Michael’s music blog

Bésame mucho (kiss me a lot) is one of the most famous boleros of all time (a bolero is a South American form of love song, most popular in Mexico and Cuba). It’s a song that has touched millions of hearts around the world. Written by the Mexican Consuelo Velázquez in 1940, it soon became popular all over South America.

Perhaps the greatest recording is that of the original Trio Los Panchos from the mid 1950s. With their close harmony singing and the sweet runs on the requinto (a Mexican guitar a fifth smaller than a conventional guitar, with proportionately higher notes), Los Panchos were the interpreters of boleros par excellence. If you want to hear this music - we will try to get if for you, but we don’t stock it as so few people in Europe and interested by it. If buying yourself, be aware that the band is still going today so you may not get what you think!

The version of this song I want to tell you about is very different! It’s by the black Argentine swing guitar master, Oscar Alemán. A contemporary of Django Reinhardt, he played alongside him in Paris and the two men were friends, but Alemán was more inventive and his music swung harder. Reviews at the time were unequivocal, but somehow Alemán never achieved the kind of fame enjoyed by Reinhardt and Grapelli. Perhaps his music was too strong for European tastes.

His 1942 recording of Bésame mucho is often to be heard in the swing breaks in traditional Argentine milongas. It’s one of his greatest recordings, with mesmerizing playing from his violinist, who swings much harder than Stefan Grapelli. The band camp it up - it’s hugely enjoyable.

As a final note: Consuelo Velázquez had not reached her sixteenth birthday when she wrote Bésame mucho and had not yet been kissed.

One of the musicians about whom I feel most passionately is the Cuban tresero and band-leader Arsenio Rodríguez. Considering that he created the son montuno, which is basically the music which became first mambo and then salsa, it’s stunning that most people in the salsa community have never heard of him.

Arsenio’s tracks from the 1940s burn so hard that they’ll set your music system on fire, and it’s not for nothing that the Buena Social Vista Club used many of his compositions on their recordings - even sometimes using his arrangements. 60 years on, they still sound modern and exciting. This isn’t the slick salsa romantica we often hear - this music has edge and bite.

It’s wonderful therefore to announce that Jordi Pujol and his colleagues at Tumbao Cuban Classics have produced a 6 cd boxed set with the entire discography of Arsenio on the Cuban RCA label (they say complete - I’ve found one track that’s missing). I’ve been listening to this for hours since I got one - it’s just fantastic. The boxed set includes a discography and a booklet about Arsenio’s life with many rare photographs.

This boxed set will have limited availability. If you want one, get one soon - once they’re gone, they’re gone. I don’t expect to sell a single one, but I wanted to share my excitement at the availability of this long neglected music

When I started dancing tango the music of Astor Piazzolla was very popular among the new dancing public who, myself included, were by and large completely ignorant about dance music in general and tango music in particular. At that time, the dramatic music of Astor Piazzolla was very popular. Many of the live bands, which were made up of musicians who knew next to nothing about tango, focussed on his music.

Piazzolla of course cared nothing for dancers, and as we began to tire (some less quickly than others) of the Piazzolla diet on which we were being fed, tangueros began to wake up to the fact that his music wasn’t that easy to dance to. Susanna Miller summed it up with these unforgettable words: the question isn’t whether or not you can dance to Piazzolla, but whether it’s enjoyable.

Musically speaking, things have improved so much on the tango scene that these days it’s a shock if a live band play Piazzolla, and one hardly ever hears his music at the milonga. He does have a place there, but one has to choose carefully.

The problem is that his most famous music, such as the iconic Buenos Aires Hora Cero (Zero Hour) or The Rough Dancer And The Cyclical Night is not the best for dancing. The most accessible music for tango dancers was recorded after this, and in fact comes from his final years. There is a wonderful selection of his music on the British label Music Club. It’s deleted, but we can still get it and currently we have stock. If you’re interested in this music, get a cd soon whilst it’s still available.

I’m trying to find this canaro song (El rey del bosque)… in my collection i have a quinteto version but i’m sure it’s different to the version i want - which is more dramatic, or am i imagining it?!

No you’re not imagining this! Canaro recorded this with his orchestra in 1939. It was on the deleted cd Colección Aniversario which has been reprinted as Serie de Oro - we have these in stock priced £7.50

How do I get hold of the song Maki Maki?

This is by Goran Bregovic and appears on his album Tales and Songs from Weddings and Funerals. There are some other tracks to which you can also dance milonga, such as “Hip Hop”, and the rest is Bregovic’s typical Balkan madness!

We don’t normally stock this, but will happily source one for you

The 1960s was not a great time for tango in general. One of the few orchestras to keep going was that of Osvaldo Pugliese. The bulk of his output in this period were vocal numbers - never Pugliese’s strongest point after the departure of Chanel. On the other hand, the instrumentals form this period include the classic “A Evaristo Carriego”. We’re often asked for the studio recording of this album, and it seemed a pity to recommend Antologia vol.4 - in many respects, a fairly duff album - just to pickup this one track. But here’s the answer: Nostalgico - an album just of Pugliese instrumentals from the years on Polygram - has been reprinted.

The cd includes some other strong instrumentals from this period, including Didi, although not the little-heard Verano Porteño - you’ll still have to buy Antologia vol.5 for that one! Anyway - here they are: Pugliese’s 60s instrumentals on one cd, with those pesky vocal numbers weeded out. Sure to be popular once people realize it’s available.

1. El entrerriano
2. El amanecer
3. El Marne
4. Taconeando
5. El pensamiento
6. La payanca
7. Lorenzo
8. Inspiración
9. Que Noche
10. Marejada
11. Cabrera
12. Lágrimas
13. Canaro En París
14. Charamusca
15. Didi
16. Orlando Goñi
17. Don Agustín Bardi
18. Nostálgico
19. A Evaristo Carriego
20. Adiós Nonino

Tango Crash is the eponymous 2003 debut cd from Tango Crash (Daniel Almada-piano, Martin Iannaccone - cello), reprinted with a new cover in 2006 after their second cd, Otra Sanata, was well received by jazz fans. This is not tango, but wild, experimental jazz. The funky soprano sax of Rodrigo Dominguez takes this much closer to John Coltrane than it does to the Gotan Project. If you like modern, deconstructive jazz - I don’t - then this is for you. Mostly this leaves me unmoved, but there is something infectious about Track 7, Remis. You can preview all the tracks on the band’s flashy website.

Who? Juan de Dios Filiberto, the composer of Caminito and Quejas de bandoneón, that’s who. Born in the barrio of La Boca in 1885, Filiberto did not identify himself as a tango musician. He called his music canción porteña - port song - and although the bulk of his compositions and performances were tangos they always had something of a country air about them. In this way, Filiberto stands out from his contemporaries of the guardia vieja as someone with a different sensibility.

EMI released a cd of Filiberto on their Pampa label back in the 1990s, but it’s long gone. EURO records have been rummaging around the vaults and have found this album of Filiberto recordings from 1958/1959, which came out in January. It’s the only Filiberto album in print and is sure to be popular with those who love his special flavour.

I was wondering if you could give me your opinion(s) of a few CDs as regards transfer quality. I’m already impressed with the Archivo RCA Di Sarli/Troilo ’40s CD, which to my ear has superior source material, but I’d rather avoid buying more duplicates… I’m not familiar with the transfer quality of the Troilo/RCA discs

Troilo was with RCA-Victor from 1941-1949. In 1962, at a time when tango had lost popularity and influence, a Colombian, Ricardo Mejia, was appointed manager of RCA-Victor. Perceiving (correctly) that there was no commercial importance to the old tango recordings, he made the catastrophic decision to torch all RCA’s old tango master matrices. BUT before this everything was transferred onto tape.

This is why for instance, in the tango “Tabernero” (Troilo/Fiorentino 1941) ALL the available versions have a hiss at 2′40″. There is a dropout on the tape copy from which the subsequent LPs were prepared. (Paul Lange did a great April fool once, saying that he’d discovered that this hiss was the sound of a mischievous Astor Piazzolla frying chips in the corner of the studio!). If anyone had an original 78 in good condition, that hiss would not be there.

At some point, I think the 1970s, RCA reissued all of Troilo’s recordings with them over 26 LPs. A number of mistakes were made in the preparation of these LPs. In “Colorao, Colorao” (Troilo/Fiorentino 1942) a section of Troilo’s bandoneón solo is quite obviously missing at 2′03″, destroying the flow of the piece, whilst a number of Marino’s versions from the mid 1940s were processed in fake stereo.

Now, the problem is that all the versions that have come down to us stem from these LP reissues - NOT FROM THE SOURCE MATERIAL. They all have the same problems. BMG’s transfers on “Tango Argentino”, on their defunct “Obra Completa” and those on their newer Troilo en RCA Victor series are, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable. How you collect these is up to you. If you are on a budget, you can buy the cds of the 1940s output quite economically on Tango Argentino. On the other hand, if you are willing to pay extra for good presentation, the newer multimedia cds on Troilo en RCA Victor are definitely the ones to go for. It’s just a pity that BMG (who own RCA) didn’t go back to their tape masters for this series.

El Bandoneón’s transfers are a little different, but they are still made from LPs not 78s. Their fidelity is never better than those on the Argentine labels. Their 4 cd box set EBCD305 has fabulous versions of the two 1938 tracks on Odeón, Comme Il Faut and Tinta Verde - worth buying just for these two! You’ll knock people dead at the milonga with their energy and excitment. As for La Cumparsita and Racing Club, from the 1940 acetate from Uruguay, they are still missing. If you have them, call me collect, day or night. I don’t believe they exist.

EURO records have been given access to the RCA vaults and their vals/milonga Troilo CD is transferred not from the LPs but from the tape copies of the destroyed original masters, as is their new Troilo / Di Sarli disc. I think they are the best available transfers and are worth getting.

Set in the heart of Patagonia, Historias Minimas is one of those films which addresses some of life’s big questions without much really happening. The low-key human drama is played out with both subtlety and sensitivity, and is quite affecting. Also starring in the film is the immense Patagonian landscape, dwarfing the characters who move through it. Profound and charming.