A Tango concert

 

Posted to www.marxmail.org on February 15, 2004

 

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 Buenos Aires just for the occasion, was the featured vocalist while four dancers performed during about half the numbers. It was among the more memorable concerts I have attended in the past ten years or so and I invite you to check out Avantango's website (listed below), which has some performance clips from other of their concerts.

 

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 Argentina despite itself. During the 1930s, the army suppressed Tango because it was seen as a potentially subversive force. After Peron's rise to power, the music enjoyed a golden age as Buenos Aires could boast of ten to fifteen orchestras, either professional or amateur, per barrio. It was also at this time that Tango began to detach somewhat from its plebian roots. This gave rise to the song "Tango de otros tiempos" (Tango of Other Times):

 

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 Paris you've become Frenchified

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 US capital was doing to the local economy. It was up to Astor Piazzolla to effect a revival. He received his original training as a classical musician and studied with Argentina's Albert Ginastera and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

 

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 Hollywood as a Tango dancing gaucho, even though the cowboys of Argentina were not known to have danced this essentially urban art-form.

 

Tango is also enormously popular in Finland, where the characteristic theme of nostalgia, even found in Piazzolla's more refined expressions, resonates deeply with the population. A Finnish scholar Pirjo Kukkonen suggests that tango lyrics reflect "the personality, mentality and identity of the Finnish people in the same way as folk poetry does". There is a yearning for the old homestead, or a distant land of happiness, while references to autumn rains and dark evenings in Finnish Tangos become symbols of crushed hopes.

 

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/