Lucía Moledo, who played percussion. The songs were pleasant enough, though somewhat banal (stories about falling in love with a stranger on the train who gets off before you can speak to them, etc), and I have to applaud anyone who is trying to write new tango songs, which is no small task. The real killer for me, however, was the air of pretentiousness that Ricardo brought to the stage, with the performance falling flat under the weight of him trying so hard to seem like he was not trying at all. There were some nice musical moments, especially the quick vocal duets between Ricardo and his brother, who had an amazingly high, nasal voice. But whatever momentum was generated during the songs was completely dissipated by Ricardo’s on stage banter and repeated requests for applause. Others in the audience seemed to share my less than enthusiastic sentiment, with a steady trickle of people heading for the doors throughout the performance and no requests for the usually obligatory “otra” when the show came to an end. Ricardo has a CD titled Llega el Tren.

Related Links
www.centrocultural.coop
www.ricardoreches.com.ar

Selección Nacional de Tango at the Teatro Colón

2006-10-03T15:46:00.000-03:00

Monday, October 2nd, 2006

The term “selección” is used in Argentina to name the teams that represent the nation as a whole at international sporting events such as the World Cup or the Copa Libertadores. Those players who make the selección are the best of the best, and as with soccer or basketball, so with tango.

The selección nacional de tango is a super-group made up of some of the greatest living tango musicians. The selección takes the form of an “orquesta típica,” a kind of tango big band that is made up, in this case, of fifteen musicians: six violins, five bandoneónes (a button squeeze box instrument typical of tango), viola, ‘cello, bass, and piano. The group features some of the most well known tango players alive today, including “grandes” such as Leopoldo Federico, Ernesto Baffa, Julio Pane, and Horacio Cabarcos, as well as some relatively young stars such as bandoneonist Pablo Mainetti and violinist Damián Bolotín. Aside from being superb players, many members of the selección are or have been important composers and bandleaders, and the group draws upon the collective talent and experience of its members in a way that I was told is historically unique in tango. It has a rotating leadership, in which many of the players write or arrange music for the group and serve as its leader when playing those works, but serve as sidemen when playing work produced by others. This kind of arrangment makes not only for a good exercise in musical humility, but also for a very stylistically diverse listening experience.

At least eight different composers or arrangers produced the nearly twenty pieces that the selección played, each with their own approach to the diverse sonic possibilities of the orquesta típica format. Pablo Mainetti’s arrangement of his composition “Tango azul” shifted between impressionistic rubato sections and more dense rhythmic jolts. Julio Pane, who many musicians I have spoken with consider the greatest bandoneón player alive today, flexed his muscles as a soloist during his “A las orquestas,” making it all look and sound effortless. The first real eruption from the audience followed Ernesto Baffa’s arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s classic “Adiós Nonino,” about half way through the concert. After the loud cheers and applause died down following this piece, someone in the crowd called out “thank you Astor!” Leopoldo Federico joined the band late in their set, and his very presence clearly made the evening a special event for many in the audience. Federico seems to be getting up in the years, and needed some assistance reaching his seat at the front of the orquesta. Once there, though, he proved that he very much still has the fire in him, executing a series of virtuosic and highly energetic solo and tutti bandoneón passages. Indeed, what impressed me most about the selección as a whole was the intricacy of their arrangements and the poised intensity with which they performed them, especially as they approached the thundering conclusions of pieces that often ended with a surprising gentleness through use of the typical hesitation cadence. That said, I personally think the MVP of the evening was Damián Bolotín, who had a series of superbly executed violin solos throughout the concert, though he did not contribute arrangements.

The band was joined for two songs by the dancers Mora Godoy and Junior Cervilla, who danced in the highly athletic “escenario” style of tango dance (including a complete flip by Ms. Godoy that landed her in the final pose exactly on the downbeat). Ms. Godoy and Mr. Cervilla are fabulous dancers, though I must admit that I have yet to discover the real appeal of this kind of tango dance. Singer Adriana Varela, who is among the most well-known and successful tango singers active today, also joined the selección for two songs. I had never heard Varela perform live before, having missed her solo concert a few weeks back, so I was very much looking forward to hearing her here. Unfortunately, however, the sound system was arranged in such a way that from where I was sitting—close to the stage but high up near the top of the room—her voice sounded like little more than a faint grumble. Nevertheless, Varela clearly has a commanding stage presence, and following her two short features many in the audience called out her name asking for more, which did not come.

The selección, on the other hand, had no problem filling up the hall with sound, though it seemed that it took them some time to fill up the large and highly formal space with energy. By the end of the concert, however, the audience was on their feet and demanding more. The group apparently did not have encores prepared, and obliged the audience by repeating two of the pieces they had performed earlier in the concert, which did not seem to disappoint anyone, including me. It should also be noted that the Hugo Rivas cuarteto—three guitars and a bass—opened the evening with the quietly virtuosic performance of four classics from the tango repertoire. I do not know much about Rivas, but will keep an ear out for him, as I very much liked what I heard here.

This performance was one in a series of tango concerts that are being given in the Teatro Colón this season. The Colón is by far the most spectacular and significant performance venue for “serious music” in Argentina, its overall opulence making Carnegie hall in New York look like no big deal. I have been told that the fact that the Colón is hosting tango concerts is quite significant for many in the tango community here, representing both a recognition and validation of the value and quality of their current work by the musical establishment and the city government (which owns and operates the theater). Though this is by no means the first time tango has ever been played in the Colón, judging by this concert alone, it is welcome and very much belongs there today.

Related Recordings
Selección Nacional de Tango. En Vivo (Típica Records) 2006.

Related Links
www.teatrocolon.org.ar