How Pugliese’s yumba works

Yumba names both a tango and a playing style ^[3]. Lavocah calls the piece La yumba the prototype of Pugliese’s approach, and explains the word as two sounds with different jobs in the bar ^[1]. His account is a good starting point for hearing how an orchestra without drums could produce a machine-like pulse, and why that pulse is only half of the music ^[4][5].

The first syllable, pronounced zhum, is the arrastre: a beat that starts softly and swells ^[3]. It is an old device, audible in late-1920s sextets, but Lavocah says Pugliese makes it louder and more percussive than Di Sarli did ^[3]. Strings attack, including the bass, while bandoneonists with instruments in their laps snap the bellows open across a leg ^[3]. The second syllable falls on beats two and four: the bass strikes the strings with the bow, the canyengue technique, while the piano adds a pedalled rumble, often a low cluster rather than a real chord, known as mugre or dirty playing ^[5]. Lavocah calls the result the greatest possible contrast between odd and even beats, the opposite of D’Arienzo’s equal emphasis ^[5].

Film shows the pianist’s left hand dropping to the bottom of the keyboard on the weak beats ^[5]. That was demanding enough to surprise substitutes: Osvaldo Requena recalled his arms hurting for a week after his first performance in the chair ^[5][6]. Lavocah credits the bandoneóns with delivering most of the marcato, and Aniceto Rossi’s slapped bass as an inheritance through De Caro’s bassist Leopoldo Thompson ^[7][8]. When Pugliese was in prison, the players stamped on the floor to compensate ^[9].

The feature Lavocah considers unique among golden-age dance orchestras is that rhythm and melody are separated in space rather than alternated in time ^[4]. The bandoneóns drive forward as the violins stretch out a contracanto above them, where Troilo moves between the two impulses ^[2]. He ranks this collision above the beat itself as the source of the style’s impact ^[2]. A piano-and-violin moment in Locura tanguera (1966) makes it audible by beginning with no beat at all, which he reads as an inversion of the usual order ^[10].

Lavocah describes cycles in which the marcato builds and then vanishes for a melodic interlude, before an in-between stage and the beat’s return ^[11]. The cycle ends even in the last two chords, fortissimo then delayed and very soft ^[11]. In his notes on La yumba (21 August 1946), the A section runs about twice the expected length to around 1'24", the B section resists the beat, and at 2'14" the rhythm returns; at 2'25" Camerano has a short break before the singing violins come in at 2'30" ^[12]. The same pattern occurs in miniature in the opening twenty seconds, around a rising seven-note motif ^[13]. Those times come from Lavocah’s listening; a different transfer may differ, and he says the arrangement also holds for the 1952 remake ^[14].

Pugliese said that metalworkers’ sounds inspired it ^[2]. Lavocah proposes the Vasena works and the IMPA aluminium factory, and those are his suggestions rather than Pugliese’s statement ^[15]. Musically, Pugliese’s own description credits the milonguero feel of Arolas, De Caro and Gobbi in the rhythmic part, and Di Sarli in the interpretation ^[14]. Lavocah hears prototypes before 1946: moments in Farol and Qué bien te queda (1943), and a marcato close to yumba in Nada más que un corazón (1944) ^[16][17][18]. Rouchetto says he began the tune in 1943, and it took three years ^[3].

Ruggiero’s N… N… (1947) sets out the ideas with even greater clarity, in Lavocah’s opinion ^[19][20]. Negracha (1948) pushes density and a 3-3-2 foundation so far that it was soon withdrawn, and Malandraca (1949) keeps the strong beats with greater clarity and joy ^[21][22]. Much later, A los artistas plásticos adds a repeating bass ostinato, and Pugliese’s Zum arrangement (1973) discards Piazzolla’s 3-3-2 ^[23][24]. Pugliese denied that Zum descended from La yumba as such ^[24].

Pugliese’s story of El Cachafaz, who answered a question about his skill by pointing to walking, is the usual link between beat and floor ^[25]. Yet the people closest to the orchestra stress feeling: José Libertella said dancers followed the feeling, and the milonguero José María Otero advised keeping ears open and moving slowly in the cadences ^[26].