As I listen further to the 10 CD tango set on Membran, I keep finding errors in the listing – some of them very pleasant ones!
Today I noticed that on cd7, track 4 El choclo is not D’Agostino/Vargas, but the voice of Angel Vargas from 1957.
The received wisdom is that Vargas’s best period as a soloist was immediately after leaving D’Agostino, when he employed Eduardo del Piano (1947 – 1950) to direct his orchestra. However this later recording with Edelmiro D’Amario is really lovely – it would work well in a tanda of late D’Agostino, who didn’t record ‘El choclo’ himself at this time.
The music of the great gaucho payador Atahualpa Yupanqui just gets better and better. Here he is reciting his own composition on the death of Pablo Neruda.
Pablo nuestro que estás en tu Chile,
viento en el viento,
cósmica voz de caracol antiguo,
nosotros te decimos
gracias por la ternura que nos diste,
por las golondrinas que vuelan con tus versos
de barca a barca
de rama a rama
de silencio a silencio.
El amor de los hombres
repite tus poemas
en cada calabozo de América
un muchacho recuerda tus poemas.
Pablo nuestro que estás en tu Chile
todo el paisaje custodia tu sueño de gigante
la humedad de la planta y de la roca allá en el sur
la arena desmenuzada vicuña adentro en el desierto
y allá arriba, el salitre, las gaviotas y el mar.
Pablo nuestro que estás en tu Chile
gracias por la ternura que nos diste.
This is pretty much untranslatable, at least by me, but let me share with you the last line: thank you for the tenderness you gave us, spoken with genuine emotion by Atahualpa. It gets me every time.
Remembering this whilst I was teaching in France, I’ve just been looking for a good compilation album of his work. Don Ata (short for Atahualpa) wrote over 1200 songs, and what is available changes all the time. Eventually – and there were a lot of CDs to wade through – I found this newish double CD which includes Canción a Pablo Neruda amongst some really good selections. Contact us if you want one – Atahualpa doesn’t have his own page on the site.
We’ve found an amazing new tango compilation – full of good dance music. Yes there are some poor tracks (Di Sarli is treated particularly badly), but there are some amazing ones as well, including some absolute rarities! Find more information, including full track listings, here – then buy one!
Otros Aires have just released their third album, Tricota. The blurb reads: Electronic tango for dancing, with the accompaniment of orchestra of Erica di Salvo y Los Reyes del Tango (The Tango Kings).
I was a bit suspicious when I heard this, but in fact it works really well: Otros Aires use the orchestra to augment their signature tango-pop sound, with the strings reminding me a little of the UK girl group Bond! The singer gets more freedom, and the effect is quite joyful.
You can hear 5 of the 10 tracks on the band’s funky website. To sum up, the new CD is nothing profound, but will please their fans.
When I was a child we had these things called nursery rhymes – remember them? Some years ago, I was astonished to discover a Spanish nursery rhyme arranged as a tango. The song was Asserín, Asserán (See Saw) and the band was Bianco-Bachicha, the masters of the comic tango:
Asserín, Asserán.
los maderos de San Juan,
piden pan, no les dan,
piden queso, les dan un hueso.
Se les atora en el pescuezo
y comienzan a llorar
en la puerta del zaguán,
y les hacen rigui, riqui.
riqui, riqui, riqui, ran.
See Saw
sing the woodsmen from San Juan.
They ask for bread, they get a stone.
They ask for cheese – they get a bone.
They say, “Oh, heck! A slice in the neck!”
They start to cry in the door of the porch
Then they giggle with a tickle.
Tickle, tickle, tickle, giggle
Serious stuff. Anyhow this morning I was listening to some music of Roberto Firpo’s orchestra, and perfectly disguised as El ahorcado (The hanged man), there is the same thing again!
No te llevo la canasta
Aunque te mueras para mí
Asserín, Asserán…
The new album from Gotan Project, Tango 3.0, was released a few days ago.
Gotan haven’t stood still, and the music is more jazzy and boppy, Peligro and Mil millones sound most like the Gotan of old, whilst De hombre a hombre is a bit like Gotan meets The Pink Panther. El mensajero is I think a chamamé.
As Gotan develop their music continues, little by little, to stray from its dancing roots. This album is getting five star reviews from the general public and is sure to sell well with the tango public too, but I think we will be hearing more from it in bars than we will at the milonga.
With sadness and confusion, we bring you the sad news that the milonguero Eduardo Aguirre (“Eduardo del Colón”) died suddenly at home in Amsterdam on Wednesday last, 7th April 2010. He was 71 years old.
I first met Eduardo in Buenos Aires in the late 1990s, where I saw him living the life of the milonguero that mostly one could only hear about: dancing through the night at Club Almagro, going for a coffee in a café, and then walking not home but directly to his work.
It was at this very salon that he met Yvonne Meissner. They became partners and Eduardo settled in Europe, where he lived and taught with great pleasure.
Eduardo had an incredible feeling for the music. Tango was his passion, and he lived it to the end: only last weekend he danced for 20 hours.
His passing leaves a hole that will never be filled for those who knew and loved him
Eduardo’s ashes will be interred in his native Argentina, in accordance with his wishes.
In this wonderful 1940s film (presented here in three parts), RCA-Victor demonstrate how a 78rpm master record was made in the 1940s. After an introduction to the archive, there is footage of a master disc being manufactured from wax, recorded, then successively plated with gold, copper and nickel, before the matrices are prepared:
What really struck me was how the finished record – being an analog process – contains an imprint of the vibrations made by the musicians at the time of the performance. In some sense, you are connected directly back to that time. This is something that digital music – especially with our attempts to “improve” the music with filtering and other kinds of post-processing – can never capture.
My thanks to Ruddy Zelaya for putting me on to this.
To be a real music enthusiast is a never-ending task. You are constantly on the lookout (listen-out) for new music. At the same time, you have to listen to and study the music you have already discovered (I have 16,000 tracks ripped to my laptop – and there’s plenty that’s not on there). So when I am away, perhaps at a tango event, and have a few free hours, I might spend some time listening to some music, studying a particular orchestra, checking a new CD against a discography to place the new music in context, and so on.
At this point, my tango friends ask me, what are you doing?
At the last Tango Mango in Devon, I received exactly this question from my colleague Paras. When I explained she said, It’s an obsession. Immediately I heard these words issue from my mouth: It’s not an obsession, it’s a mission.
For a long time we’ve known that Carlos Di Sarli’s early 1950s sides on TK are even better for dancing than the late 50s ones on RCA. There was only problem: Music Hall went bankrupt and there was a legal problem about publishing the music. you just couldn’t get it.
More than a year ago, I heard a rumour that EURO records was preparing a new release in their series Archivo TK. Well, it was true! That project has come to fruition, and the result is the new CD Tangueando Te Quiero. At 25 tracks this is a generous album. Don’t think that the sound is as good as the lush late 50s instrumentals on RCA. It isn’t, because the masters are still locked in a vault somewhere, but as ever from EURO the quality is the best available. These are going to fly off the shelves like hot cakes
More than a year ago, I heard a rumour that