A Tango concert
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Last night's "Tango for Valentine's Day" concert
featuring Pablo Aslan's band Avantango
was sponsored by one of NYC's great cultural institutions, the World Music
Institute. It was my first exposure to a live performance of one of the world's
great popular musics.
Roxana Fontán,
who came up from
The tango, like practically all other popular music
including jazz, has absorbed and digested various influences from the rest of
the world. Aslan is a disciple of Astor Piazzolla, whose songs constituted over half the program.
The Piazzolla style, which he called "Tango
Nuevo", can best be described as a fusion of Tango, classical music and
modern jazz. Although it can strike me sometimes as being a bit cerebral and
hard-edged, "Tango Nuevo" proved irresistible last night as Piazzolla songs such as "Milonga
Loca" provided a bittersweet background for the
Tango dancers. (A Milonga is a gaucho song.)
I am also very partial to the Tango fusion style of the band
Gotan Project, which has borrowed from techno and
Jamaican Dub. Although it was formed by French musicians, it includes Argentine
musicians who were living in exile. Their album "La Revancha
del tango" (The Revenge of the tango) is top-notch, although it stretches
the boundaries of the art-form to the limit. If you go to their website, you
can hear a performance of "El Capitalismo Foráneo", a departure from traditional themes of
jealousy and nostalgia but very much in tune with the nation's reality today.
That being said, politics has always been present just below
the smoldering surface of Tango. As the expression of proletarian
sensibilities, the music has often interjected itself into the class struggle
in
Tango, you were the king
In one word, a friend
Blossoming from the bandoneon
music
Of Arólas
Tango, the rot set in
When you became sophisticated
And with your airs and graces
You quit the suburbs where you were born
Tango, it saddens me to see
How you've deserted the mean dirt-streets
For a carpeted drawing-room
In my soul I carry a small piece
Of that happy past!
But the good old times are over
In
And today, thinking of what's happened
A tear mars your song.
The overthrow of Peron coincided with the rise of
rock-and-roll, which crowded Tango to the margins just as
He had the idea that tango could be a serious music, not
just for dancing. The old guard, however, felt threatened in the same fashion
that a conservatized Peronista
labor bureaucrat might have felt threatened by the student left in the 1960s. Piazzolla recounts:
"Musicians hated me. I was taking the old tango away
from them. The old tango, the one they loved, was dying. And they hated me, they threatened my life hundreds of times. They waited
for hours outside my house, two or three of them, and gave me a good beating.
They even put a gun at my head once. I was in a radio station during an
interview, and all of a sudden the door opens and in comes this tango singer
with a gun. That's how it was."
Tango has had enormous influence worldwide, even though it
has often been appropriated as a kind of kitsch, like Carmen Miranda. For
example, Rudolf Valentino stormed
Tango is also enormously popular in
To a very great extent, the nostalgia of the Tango evokes
the "Ostalgie" of former East Germans for a
time when things were better. Although it is altogether unlikely that the
heyday of Peronism and the Tango will return any time
soon in an unmediated fashion, the popularity of Tango does suggest a belief
that "a better world is possible".
To do Tango: http://www.todotango.com/
A history of Argentine Tango: http://totango.net/sergio.html
Astor Piazzolla website: http://www.piazzolla.org/
Gotan Project: http://www.gotanproject.com/
Avantango: http://www.avantango.com/