I've just discovered the new star of the tango blogosphere, a super sharp and eloquent Igor Zabuta of Ukraine. And couldn't help remembering one obsessively and mutually musical tanda at last years Connect, and translating a passage from one of Igor's beautiful posts. Photo credits to Kyle Asher
There are pairs who feel a kind of a split challenge to dance musically, come what may. They step onto the dance floor with a mission to express the music together. It takes a special respect to the music and a peculiar courage. It is so understandable ... indeed, what could be more helpful for a great connection between people than a lucky overlap of their obsessions :)
Salt Lake's art nouveau Ladies Literary Club (now The Clubhouse at 850 E. South Temple) used to be the cradle of the "dance tea parties" (the dansante) of the heyday of pre-WWI American tango boom, and it's amazing to witness its rebirth as a tango venue a century later. And it's especially poignant that the first tango workshop in this grand hall focused on the history of tango!
But they don't just play music - they teach how to interpret tango. Their class started with a history lecture, dividing the story of the tango music into 4 chapters:
Tango BC duo
1880 - 1925: Guardia Vieja (exemplified by Villoldo, Arolas, Canaro, Matos Rodriguez....)
1925 - 1955: Guardia Nueva (such as De Caro, D'Arienzo, Di Sarli, Pugliese)
1955-1975: Avant Garde (Piazzolla, Salgán)
1975 + : Contemporary Tango (Fernandez Fierro, El Arranque, Ramiro Gallo - and of course Tango BC themselves)
Guardia Vieja (Old Guard) musicians were almost all amateurs. Europe and Africa influenced the emerging synthesis of different musical forms: Congolese and Angolan candombe, Afro-Cuban and European fusion of habanera, and Argentine hinterland's milonga campera. The fusion of milonga and candombe existed in its own right - listen to Azabache! Mariano and Santiago play examples of the three ancestors of tango, asking the listeners to identify what flowed into the future tango from each of these genres.
Here I must tell you that Bizet's Habanera holds a very special place in my musical education and, perhaps, in my path to tango. We must go back in time to the 1970s Moscow for this story, but before we get there, let me mention that the Habanera from Carmen wasn't actually created by Georges Bizet. He may have thought that it was a folk song but he soon realized that the tune has been composed 12 years earlier by Sebastián Yradier, a native of Spain's Rioja region, who also composed the other most famous habanera of all times - "La Paloma" (Yes, the songs which brought worldwide fame to Cuban music were composed by a Basque who haven't even visited Cuba until the age of 50!)
Yet for me, Carmen's Habanera evokes neither Spain nor steamy Cuba, but snowbound old town Moscow. More specifically, my grandfather's traditional walking path to the Moscow Conservatory. Gramps Karl (or Charles, as grandma preferred to call him in French) was a semi-amateur orchestra clarinet player. Everyone in his family was a part-time musician or singer or actor, but his older brother, violinist Isaac, has been executed in Stalin's purges along with their father; and soon after, they lost the sisters' piano as well. Grandfather Karl was the lone musician survivor now. His children didn't share his passion about music, and now he was hopeful to get me, his first grandchild, into it. Karl bought an educational concert series at the famed Conservatory for the two of us - up at the balcony overhanging right above the orchestra. Soon, I was able to name every instrument - alas, visually, rather than by ear :) Honestly, I didn't like these concerts at all! But I keep the fondest memories of our walks together. Grandfather lived an exotic life, having grown up in Switzerland, picking his first Russian only after high school, moonlighting as a translator for foreign dignitaries for a while - and then, after his family was decimated by the bloody purges, he was kicked out of grad school, worked on river boats and nearly perished in a floating crane disaster, and then it was his turn to be sent to the labor camps and his luck to come back alive ... not all of the stories were safe to share, but out of the ear of the fearful grandmother, he had some amazing stuff to tell.
We'd start at Kropotkinskaya Metro Station, one of the most beautiful in Moscow, built in the early 1930s to serve the giant House of Soviets which has never been completed. So the huge, airy subway ended up being far too big for its modest neighborhood, and eerily more beautiful because of it. The steel frame of the unfinished palace has been cut into anti-tank obstacles when the Nazi troops advanced to the outskirts of the city in 1941, and the remaining giant hole in the ground eventually made way for an outsize open-air swimming pool, open year round. Karl would occasionally take me there in the middle of Moscow's long winter, too.
Chess playing at Gogolevsky Boulevard remains a Moscow tradition
We'd walk up Gogol Boulevard, where the chess players would converge at street tables outside of the Central Chess Club to play, no matter the freezing cold. We'd cross Arbat and dive into the maze of lanes of the former Royal Fermenters' Borough where the artisans once prepared sauerkraut, pickles, and kvas (fermented malted rye bread drink) for the Czar's palace. There, hidden away from the main streets, stood in obscurity the first Soviet skyscraper, the Mosselprom Tower, all 10 stories tall, still sporting the faded ads from pre-Stalin's years, complete with the mural of the Horn of Plenty dispensing such indispensable products as cheap smokes and caramel candy. (Its namesake, Mosselprom, was the 1920s agricultural product processing and trading conglomerate). And finally, we'd round a corner and there would be the gilded edifice of the Conservatory! Our weekend walks continued until I finally heard a musical piece I loved. Alas, it was the Habanera from Carmen.
"You can't get yeast and papirosi (the cheapo smokes
once popular with the Russians and evenpreserved in a
tango name, Elegante papirusa) anywhere
but in MOSSELPROM!"
I'm afraid my admission broke my grandfather's heart. He was, like, all is lost, you'll never get to love the classical music, you're obviously destined to like rock and stuff :( But in hindsight, perhaps it wasn't an omen about rock music, after all. Perhaps it was all about my future infatuation with tango?
Back to Tango BC's workshop now. More musical influences came from the European dance beats - note that almost all early tango composers came from Europe themselves or were born to recent European immigrants. The earliest bands had just 3 instruments - guitar, flute, and violin. Bandoneon comes from Germany later, following a more humble concertina. Bandoneon has a unique ability to modulate the intensity of its sound on the same note, adding a great expressive potential to the bands. But tango has already been well established, and bandoneon "invaded" it against the wave of initial rejection - and changed tango!
Piano "invades" around the same time, and professionally trained musicians and larger bands come in.
The Old Guard music started out rigidly structured. Julio De Caro worked to break the stereotypes. Rhythms acquired syncopation instead of uniformity of the regular "marcato" beat of the Old Guard. Where all the instruments used to play together, now emerged a great room for individual expression of different musicians. The New Guard times have become known as the Golden Age of tango, when its music sounded everywhere!
Santiago and Mariano then introduce us to the Argentine terms for the 3 principal beat patterns of tango, and illustrate walking to the 3 beats by playing :Por una cabeza" with varied and variable accents: the main beat / "marcato", the "blancas" / "whites" of every other beat (so called in Spanish because the half-notes are notated by hollow ovals, "white inside", as opposed to filled-oval quarter-note "blacks"), and the unevenly spaced "sincopa"... plus "arrastre" / drag effects merging together the adjacent sounds of the sincopa, as in dragging one's palm over the guitar strings. It's a great workshop plan, to alternate between listening and practicing to the customized live music on the dance floor!
There was so much more in the workshop material which I couldn't cover in my notes ... from the fundamentals for those who just begin to discover tango to the discoveries which surprise and enlighten the most seasoned tangueros. Thumbs up, Tango BC!
Erskine Maytorena, Olga Tikhovidova, and Natalia Tikhovidova of QTANGO Orchestra may not need an introduction to the Salt Lake Tango community, they are our old friends. On their June road tour, QTANGO planned a 4-night stay in Utah before continuing to Idaho, Montana, Alberta CA, and Colorado. I was to provide recorded music support on the 2nd night of the workshop, in the loft of Squatters Pub where we scheduled a musicality class and a practica with a long live music segment.
For a pre-class warm-up, Erskine asked me to play a set of different orchestras with strong contrasts, and oh, how about starting it with El Recodo? I had to think real quick and I probably had a deeply puzzled look of my face - well, how do you get contrast and continuity at the same time?? - before picking Di Sarli's 1951 "El recodo", D'Arienzo's 1970s "La torcacita", and 1942 "Trasnochando" of Miguel Caló with Raúl Berón.
The class was themed "How each orchestra can change your dance", and Olga and Natalia wonderfully conjured up the spirits of the steady-matching Canaro, the fiery rhythmic D'Arienzo coming to the rescue of the moribund pre-Golden Age tango scene and evolving over the years, and the dramatic, accelerating and slowing, passionate Pugliese. Actually, the topics of the class ranged even farther, with an intro on the tango instruments and their staccato and melodic abilities and roles - piano vs violin and bass, the voice of the bandoneon and the human voice - and with segments about stimulating female musicality, even in such traditionally lead-dominated contexts as the song endings ("the poses of the cha-chan") !
Focusing on piano...
... and on violin!
Then it's time for the musicians to take a short break, and for me, to play a few tandas which, I assume, will keep the energy strong without an overlap with QTango's repertoire and style.
01. Juan D'Arienzo - Instrumental "Derecho viejo" 1939 2:24
02. Juan D'Arienzo - Instrumental "Joaquina" 1935 3:01
03. Juan D'Arienzo - Instrumental "Champagne tango" 1938 2:26
04. Edgardo Donato - Horacio Lagos "A media luz" 1941 2:31
05. Edgardo Donato - Horacio Lagos y Romeo Gavioli "Amando en silencio" 1941 2:52
06. Edgardo Donato - Horacio Lagos "Lagrimas" 1939 2:50
07. Quinteto Pirincho - Instrumental "El torito" 1950 2:20
08. Quinteto Pirincho - Instrumental "Orillera" 1960 2:24
09. Quinteto Pirincho - Refran "El esquinazo" 1951 2:28
10. Carlos di Sarli - Alberto Podestá "Nido gaucho" 1942 3:22
11. Carlos di Sarli - Alberto Podestá "Tu el cielo y tu" 1944 2:59
12. Carlos di Sarli - Alberto Podestá "Lloran las campanas" 1944 2:58
13. Enrique Rodríguez - Armando Moreno "Tango argentino" 1942 2:37
QTango start super-rhythmically and the floor literally bursts with energy with the opening bars of their signature Felicia. And then the second tanda pumps pure unadulterated Old Guard drive with the trio of El Garron, 9 de julio, & El choclo. This is a practica after a class about orchestras and styles, and Erskin often precedes the songs with a short talk-through about what's special about these pieces, and this format works great with the dancing crowd.
The cooldown tanda starts from a supposedly slow-and-steady vals, Adios juventud, and ends with an officially slow one (subtitled "vals lento"), Piazzolla's Chiquilin de Bachin - buy you gotta listen to these arrangements, they breath fire over the facade of slow steadiness. An hour later comes another amazing lyrical and sad cooldown tanda, a QTango's trademark set of Adios Nonino and Milonga triste. And in the final set, a timeless favorite, El pañuelito. But no Cumparsita even though the time is 10 pm and the practica is supposed to be over. So I keep on playing with a transition tanda, a Pugliese crowning tanda, and the final "exclamation mark and ellipses" for this great night.
14. Enrique Rodríguez - Armando Moreno "Como se pianta la vida" 1940 2:25
15. Enrique Rodríguez - Armando Moreno "Como has cambiado pebeta" 1942 2:37
16. Enrique Rodríguez - Armando Moreno "Danza Maligna" 1940 2:27
17. Osváldo Pugliese - Jorge Maciel "Remembranza" 1956 3:41
18. Osváldo Pugliese - Roberto Chanel "Rondando Tu Esquina" 1945 2:49
19. Osváldo Pugliese - Roberto Chanel "Farol" 1943 3:22
20. Pedro Láurenz - Pedro Mafia "La cumparsita" 1926 3:01
21. Damour Vocal Band "SWAY" 3:49
Our community was truly blessed to host Erskine Maytorena and QTANGO for a series of workshops and live music gigs. I must say that Erskine elevated tango musicality teaching to such a qualitatively different level that every class may be a revelation even for such a dyed-in-the-wool tanguero as myself. One of the most amazing ingredients in the "workshop mix" is the direct assistance of live music. Whenever we were asked to distinguish overlayed staccato and legato themes, or to recognize the music cues used by the tango musicians to forewarn us about coming pauses or phrase endings, or to accelerate and decelerate in and out of contratiempo, Olga's violin and Natalia's piano were always there to offer a remixed tango with the right musical components. When we discussed the changes in music style over the tango eras and between the tango masters, the QTANGO musicians were always ready to conjure up the spirit and the sound of the Guardia Vieja or mature D'Arienzo, late-period Di Sarli or Pugliese. The secrets of the craft revealed, one after another, to enrich our appreciation of our tango musical heritage. It's just incredible... Hats off!
QTANGO trio at the North Church
I DJ'd during QTANGO's final night in Salt Lake, on Xmas Eve in the old North Church. Just two small stretches of recorded music before and after live music, and greatly (and happily) overshadowed by QTANGO's play.
01. Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida "Recuerdos De Paris" 1937 3:12
02. Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida "Nada mas" 1938 3:00
03. Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida "Invierno" 1937 3:26
04. Alexander Dolsky "At last, rainy September! (cortina 1)" 1979 0:15
05. Lucio Demare - Juan Carlos Miranda "No te apures, Carablanca" 1942 3:29
06. Lucio Demare - Juan Carlos Miranda "Sorbos amargos" 1942 3:22
07. Lucio Demare - Juan Carlos Miranda "Manana zarpa un barco" 1942 3:22
08. Eldar Ryazanov - Andrey Petrov "Nature doesn't have bad weather" (cortina) 0:24
09. Enrique Rodriguez - Armando Moreno "En el volga yo te espero" 1943 2:40
10. Enrique Rodriguez - Instrumental "Siempre fiel (vals)" 1938 3:38
11. Enrique Rodriguez - Armando Moreno "Mariquita no mires al puerto (vals)" 1945 3:01
12. Goran Bregovic "Old Home Movie" 1993 0:25
Erskine Maytorena is, of course, first and foremost a vocalist, an opera singer before he took up bandoneon and tango teaching and reverse-engineering the best tango danceable music in the nation. So you wouldn't be surprised that he repeatedly pointed my attention to the talented tango vocalists of the past, whom I hardly ever featured in my playlists before. Argentino Ledesma sang mostly for Varela's orchestra, but he also recorded very few songs with Di Sarli, including this totally breathtaking "Fumando espero", one of those virtually unmatcheable tracks. Here I combined it with two other Di Sarli singers, united by the period and by the mood, quite seamlessly for my humble taste ... yet I got an impression that for Erskine, my transitions from a singer to a singer sounded totally abrupt and jarring, that he perceived too great a difference in their voices, talents, and manners of singing! Life to learn... "Verdemar" is of course hard to match both musically and I guess emotionally too, it's so overflowing with sadness ... I wrote about its mystery before on rio Wang's blog.
13. Carlos di Sarli - Argentino Ledesma "Fumando espero" 1956 4:02
14. Carlos di Sarli - Jorge Durán "No me pregunten por qué" 1956 3:29
15. Carlos di Sarli - Oscar Serpa "Verdemar" 1955 3:01 Now it's time for live music! El gente is truly electrified. Familiar QTANGO hits such as Ultima copa de bebida, vocal Gran muneca, best-ever Milonga triste, and some new super-hits, the most memorable of which is probably wonderfully lyrical instrumental Chiquilín de Bachín, Astor Piazzolla's vals lento which has become so un-Piazzolla danceable in Q's arrangement :) Love!
16. Osvaldo Fresedo - Roberto Ray "Niebla del Riachuelo" 1937 2:25
17. Osvaldo Fresedo - Roberto Ray "Sollozos" 3:28
18. Osvaldo Fresedo - Roberto Ray "Recuerdo de bohemia" 1935 2:36
19. Sofia Rotaru "Autumn Melody" 0:30
20. Donato Racciatti - Olga Delgrossi "Queriéndote" 1955 2:49
21. Donato Racciatti "Tu corazón - Nina Miranda" 2:32
22. Donato Racciatti - Olga Delgrossi "Hasta siempre amor" 1958 2:57
23. Canaro - Hugo del Carril "Marcha Peronista cortina" 0:16 people are palpably tired before the holidays and overflowing with live music's energy, and I find that a milonga tanda is simply a no go. Transitioning to a more dramatic tanda with Mario Pomar, another Di Sarli singer we discussed with Erskine the night before, and for a quicker-than-planned wrap up of the night.
24. Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida "Milonga criolla" 1936 3:05
25. Goran Bregovic "Old Home Movie" 1993 0:25
26. Carlos di Sarli - Mario Pomar "Tormenta" 1954 3:38
27. Carlos di Sarli - Mario Pomar "Patotero sentimental" 1953 3:02
28. Carlos di Sarli - Mario Pomar "Duelo criollo" 1952 2:30
29. Lidiya Ruslanova "Valenki 1 (cortina)" 0:24
30. Juan D'Arienzo - Instrumental "La torcacita" 1971 2:31
31. Juan D'Arienzo - Instrumental "Zorro gris" 1973 2:03
32. Juan D'Arienzo - Instrumental "Este Es El Rey" 1973 3:10
33. "Lady Be Good - Sol Hoopii Trio" 0:23
34. Alfredo De Angelis - Instrumental "Felicia" 1969 2:48
35. Alfredo de Angelis - Instrumental "Pavadita" 1958 2:55
36. Osvaldo Pugliese - Instrumental "Recuerdo" 1944 2:54
37. Osvaldo Pugliese - Roberto Chanel "Corrientes Y Esmeralda" 1944 2:49
38. Osvaldo Pugliese - Roberto Chanel "Rondando Tu Esquina" 1945 2:49
39. Pedro Láurenz - Pedro Maffia - Instrumental "La cumparsita" 1926 3:01
(39 total)
Salt Lake's art nouveau Ladies Literary Club (now The Clubhouse at 850 E. South Temple) used to be the cradle of the "dance tea parties" (the dansante) of the heyday of pre-WWI American tango boom, and it's amazing to witness its rebirth as a tango venue a century later. And it's especially poignant that the first tango workshop in this grand hall focused on the history of tango!
Santiago and Mariano then introduce us to the Argentine terms for the 3 principal beat patterns of tango, and illustrate walking to the 3 beats by playing :Por una cabeza" with varied and variable accents: the main beat / "marcato", the "blancas" / "whites" of every other beat (so called in Spanish because the half-notes are notated by hollow ovals, "white inside", as opposed to filled-oval quarter-note "blacks"), and the unevenly spaced "sincopa"... plus "arrastre" / drag effects merging together the adjacent sounds of the sincopa, as in dragging one's palm over the guitar strings. It's a great workshop plan, to alternate between listening and practicing to the customized live music on the dance floor!
