Denver Tango Festival Spillover Milonga playlist, May 2015

Denver Festival lives! The History The Alternative Music The Playlist

The historic festival is alive!

Denver Tango Festival has already been a legend when we were tango newbies - actually, I am on record saying that my birth as a tanguero happened right there, a dozen festivals ago. In fact, Tom Stermitz's organizer's prowess left its mark not just in his hometown, but continents and oceans away, from Russia (where the nation's oldest and strongest festival, Moscow Milonguero Nights, has been godfathered by Tom) to San Diego with its famous New Year's festival, originally Tom's brainchild as well.

My rookie's milonga many,
many years ago. And I still
consider a year without dancing
in the slanted rays of Sun at
Cheesman, a year not fully lived

But it's also true that the tango festival organizers' world had changed dramatically in the past two decades. There are myriad festival-goers' options now, and the tangueros know almost in real time who's heading where, what's hot, what's not. For, ultimately, it is the guest list which makes the festival. And to stay hot and to attract the cool guests, one must constantly innovate, be generous and personable, always ratchet things up, always keep abreast with the trends - or better yet, set the trends, and never let the fickle Fortune look at you dismissively. In hindsight, Denver Tango Festival already showed signs of slow decay and of the organizers' inattention even when we first visited it 7 years ago. The oldtimers would already tell you that it used to bigger, that it used to be a trend-setting novelty, but by the late 2000's it's become a dependable, solid but kind of stolid thing. Frictions within the community didn't help things either, and by fall 2014, the grand old fest was at the edge of the abyss.

The power of the locals, DEN 2015:
John Miller and Nick Jones introduce a miraculously restored Victrola;
Jesica Cutler crafts the festival banner, as Pugliese watched approvingly;
Martin Rybczynski outshone all of the DJs in my personal perception

We are so happy to see that the community bandied back together to return the West's flagship tango event to life! Great, great thanks to John Miller and Jesica Cutler for selflessly helping to turn around the fortunes of this historic Festival, to its visionary founders Tom Stermitz and Amy Beaudet, to the DJ's, musicians, instructors, and volunteers. And my special warmest gratitude to Halina Morgucz Palmer for the invitation to DJ in my beloved Avalon, for her wonderful hospitality, and for pushing me to include lots of alternative tandas, and to Grisha Nisnevich for his great friendship and his very timely sage DJ advice.

The alternative conundrum

Defamiliarization :) :
Victor Shklovsky, who coined the word,
with his wife Serafima. The 1950s.

Broadly defined, the alternative tango music is (doh!) not a classical milonga music but a variety of passionate dance music with an ample room for our tango vocabulary, tango musicality, and tango social conventions and skills. Alternative music serves two very different primary purposes - to put the experienced tango dancers "outside of the box" to stimulate their creativity and to enrich their music interpretation skills, AND to reconnect the tango dancers with the more familiar musical cultures and styles to which they may have been attached even before embarking on their tango journeys. In other words, to expose the dancers to The Strange and to give them footing in The Familiar. Actually, there may be less contradiction between these two goals than it seems at first. "Defamiliarization" through the juxtaposition of the familiar and the strange is at least a century-old creative arts method (the word itself has been first coined by the Russian avant-guarde in the 1910s) and it works just as intended, destroying stereotypes and automatic behaviors and fostering creativity.

"It's not a mere matter of taste": Cultural warfare Pure bodies, pure blood, pure food, pure music .... it's ageless The classics-only school of thought assigns to the Golden Age tango music a strong ritual-purity quality, harnessing the millennia of the human beliefs in the pure, righteous Self and the dangerous, contaminated Other. This gives a truly primal quality to the cultural wars over the choices of the music. Sometimes it even pushes bona fide classic orchestras such as Donato or Rodriguez to the "other" side.  I am no stranger to partisanship in the culture wars myself. But DJing requires a different state of mind. It takes giving up one's ambition and one's lofty ideals for the higher-yet ideal of serving the dancing public. This blog is named "humilitan" for the same reason - to remind me that I may be free to pick sides as a private person, but that as DJ, I should bow to the community needs. Only it's still very hard to serve the community where different key opinion leaders call for addition or deletion of alternative tandas - not even because of the sets' artistic and functional merits, but because these people want to make radical statements!

But these two cool goals don't come without a major liability. For great many tangueros, one of the best things about the milonga culture is exactly this Great Wall of the cultural divide separating the tango universe from the popular and contemporary cultural influences and from the music forms from outside Argentina, and they love being safe and predictable in the beautiful bubble of the Golden Age. They don't volunteer into the surprising discoveries of, eh, defamiliarization. They may or may not join a fully alternative milongas, as a matter of an informed conscious choice ... but the "mostly classic / part alternative" format has worse pitfalls. The guests generally don't know if an alt tanda is coming, and if they are prepared to dance but choose to sit it out, then it may drain some of the energy. Moreover, I try hard to select the moods, the rhythms, and the textures of the consecutive tandas to generate a good flowing wave of energy, a predictably accelerating and decelerating but unstoppable momentum. But it is a lot harder to create a parallel wave experience for those dancers who skip all alternatives, so they may be shortchanged in this respect, too.

The relative unpredictability and the sheer variety of the alternative tango music lead to one more inseparable yin-yang pair of a pro and a con. Generally it makes little sense to weigh the opening bars of an alt tanda to decide who exactly is the perfect partner for this music. You know the drill, "X is a superb Di Sarli - Podesta tango follower, or Y is just right for a fiery vals of Biagi's". It is a cliche, and IMHO it is largely a fallacy, yet another automaton stereotype which detracts from our creativity. Sure thing this "Y" could be great for this specific flavor of music, but if it's all you ever dance with him, without variation, then you are probably missing out. Anyway, with an alternative tanda, you better "expect the unexpected" & throw most of these prejudicial who's-good-for-what ideas out of the window. The result is a better social openness, and it is a big pro in my book. But the flip side is that it's much harder to mix the alt tandas, to make sure that "the unexpected" doesn't become "the haphazard" or even "the untenable". (On the contrary, in the classic tanda mixology, a DJ needs to watch out for "the predictable" not to segway into "the unexciting" and "the contrived").

To cut the long story short, the flow-of-energy magic resulted in the final setlist being 25% non-classical - which is lower that 35% requested by the host, but still a LOT higher than anything I played to date (Interestingly, Adam's supposedly "50:50" milonga two days before also came at about 30% non-classic?).

The playlist with comments

01. Quinteto Don Pancho "El garron" 1938 2:27
02. Quinteto Don Pancho "Alma en pena" 1938 2:46
03. Quinteto Don Pancho "Champagne tango" 1938 2:30
I re-cut cortinas to various lengths between 33 and 45 seconds based on my visual memories of the floor of the Avalon Ballroom. Having played them, I can now conclude that just about 30 seconds would have been perfectly OK for this venue (and it can be as short as 20" for the earliest tandas with the lighter attendance)

The dance floor of the Avalon
fills up fast!

04. Alla Pugacheva "Million Scarlet Roses (cortina long)" 0:39
05. Carlos Di Sarli - Roberto Rufino "Cascabelito" 1941 2:34
06. Carlos Di Sarli - Roberto Rufino "Tristeza Marina" 1943 3:09
07. Carlos Di Sarli - Roberto Rufino "Charlemos" 1941 2:30
08. Leonid Utesov "S Odesskogo Kichmana" 1935 0:44
I had a sheepish thought. You see, people come early to Halina's milongas. But they head straight to the dining hall, bypassing the dance floor - because they know that the best food won't last. Tonight, there is a stupendous black bean soup, fantastic quinoa, ham ... and the bread is just about to come out of the oven ... and ... (well you know where I got some inspiration for our local events ;) ). In any case, I was making a guess that nobody will dance the first three tandas because they'll go eat, and that I will get a chance to sneak in some contentious alt set and nobody will even notice :) But ... the dancers already fill the floor during the Di Sarli tanda. Therefore, they need a good classic tango warmup. Therefore, my 3rd tanda will be alternative almost in the name only. Yes, this stuff doesn't get played at the regular classic milongas. But .... I think it should be. Hats off to Alex Krebs!
09. The Alex Krebs Tango Sextet "Largas las Penas" 2011 3:02
10. The Alex Krebs Tango Sextet "Negrito (milonga)" 2011 1:53
11. The Alex Krebs Tango Sextet "Ella Es Asi" 2011 2:32
12. Zhanna Aguzarova "Old Hotel cortina long" 0:38
13. Ángel D'Agostino - Ángel Vargas "Ahora No Me Conocés" 1941 2:35
14. Ángel D'Agostino - Ángel Vargas "Solo compasion" 1941 2:58
15. Ángel D'Agostino - Ángel Vargas "Ninguna" 1942 2:59
16. Lidiya Ruslanova "Valenki 5 (cortina)" 0:36

"It looks like they love it!": A DJ's myopia? I know what to do if, G*d forbid, el gente refuses to dance to my tanda. But now I see the full floor, I see the people dancing well to the music, Nobody is making grimaces. No obscene gestures. Do I have to assume that the people like the music? What other body cues do I have to watch for? Experienced DJs out there, can you share your advice? "Poor mice wouldn't stop eating $%$#& cactus ..." Dave Schmitz told me not to be mislead by the sight of the masses dancing. They paid so much money to be here, he said. What you see isn't their contentment, he said. Its their avarice, their primal greed. They may be totally feh about your music, but they paid big bucks  and they'll suffer but keep on dancing just to make a good use of their money. (Actually the milonga admission was $10, and with great food and a great company it ought to be one of the best milonga deals anywhere - not that it really matters). Of course I can't help remembering a classic Russian meme: "The mice took jabs from the spines, cried, but kept on eating cactus". It means, if one *really* hates something, then how come one would't stop doing it?

17. Soha "Mil Pasos" 2008 4:07
18. Feist and Ben Gibbard "Train Song" 3:03
19. Alacran "Reflejo De Luna" 2010 3:44
20. "Katyusha" 0:33
Should I have called these valses alternative? Of course, it is a fav BsAs orchestra, and it is the late 1930s and early 1940s ... but Enrique Rodriguez remixes old Europe's folk hits here, from a Russian gypsy romance to an Andalusian buleria. And, strictly speaking, his orchestra isn't even a tango tipica - it was officially "an orchestra of all different rhythms"! ( It is also time to celebrate the upcoming Armando "Muñeco" Moreno's birthday, May 29th. He joined the orchestra of Enrique Rodriguez at the age of 18 and kept returning there to record more hits. Alas I didn't have time for another tanda with Moreno! I love so many of his tangos, valses, and foxes!)
21. Enrique Rodriguez - Armando Moreno "En el volga yo te espero" 1943 2:40
22. Enrique Rodriguez - Roberto Flores "Las Espigadoras (vals)" 1938 2:47
23. Enrique Rodriguez - Roberto Flores "Los Piconeros (vals)" 1939 2:47
24. Leonid Bykov "Smuglyanka" 0:33
And of course Fresedo's birthday is also in May
25. Osvaldo Fresedo - Roberto Ray "Isla de Capri" 1935 3:16
26. Osvaldo Fresedo - Roberto Ray "Canto de amor" 1934 3:25
27. Osvaldo Fresedo - Roberto Ray "Sollosos" 1937 3:27
28. Lidiya Ruslanova "Valenki 2 (cortina)" 0:33
I haven't played these more rhythmic Tanturi's for too long!
29. Ricardo Tanturi - Alberto Castillo "Decile Que Vuelva" 1942 2:33
30. Ricardo Tanturi - Alberto Castillo "Asi Se Baila El Tango" 1942 2:36
31. Ricardo Tanturi - Alberto Castillo "La vida es corta" 1941 2:25
32. The Red Elvises "Cosmonaut Petrov 1 (-3dB)" 1999 0:28
33. Fool's Garden "Lemon tree" 1995 3:09
34. Israel Kamakawiwo'ole "Over The Rainbow" 2001 3:32
35. Souad Massi "Ghir Enta" 2008 5:06
36. The Blues Brothers "Theme From Rawhide (long vocal cortina)" 1980 0:33
37. Carlos Di Sarli - Roberto Rufino "La Mulateada" 1941 2:22
38. Carlos Di Sarli - Roberto Rufino "Zorzal" 1941 2:40
39. Carlos Di Sarli - Roberto Rufino "Pena Mulata" 1941 2:27
(A DJ's nightmarish oops here - my deepest apologies for it. A cut for flamenco, with a switch to a different computer, has been requested, but just as I switched, the dancer whispered that she wasn't ready! Hurriedly returning to my laptop and to an appropriate next tanda, I fatfingered a few seconds of the previous tanda's milonga before correcting it to a cortina. Blush.)
40. Leonid Utesov "S Odesskogo Kichmana" 1935 0:44
41. Orquesta Tipica Victor (dir. A. Carabelli) "Nino bien" 1928 2:43
42. Orquesta Tipica Victor (dir. A. Carabelli) "Che, papusa, oi" 1927 2:37
43. Orquesta Tipica Victor (dir. F. Scorticati) - Angel Vargas "Adios Buenos Aires" 1938 2:36
44. Alla Pugacheva "Million Scarlet Roses (cortina long)" 0:39
cut for a birthday vals followed by a flamenco demo
45. Alfredo De Angelis - Carlos Dante - Julio Martel "Sonar y Nada Mas" 3:06
46. Leonid Utesov "S Odesskogo Kichmana" 1935 0:44
and a community / waterfall dance tanda of Canaro classics:
47. Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida "Recuerdos de Paris" 1937 3:12

Some of Florian Hermann's compositions
available from a 1900 German sheet music catalog

I wrote a little about the Russian roots of Canaro's "Ojos negros" ("Dark eyes") before, but I've found many more details since. The music and the lyrics are inspired by a timeless Russian Gypsy romance of the same name - a song with the history spanning borders of Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the way it's common with best Eastern European songs which as a rule claim several mother countries and tongues. Russian "Dark Eyes", a Gypsy romance, was put together in 1884 by Soyfer (Sergey) Gerdel, a Jewish musician from the same Ukrainian town where my grandfather was born. But Gerdel used a verse published by an Ukrainian Yevhen Hrebinka in a Russian newspaper in 1843 (it was a prophetic poem ... indeed Hrebinka died only 4 years after meeting the gaze of the Dark Eyes, aged only 36). And the music was based on a slow waltz of Florian / Feodor Hermann, a composer of waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, marches, and little plays, mostly dedicated to a myriad of his Russian and Polish noblewomen students and published in Russia, Poland, and Germany. Many Russian sources claim that Hermann lived in Germany, while a popular Ukrainian legend claims that Hermann was a French military composer with the Napoleon's Army. Neither tale could be true, somebody must have been fooled by the French titles and German music catalogs. Hermann lived later in the XIX c., in fact some of his composition are dated late 1870s (and respond to the patriotic outbursts of the Russo-Turkish war of 1876). His works are Russian-, Ukrainian, and Polish-themed (and occasionally Lithuanian), and they use Russian and Polish lyrics. The place names in his titles imply a connection to the Wilna strip and specifically to Roubno (now Kirtimai) on the outskirts of Vilnius in Lithuania (but in those days, a part of Russian-governed Poland). My hunch is that Hermann was a mid-XIX c. Jewish piano teacher in then-Polish/Jewish/Russian Wilno relying on French and German languages for better marketing. I mean I'm sure I read more details on it on the Internet, but just couldn't find it now. (Update: the enigmatic life path of Florian Hermann has been pieced together; he turned out to be a Vilnius native, a Catholic nobleman of German and Polish descent. Details here)
48. Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida "Ojos negros que fascinan" 1935 2:51
49. Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida "Mi noche triste" 1936 2:45
50. Victor Tsoy "Gruppa Krovi (cortina)" 0:36
Two very different pieces of Bregovic in the following tanda - in Polish with a beautiful voice of Kayah, and in English, from the soundtrack of Kusturica's failed American movie, "Arizona Dream". All three pieces are on the long side, making a nearly 15-minute tanda, and I stand by ready to cut it to just two songs if the energy comes short - but no, the whole floor is dancing.
51. Pentatonix "Say Something" 4:39
52. Goran Bregovic - Kayah "To Nie Ptak [Not a Bird]" 1999 4:40
53. Goran Bregovic - Iggy Pop "In the Deathcar" 1999 5:13
55. Juan Maglio Pacho, Jorge Cafrune "Chacarera loca de Ledesma" 0:27
56. "Chacarera del Rancho" 2:21
57. "Chacarera del violin" 2:12
58. Leonid Bykov "Smuglyanka" 0:33
59. Juan D'Arienzo - Alberto Echagüe "Ansiedad" 1938 2:38
60. Juan D'Arienzo - Alberto Echagüe "Mandria" 1939 2:26
61. Juan D'Arienzo - Alberto Echagüe "Que importa" 1939 2:17
62. "Kuznechik Cortina" 0:39
A Polish and Russian 1930s-1940s tanda. Lots of tragic stories behind it - not just the heartbreak of the lyrics which the Polish poets so perfected starting in the 1920s. It is a relatively low energy tanda but it always strikes a chord with the people with Eastern European musical affinities. We travel to Poland - then Russia - then Romania and Latvia with these songs.

Artur Gold & Jerzy Petersburski orchestra, Warsaw, ca. 1930

Jerzy Petersburski, a composer and pianist, belonged to a Polish Jewish clan with a telling surname, the Melodists. His 1928 "Tango Milonga", a dream of the faraway Argentina, has become an international hit in the West, but his best remembered tango in Poland and Russia is "To ostatnia niedziela" ("This is the Last Sunday"), a song of separation and the end of love. The 1939 military defeat of Poland sent Petersburski on an escape route East to Białystok, where he was enlisted into the Soviet Belorussian State Jazz Ensemble. There, he composed Poland's favorite waltz, "Blekitna Chusteczka" ("Blue Handkerchief") which has become even more deeply ingrained in Russian conscience with the folk lyrics as the song of the heartbreak of the War. 

Mieczysław Fogg
(from Sophisti ezine)

But Petersburski didn't stay with the Belorussian band long. His short stint with the Polish Air Force in the opening weeks of WWII earned him a right to enroll in the Polish Corps of General Anders in 1941, and thus an escape ticket from the Soviet Union. After travels across the Middle East and Latin America, Jerzy Petersburski finally made it to Buenos Aires in 1948. There, he built a career of a prominent radio and theater musician but didn't compete with the Argentines on the turf of tango again. Petersbursky's life had a happy ending of sorts - he finally returned to Warsaw in the late 1960s, remarried, and died peacefully at the age of 84.

Mieczysław Fogg's life story is amazing and inspiring - his voice helped to propel the 1928 "Tango Milonga" to world fame, and he was still touring with concerts in the post-totalitarian times right until his death in 1990! He fought with the Polish Resistance, he sang at the barricades of the Warsaw Uprising, he has become Righteous among the Nations for saving a Jewish family from the death camps, and he has been repeatedly voted the best radio singer both before WWII and during the People's Republic times.
63. Jerzy Petersburski - Mieczysław Fogg "To ostatnia niedziela" 1936 3:19

Eddie Rosner soon after his return from Gulag labor camps. Having lost his teeth to scurvy,
he had to re-learn to play trumpet with dentures. 1955.

We are just one day away from the birthday of Eddie Rosner, another titan of Polish and Russian music who has already been featured on this blog exactly a year ago. Born May 26 1910 to the Jewish parents from Poland in Berlin, Adolf Rosner has become the top German jazz trumpet player, before the rise of the Nazism forced him to reinvent himself as Eddie, a Polish jazz star. And then the war made him the leader of the Belorussian State Jazz Ensemble, really a collection of Polish Jewish musical talents who all managed to escape the advancing Wehrmacht to Białystok / Belostok just as the Soviets took the city in their short-lived land grab of "Western Belorussia". Five wartime years later, the Germans were finally being pushed back from Belorussia, and Rosner's band saw the limelight at last. They were assigned a star Russian jazz singer, Georgy Vinogradov, because all the musicians spoke too heavily accented Russian to make the authorities happy. Georgy Vinogradov already recorded Russian tango super-hits such as "Schast'ye moyo" with Efim Rosenfeld's band. Eddie and Georgy made only of handful of records together but they really enjoyed their chance encounter and its fruit. In 1946 Eddie Rosner has been jailed for an attempt to return to Poland, and spent 7 years in the dreaded Subarctic labor camps of Magadan. After Stalin's death Rosner rebuilt his jazz trumpet star career - only to be blacklisted because of his Jewish roots. He never saw Poland again. Only in the mid-1970s the authorities allowed the sick and dying musician to return to his hometown. He died in Berlin in 1976.
64. Eddie Rosner - Georgy Vinogradov "Zachem (Why)" 1944 3:11

A memorial plaque at the King of Tango's Riga home has been unveiled in 2013

"Dark Eyes" is the first and perhaps most famous tango of Oscar Strok, the future King of Russian Tango, composed in 1928 and alluding to the same classic Russian Gypsy romance as Canaro's "Ojos Negros" which I just wrote about 3 tandas earlier. Oscar Strok (1893-1975) was born to a Latgalian family of small-town Jewish Klezmer musicians, and composed popular Klezmer pieces himself, played piano in movie theaters, accompanied for visiting vocalists... A hot romance led him to Paris in the mid-1920s, and exposed him to the music of tango. The sorrow of the end of his Parisian love flowed into the score and the lyrics of "Dark Eyes". Having returned to Latvia and to financial ruin, Strok composed his next tango ... in debtor's jail, it was called just like that, "The Debtor". But later in the 1930s, Oscar Strok won a tremendous success as a composer of 300 tangos and a band director, and earned the nickname "The King of Tango". The lightning advance of the Nazi troops led to the fall of Riga in just two weeks of war, and most of Strok's orchestra musicians couldn't escape in time, and perished in the Holocaust. By sheer luck, Oscar escaped, and composed and performed many patriotic pieces during WWII. But after the war, the "corrupt" tango was banned by Stalin's regime, and its composer, blacklisted and banished from the musician's guild. Oscar Strok has been forced to earn living as a regular piano teacher. Only at his funeral, the band dared to play his banned tangos in public. (More on Oscar Strok can be found in my more recent post)
I already mentioned that Strok's "Dark Eyes" has also been interpreted by an Argentine tango orchestra decades later (Florindo Sassone, 1968) 

Before Leschenko became famous as a singer, he
was a professional folk and exotic dancer

Piotr Leschenko (1898-1954) hailed from a completely different corner of the post-Revolution Russian cultural diaspora, from Romania, where his tango singer career began in the Northern city of Cernăuţi (now in Ukraine, and better known in America as a once-grand Jewish cultural center of Tchernovitz). Leschenko was actually born out of wedlock in a village in Ukraine, but grew up in Moldova, singing in choirs as a child, and convalesced in a military hospital there from a battlefield wound and concussion when the region became a part of expanded Romania in 1918. After WWI, Leschenko kept on singing, but his main occupation has become stage dance, first locally, then in the nation's capital, and then in Paris and across the globe. His dance partner was his ethnic Latvian wife whom he met in Paris. Piotr Leschenko had to restart his vocal career in 1930 when she became pregnant and stopped performing, and quickly reached fame as a singer of regional folk. It was his wife who introduced Leschenko to her fellow countryman, Oscar Strok, during a visit to Latvia. Strok's tangos have become the highlights of the repertoire of Piotr Leschenko almost overnight. And "Dark Eyes" - which fused together the singer's acclaim in both Gypsy Folk and Tango - was the most popular of them. The best Leschenko recording of "Dark Eyes" was actually done in Austria, with Frank Fox - born Franz Fux in today's Czech Republic, then Moravia  - who conducted an orchestra and composed music for dancing and for movies in Vienna. Piotr Leschenko's bootleg records were immensely popular - albeit technically illegal - in Russia, but he only set foot there under most tragic circumstances, as a Romanian conscript in the Nazi-allied occupation forces in WWII. Despite this stain of being a collaborationist, Leschenko was offered forgiveness and a clean slate in the Soviet Union after the end of the war. But at his farewell party, the singer confessed his love to Romania too eloquently. A snitch denounced him, and the Russians withdrew the invitation at the last moment. Instead, Leschenko has been sent to the Romanian labor camps, to the malarial swamps of lower Danube, and languished there even after Stalin's death. He died in a prison hospital, and his case remains classified even now.
65. Frank Fox Tanzorchester- Piotr Leschenko "Chernye Glaza (Dark Eyes)" 1933
66. "Katyusha" 0:33
67. Francisco Lomuto - Jorge Omar "Damisela encantadora (vals)" 1936 2:58
68. Francisco Lomuto - Instrumental "Noche de ronda (vals)" 1937 2:34
69. Francisco Lomuto - Fernando Díaz, Mercedes Simone "Lo que vieron mis ojos" 1933 2:22
70. Leonid Utesov "S Odesskogo Kichmana" 1935 0:44
71. Sexteto Carlos Di Sarli - Ernesto Famá "Flora" 1930 2:44
72. Sexteto Carlos Di Sarli - Ernesto Famá "La estancia" 1930 3:25
73. Sexteto Carlos Di Sarli - Ernesto Famá "Chau pinela" 1930 2:41
74. Zhanna Aguzarova "Old Hotel cortina long" 0:38
75. Miguel Caló - Raúl Berón "Jamas retornaras" 1942 2:31
76. Miguel Caló - Raúl Berón "Tristezas de la Calle Corrientes" 1942 2:46
77. Miguel Calo - Raul Beron "Que te importa que te llore" 1942 2:44
78. The Blues Brothers "Theme From Rawhide (long vocal cortina)" 1980 0:33
79. Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida "Milonga criolla" 1936 3:00
80. Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida "Tangon (slow milonga)" 1935 3:17
81. Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida "Milonga triste" 1937 3:33
82. Victor Tsoy "Gruppa Krovi (cortina)" 0:36
Two Argentine bands and one from Portland OR find a match in this almost-classic, high energy tanda. "Fervor", the mid-2000s phenomenon, got named after Borges's book. Their main album, "Quien sos", has several interesting dramatic danceables. "Ojos", led by a strikingly looking pianist, Analíá Goldberg, are known to play live at the milongas. Their "El adiós" is one of kind piece IMHO, a standout far surpassing most of the rest of their records.
83. Orquesta Tipica Fervor de Buenos Aires "E.G.B." 2007 2:26
84. The Alex Krebs Tango Sextet "La Yumba" 2011 2:57
85. Analíá Goldberg y Sexteto Ojos De Tango "El Adiós" 3:13 2011

86. Leonid Bykov "Smuglyanka" 0:33
87. Lucio Demare - Juan Carlos Miranda "Sorbos amargos" 1942 3:22
88. Lucio Demare - Juan Carlos Miranda "Mañana zarpa un barco" 1942 3:22
89. Lucio Demare - Juan Carlos Miranda "No te apures, Carablanca" 1942 3:29
90. Zhanna Aguzarova "Old Hotel cortina long" 0:38
91. Osváldo Pugliese - Roberto Chanel "Rondando Tu Esquina" 1943 2:48
92. Osváldo Pugliese - Roberto Chanel "Corrientes Y Esmeralda" 1944 2:49
93. Osváldo Pugliese - Jorge Maciel "Remembranza" 1956 3:41
94. Juan D'Arienzo - Instrumental "La cumparsita" 1951 3:49
... and a whole set of the apres-dancing, last drops of wine, last-hugs and furniture-moving music. The first song, a remix of a 1947 milonga sureña classic, feels really personal for me, with a lot of stubborn defiance, a bit of sadness, and no need for silence. And the long, long roads. Es demasiado aburrido seguir y seguir la huella...
95. Paco Mendoza & DJ Vadim "Los Ejes De Mi Carreta" 2013 3:23
96. Eendo "Eshgh e Aasemaani" 2011 3:31
97. Goran Bregovic "Maki Maki" 2009 3:33
Adiós, Colorado! Los ejes de mi carreta nunca los voy a engrasar.....

Grand Milonga playlist, Missoula Tango Marathon, May 2015

I would like to start from thanking Patrick for entrusting me with the Grand Milonga of Missoula Tango Marathon, and Buell for his hospitality, and the tango community of Missoula and the whole wider, wilder North for their companionship, for their support, and for the memorable tandas! It was my first time dancing in Montana and I so look forward to another time!

The theme for the Saturday night Grand Milonga was "Vintage" and I took it as a license to play several seriously old tandas (and to sport a beret for a good portion of the night, too :) )

The vintage crew from Salt Lake sets the tone for the night :)

It's been just 3 days since Osvaldo Fresedo's birthday and I plan to play several tandas in honor of this pioneering musician and probably the most influential one in the tango world of the 1920s. But it leaves room for just one instrumental tanda ... so I'm starting bolder and bigger than usual, with a tanda spanning 25 years of Fresedo's recors:
001. Osvaldo Fresedo - Instrumental "Tigre viejo" 1934 3:01
002. Osvaldo Fresedo - Instrumental "Derecho viejo" 1941 2:27
003. Osvaldo Fresedo - Instrumental "La Viruta" 1957 3:32
 "Smuglyanka" ("Darkie girl", also "Moldovan girl") has been composed in 1940 and became wildly popular towards the end of WWII, but to my generation it's mostly known from an iconic 1973 movie about the war, "Only Old Men are Going to Battle" (clip from the movie below)
004. Leonid Bykov "Smuglyanka" 0:33

005. Quinteto Don Pancho - Instrumental "Champagne tango" 1938 2:30
006. Quinteto Don Pancho - Instrumental "El choclo" 1937 2:46
007. Quinteto Don Pancho - Instrumental "Loca" 1938 2:57
"Little Kathy" Katyusha song is fairly widely known in the West as a WWII period Russian classic (it was actually composed in 1938 and softly alluded to the simmering pre-WWII tensions with the Imperial Japan ... "to the serviceman on the border far away, say hi from his beloved Kathyusha"). Less common is the knowledge that the song may have become even more popular among the Italian resistance fighters (clip below).
008. "Katyusha" 0:33

009. Aníbal Troilo - Floreal Ruiz "Flor de lino" 1947 2:53
010. Anibal Troilo - Floreal Ruiz "Lloraras, Lloraras" 1945 2:52
011. Aníbal Troilo - Edmundo Rivero - Floreal Ruiz "Lagrimitas De Mi Corazón" 1948 3:00
I played Leonid Utesov's cortinas before. The Jewish enfant terrible from the freewheeling Odessa already achieved stardom as a jazz and folk singer (and of some classic tangos such as "Serdtse") before WWII, and during the war, he was all over the frontlines with concerts. "Road to Berlin" is indelibly linked with the memories of triumphal advances of the Red Army in 1944-1945, and in fact it improvised the lyrics and even its very title from month to month and from a military unit to a military unit, starting out as "Road to Minsk" when Berlin still seemed so far, far away. In each couplet, it brags about taking a city, and seeing a street sign with a name of another city down the road. Then in the next couplet, the next city is taken, and the song continues.
012. Leonid Utesov "Road to Berlin (slow)" 0:27

We're into old style tonight, right? Adolfo Carabelli was one of the most talented tango orchestra directors before the upheavals of the Great Depression. That's the real vintage sound to me.
013. Orquesta Tipica Victor (dir. A. Carabelli)  "Niño bien" 1928 2:43
014. Orquesta Tipica Victor (dir. A. Carabelli) "Che, papusa, oi" 1927 2:37
015. Orquesta Tipica Victor (dir. F. Scorticati) - Angel Vargas "Adios Buenos Aires" 1938 2:36
016. Leonid Bykov "Smuglyanka" 0:33
017. Ángel D'Agostino - Ángel Vargas "Ahora No Me Conocés" 1941 2:35
018. Ángel D'Agostino - Ángel Vargas "Solo compasion" 1941 2:58
019. Ángel D'Agostino - Ángel Vargas "Ninguna" 1942 2:59
020. Leonid Utesov "Road to Berlin (fast)" 0:30
021. Carlos Di Sarli Roberto Rufino "La Mulateada" 1941 2:22
022. Carlos Di Sarli Roberto Rufino "Zorzal" 1941 2:40
023. Carlos Di Sarli Roberto Rufino "Pena Mulata" 1941 2:27
I already wrote about the WWII history of Lidiya Ruslanova's "Valenki" ("Felt Boots"), a hundred years old Gypsy dancing song which she resurrected in the 1940s and famously performed, by the crowd's request, at the steps of the ruined Reichstag in Berlin in May 1945.
024. Lidiya Ruslanova "Valenki 5 (cortina)" 0:36

Osvaldo Fresedo (1897-1984)

My 2nd Fresedo tanda for the night. It's always a challenge to mix a tanda with a beautiful and unique "Buscandote". In the end I kind of liked how it came out. "Plegaria" has a pretty unique sound too, with its chorus countering the lines of the soloist - of course it also happens to be the very tango which (in Bianco's rendition) has captivated Hitler's sick imagination, and morphed into the Death Fugue of the Nazi extermination camps :( I wouldn't have played Bianco's record, especially on a night like this one, but after thinking about it, I hesitantly concluded that Fresedo's was fair game. It is a prayer, it is about death, grief, darkness, and loving hope, and it actually projects sincerity no matter what one may think about the song's history.
025. Osvaldo Fresedo - Ricardo Ruiz "Y no puede ser" 1939 2:26
026. Osvaldo Fresedo - Ricardo Ruiz "Plegaria" 1940 2:24
027. Osvaldo Fresedo - Ricardo Ruiz "Buscandote" 1941 2:49
028. Leonid Bykov "Smuglyanka" 0:33
029. Enrique Rodríguez - Armando Moreno "Tango argentino" 1942 2:37
030. Enrique Rodríguez - Armando Moreno "Como has cambiado pebeta" 1942 2:37
031. Enrique Rodríguez - Armando Moreno "El encopao" 1942 2:34
032. "Katyusha" 0:33

Roberto Firpo (1884-1969)

Roberto Firpo was born on May 10 1884, and it's about time to celebrate it with a good tanda! Firpo was a trailblazer, a great musician and composer who may have ranked as tango's #1 in the 1910s, and who famously turned "La cumparista" into a real, stellar tango in 1916 - and then missed millions in royalties. Firpo recorded hundreds tangos in the 1920s, largely before the era of electric recorders, so all these treasure troves aren't ever played at the milongas. By 1930, he felt ready to retire to ranching, but soon lost all his investments to the disasters and the economic crisis, and sort of crawled back to tango to heal his wounds. This tanda of beautiful, spirited valses belongs to a quartet Firpo organized after the Great Depression:
033. Cuarteto Roberto Firpo "El Aeroplano (vals)" 1936 2:14
034. Cuarteto Roberto Firpo "Olga (vals)" 1946 2:10
035. Cuarteto Roberto Firpo "Para Las Chicas (vals)" 1942 2:14
036. Leonid Utesov "Road to Berlin (slow)" 0:27
Time for another infusion of the 1920s vintage! Towards the end of this mixed tanda, Roberto Firpo's old Orquesta Tipica makes a very rare appearance with a great, powerful 1929 masterpiece. I just gotta dance to it!
037. Sexteto Carlos di Sarli "Belen" 1929 2:44
038. Orquesta Tipica Victor (dir. A. Carabelli)  "Coqueta" 1929 2:47
039. Orquesta de Roberto Firpo "Una Noche En La Milonga" 1929 2:56
040. Lidiya Ruslanova "Valenki 2 (cortina)" 0:33

Lilac in Missoula...

I believe that the music of Calo's "Jamas retornaras" have inspired a fav Russian street chansonne of my childhood years, a WWII vintage tango called "Lilac Mist" ("Сиреневый туман"). Even the folk lyrics, originally penned by a nearly-forgotten Russian composer, Yuri Lipatov, tell similar stories of parting forever, to never come back. Recently, the "Lilac Mist" suddenly sprung into TV fame, and heirs to a more famous Russian composer won a court battle for royalties, citing vague stories about this song being composed for some informal party in the 1930s. But Calo's recording is from the 1942, and if it isn't a coincidence, then the claimed 1936 date of the Russian composition may not be true. Anyway - it is Missoula, it is May, and the whole town is drenched in the mist of lilac bloom, and of course I feel too sentimental not to start a Calo tanda like this:
041. Miguel Caló - Raúl Berón "Jamas Retornaras" 1942 2:31
042. Miguel Caló - Raúl Berón "Tristezas De La Calle Corrientes" 1942 2:46
043. Miguel Calo - Raul Beron "Que te importa que te llore" 1942 2:44
044. Leonid Utesov "Road to Berlin (slow)" 0:27
And the third Fresedo tanda, the most classic one, with the sweet vocal of Roberto Ray:
045. Osvaldo Fresedo - Roberto Ray "Isla de Capri" 1935 3:16
046. Osvaldo Fresedo - Roberto Ray "Canto de amor" 1934 3:25
047. Osvaldo Fresedo - Roberto Ray "Sollosos" 1937 3:27
048. Leonid Bykov "Smuglyanka" 0:33
The time is closing on 11 pm, so after these two tango tandas, I expected to play a set of chacareras as requested by the hosts. But Patrick and Lori aren't quite ready and I'm asked to delay the chacareras by another tanda. The darker, more brooding quality Biagi favorites I haven't played for far too long:
049. Rodolfo Biagi - Jorge Ortíz "Queiro verte una vez más" 1940 2:59
050. Rodolfo Biagi - Jorge Ortíz "Todo Te Nombra" 1940 3:33
051. Rodolfo Biagi - Jorge Ortíz "Yuyo verde" 1945 2:43
052. Lidiya Ruslanova "Valenki 3 (cortina)" 0:24
Of course the chacarera is delayed again ... and again ... and again ... so please forgive my eventual straying really far from the classic TTV-TTM flow format.
053. Carlos Di Sarli - Roberto Rufino "Noche De Carnaval" 1942 2:41
054. Carlos di Sarli - Roberto Rufino "Charlemos" 1941 2:30
055. Carlos di Sarli - Roberto Rufino "Patotero sentimental" 1941 2:34
056. "Katyusha" 0:33
057. Edgardo Donato - Félix Gutierrez "La Tapera - vals" 1936 2:54
058. Edgardo Donato - Horacio Lagos "Quien Sera - vals" 1941 2:15
059. Edgardo Donato - Horacio Lagos "Con Tus Besos (vals fast)" 1938 2:23
060. Lidiya Ruslanova "Valenki 2 (cortina)" 0:33
DJ Sean played two tandas of Canaro - Maida the previous night, so in my turn, I'm going for Canaro / Famá:
061. Francisco Canaro - Ernesto Famá "Tormenta" 1939 2:35
062. Francisco Canaro - Ernesto Famá "No me pregunten porque" 1939 2:51
063. Francisco Canaro - Ernesto Famá "Te quiero todavia" 1939 2:54
OK, here comes easily the craziest cortina I ever cut, overlaying the bold guitar of Cafrune with the 1928 voices of José Galarza & Carlos Viván... and then it is finally the chacarera time!
064. Juan Maglio Pacho, Jorge Cafrune "Characera loca de Ledesma (cortina)" 0:27
065. "Chacarera del Rancho" 2:21
066. "Chacarera del violin" 2:12
(Note to self: should have made a pause after the first chacarera - the dancers were so excited after the first one that their voices totally drowned the opening bars of the second song)
067. Leonid Bykov "Smuglyanka" 0:33
What to choose to re-start the floor after the chacarera and the speeches and the raffle, other than D'Arienzo? Only normally I would have fired a classic D'Arienzo - Echagüe tanda right off with "La bruja", but Tommy just played it endlessly in a class earlier in the afternoon, so we better do without:
068. Juan D'Arienzo - Alberto Echagüe "Ansiedad" 1938 2:38
069. Juan D'Arienzo - Alberto Echagüe "Mandria" 1939 2:26
070. Juan D'Arienzo - Alberto Echagüe "Que importa" 1939 2:17
071. Lidiya Ruslanova "Valenki 3 (cortina)" 0:24
072. Lucio Demare - Juan Carlos Miranda "Malena" 1942 2:57
073. Lucio Demare - Juan Carlos Miranda "Manana zarpa un barco" 1942 3:22
074. Lucio Demare - Juan Carlos Miranda "No te apures, Carablanca" 1942 3:29
075. Leonid Bykov "Smuglyanka" 0:33
076. Edgardo Donato - Horacio Lagos "Lagrimas" 1939 2:50
077. Edgardo Donato - Lita Morales "Yo Te Amo" 1940 2:50
078. Edgardo Donato - Horacio Lagos, Lita Morales, Romeo Gavioli "Triqui trá" 1940 2:34
079. "Katyusha" 0:33
Lomuto's is seriously vintage stuff in my "vals book". Love the unusual texture of these rarely played gems:
080. Francisco Lomuto - Jorge Omar "Damisela encantadora (vals)" 1936 2:58
081. Francisco Lomuto - Instrumental "Noche de ronda (vals)" 1937 2:34
082. Francisco Lomuto - Fernando Díaz, Mercedes Simone "Lo que vieron mis ojos" 1933 2:22
083. Leonid Utesov "Road to Berlin (slow)" 0:27
084. Pedro Laurenz - Alberto Podestá "Todo" 1943 2:37
085. Pedro Laurenz - Alberto Podestá "Recien" 1943 2:43
086. Pedro Laurenz - Alberto Podestá "Garua" 1943 3:09
087. Lidiya Ruslanova "Valenki 2 (cortina)" 0:33
The energy of the floor is really great, and I have no qualms about marking the upcoming birthday of another great master of tango, Alfredo Gobbi (May 14th). His is the beautiful, seldom heard stuff to be played when people are deeply in the music and in the mood - it's now or never!
088. Alfredo Gobbi "Jueves" 1947 2:43
089. Alfredo Gobbi "Independiente Club" 1948 3:12
090. Alfredo Gobbi "Sin vuelta de hoja" 1956 3:16
091. Leonid Utesov "Road to Berlin (fast)" 0:30
and one more lucky tanda of "raw-DJ-imagination-meets-the-tango-crazed-floor". Love those moments. At first I just thought to add a lone tango-foxtrot track after the Cumparsita, but the plan morphed into a whole set - and right in the flow of the milonga! The vintage theme gets really powerful here, with the final two tracks embracing the Balkan folk, while the first one is firmly rooted in Yiddish Americana. "Bei Mir Bistu Shein" has been composed in 1932 in New York City, and made really famous with the 1937 recording of Andrews Sisters. The following year, Enrique Rodriguez had it in a faithful Castellano translation. "For me, you are wonderful!". Bailemos?
092. Enrique Rodriguez - Roberto Flores "Para mi eres divina" 1938 2:28
093. Enrique Rodriguez - Armando Moreno "Noches de Hungria" 1942 2:57
094. Enrique Rodriguez - Armando Moreno "Amor en Budapest" 1940 2:43
095. Leonid Bykov "Smuglyanka" 0:33

It's been a milonga!
(Felipe El Aleman's photo)

096. Alfredo de Angelis "Mi dolor" 1957 2:51
097. Alfredo de Angelis "Pavadita" 1958 2:53
098. Alfredo de Angelis "Felicia" 1969 2:47
099. Victor Tsoy "Gruppa Krovi (Blood Type) (cortina)" 0:36
100. Osváldo Pugliese "Recuerdo" 1943 2:45
101. Osváldo Pugliese "Gallo Ciego" 1959 3:34
102. Osváldo Pugliese - Jorge Maciel "Remembranza" 1956 3:41
after the dramatic closing tandas which spanned 1950s and even 1960s, it's time to close the curtain with the most vintage of the songs of the night's playlists, the 1926 duo of the bandoneon virtuosos:
103. Pedro Láurenz y Pedro Maffia "La cumparsita" 1926 3:01
... and the final track ... think of it as of a long, danceable cortina ... the night isn't over, it's only 1:15 AM, time to hand the DJ table over to El Aleman and we'll be up till 4
104. Kayah & Bregovic "To Nie Ptak [Not a Bird]" 1999 4:40

(and next day I took up a more traditional assignment of the event's grillmaster, but that's a separate story :) )