Tango By Year, the podcast

Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah's podcast, one year of tango records at a time (2020–2022). Every episode to listen to and read along with, with the records they play.

Tango By Year is Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah's, published here with their permission. The audio plays from SoundCloud.

1926–1927
Tango 1926-1927
episode 33 · 2021-03-03 · 2:56:45 · 35 records
Dag Stenvoll was sick, so Michael Lavocah ran the whole show alone, playing from Dag's playlist plus his own picks. The episode sits at the start of electrical recording (Victor from March 1926, Odeon from November 1926, both labels staying quiet about it so old acoustic stock would still sell), just as tango's six-piece sextets were recording prolifically because there were no written arrangements yet. Lavocah tracks the 'old guard' (Firpo, Canaro's stand-in band, Fresedo, Lomuto, Maglio, Guido) against Julio De Caro's sextet, already building the harmonic vocabulary that Troilo, Laurenz and Pugliese would use. Working-class 'arrabalera' singers Rosita Quiroga and Azucena Maizani are set against the more polished new arrival Libertad Lamarque. Lavocah names Osvaldo Fresedo his favourite orchestra of 1927, just before Canaro and Lomuto are lifted to a new level by singer Charlo.
1926–1927
TBY Lost Afterparty V - 1926-1927
episode 34 · 2021-03-10 · 2:43:30 · 31 records
A 'Lost Afterparty' that lets Dag Stenvoll, who missed the main 1926-27 broadcast through illness, catch up on the year and play listener-requested tracks that Michael Lavocah didn't use. The year sits at tango's technological hinge: the switch from acoustic to electrical recording during 1926 opens up the sound of the orchestras, especially the bandoneón. Victor, having lost its biggest star Fresedo to rival label Odeon, responds by building its own house orchestra (Orquesta Típica Victor) out of session musicians it can never lose. Pedro Maffia and Pedro Laurenz's bandoneón duets, born almost by accident when Maffia's new band wasn't yet recording, turn out to be a direct root of Aníbal Troilo's later style, while Julio De Caro's harmonically adventurous arrangements already point decades ahead, at the cost of being hard to dance to. Firpo and Canaro still dominate by prestige and sheer output respectively, but it is Fresedo, 'unplugged' and still playing his own bandoneón solos, whom Lavocah names his favourite orchestra of the year.
1928
Tango 1928
episode 27 · 2021-01-13 · 4:05:29 · 47 records
The earliest year in Tango By Year so far, 1928 is a golden age of a different kind from the 1940s: more than a thousand recordings, a big three of Canaro, Firpo and Fresedo (plus Gardel), and new-guard bands (Julio De Caro, Pedro Maffia, Luis Petrucelli) making advanced music that sells poorly but shapes everyone else. Charlo joins Canaro and Lomuto as estribillista, the Odeon-Glucksmann Gran Concurso tango contest produces a batch of hits, and Fresedo, at his intense best, leaves for Europe in October, which gives Carlos Di Sarli his break with Victor. Stenvoll builds his selection from listener suggestions, and Lavocah talks about the old guard (Maglio, Guido), Cobián's New York disappearance, guitar-backed soloists such as Rosita Quiroga, Mercedes Simone, Azucena Maizani and Corsini, the Orquesta Típica Victor, and Firpo's El amanecer. After the show Lavocah plays more Canaro, De Caro, OTV, Fresedo and Firpo and ends with Gardel's Ramona.
1929
Tango 1929
episode 8 · 2020-05-27 · 3:15:22 · 38 records
1929 falls in the era of the tango sextets: Julio De Caro's innovations have already reshaped the music, so what sounds like the old guard to modern dancers was considered advanced at the time. Canaro is at the peak of his career, recording around 300 tracks this year alone and launching his arranged-music label, Series Symphonica Canaro, with Ada Falcón, who has just entered his life and his orchestra. Bandoneonist Pedro Maffio, trained in De Caro's school, forms his own orchestra with top session players (Pugliese on piano, Vardaro on violin, Ferrazzano on cello), while Juan Maglio, past his own technical peak, still shapes the sound D'Arienzo will build his career on. Danced tango is still mostly instrumental, since the era's star singers (Charlo, Ada Falcón, Gardel backed by guitars) are record-only artists rather than touring band members, and women dominate the separate, bigger stream of tango canción. The Depression has barely touched Argentina's export economy yet, but D'Arienzo and Carlos Di Sarli are already recording, and the hosts trace how the coming arrival of sound cinema, not the Depression itself, will soon take away the bands' main venues.
1930
Tango 1930
episode 15 · 2020-08-05 · 3:47:59 · 44 records
1930 looks at first glance much like 1929 — another year of new, Julio De Caro-influenced sextets chasing a more sophisticated sound — but cracks are showing: Argentina's economy is starting to feel the Great Depression, the first band loses its recording contract, and a military coup on 6 September is cheered in the streets, the first of six that would follow over the decades. Canaro records an astonishing 330 sides this year, Pedro Maffia and Juan Maglio both have standout years, and several later-famous bandleaders (Carlos Di Sarli, Luis Petrucelli, the bandoneonist Minotto) are just getting started on their own after splitting from bigger orchestras. Two of the night's best stories have nothing to do with the hits: a would-be supergroup, the Vardaro-Pugliese sextet, flops completely and leaves violinist Elvino Vardaro pawning his bow to afford the train fare home, while Julio De Caro makes his only-ever recording of La Cumparsita, a sprawling four-and-a-half-minute arrangement that needed a bigger disc pressed just to fit it.
1931
Tango 1931
episode 36 · 2021-03-31 · 4:07:30 · 39 records
Stenvoll and Lavocah take 1931 as a year of Depression and crisis: Villa 31 is founded behind Retiro, labels are going bust, and Di Sarli loses his Victor contract and falls back to accompanying singers until 1939. The big three orchestras are Fresedo, Firpo and Canaro (with Lomuto's help), and the music takes on a darker, slower edge: Fresedo, famous for sweetness, shows the Depression most, and Firpo is in a sad mood after losing money. It is also a great year for women singers (12 or 13 recorded) and Spanish-flavoured tango, and a year of sextets that are about to be pruned away by the recording crisis of 1931-32. The afterparty adds Canaro in the good-bad-ugly slot, Charlo, Minotto Di Cicco, a Juan Maglio tanda and a long stretch of Fresedo.
1932
Tango 1932
episode 11 · 2020-06-17 · 3:17:02 · 39 records
1932 is framed as a post-Depression year in name only: record labels are folding, orchestras are losing contracts, and output is falling, even as some bandleaders push past it, Fresedo deliberately turns upbeat again, and Canaro finds new money writing hit songs for a stage revue. It is notably a year of women singers and tango canción, including Mercedes Simone's own song blaming talking pictures for killing tango's fashion, and the accidental invention of the "city" milonga with Milonga Sentimental, a song its own commissioner rejected. Carlos Di Sarli, having lost his Victor contract, works anonymously backing a singer on Brunswick; a teenage Troilo sits as fourth bandoneón in a minor band; and Miguel Caló makes his first-ever recording, still following Julio De Caro's complex style rather than the simplified sound that later made him famous. Fresedo and De Caro, shut out of the cinemas by talking pictures, respond by expanding their bands with outside arrangers and coining the term "symphonic tango."
1933
Tango 1933
episode 18 · 2020-09-16 · 3:41:38 · 45 records
Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah look at 1933, the year of the first Argentine talking film, after the double blow of talking pictures and the Great Depression has culled the most sophisticated bands and bankrupted about half the record companies. The scene is less diverse, dominated by Canaro, Fresedo and Firpo plus the Victor house bands, with solo singers (Gardel, Charlo, Mercedes Simone, Ada Falcón, Corsini, Imperio Argentina) the real stars on the film poster. Fresedo is in what may be his best year; the milonga becomes a mainstream dance-band rhythm; Charlo goes solo with Victor; Lomuto, Donato and Cirilo Ortiz make memorable sides. The centrepiece is Elvino Vardaro's experimental sextet with Troilo on bandoneón, whose single test pressing of Tigre viejo was rejected by Victor and survives as one Vaseline-covered disc. The afterparty adds Polish tangos, foxtrots and waltzes.
1934
Tango 1934
episode 22 · 2020-11-11 · 3:30:06 · 37 records
1934 is a trough year: the Great Depression has gutted record labels and driven out the innovative chamber-style sextets of the early 1930s, while tango itself is losing ground in Argentina's popular culture to foxtrot and North American jazz. Francisco Canaro dominates completely, recording around 111 of the year's surviving sides versus 14 for Roberto Firpo and 19 for Osvaldo Fresedo, while Pedro Laurenz and Elvino Vardaro quietly form the bands that will not bear fruit until the 1937 dance-orchestra revolution. Fresedo's increasingly European, less milonguero sound and a wave of new Canaro lyrics about good times coming reflect a music industry trying to sing its way out of the Depression. The episode also ranges outside the core dance orchestras into a German tango, a Mexican/Tex-Mex 'tango', Al Bowlly's crooning, and a near-forgotten Roberto Sirigio recording whose singer, Fiorentino, anticipates by four years the vocal structure that will define tango canción after 1938.
1935
Tango 1935
episode 5 · 2020-05-06 · 2:37:22 · 29 records
1935 sits just before tango's golden decade of dance orchestras, so the mood is romantic and song-led rather than danceable. Carlos Gardel's death in a June plane crash devastates Argentina (national mourning, three suicides, five days with no tango on the radio) and the vacuum it leaves opens the door for Juan D'Arienzo, who gets his first record deal weeks later and ends the year adding pianist Rodolfo Biagi. Francisco Canaro dominates output (84 of roughly 250 tango sides released that year) in a mature, smooth period with singer Roberto Maida, while older figures like Roberto Firpo and Julio De Caro fade in relevance even as their innovations (piano accompaniment, violin vibrato, complex arrangement) still shape the sound. The show also covers women vocalists (Ada Falcón, Mercedes Simone, Imperio Argentina, Azucena Maizani), who mostly worked as soloists rather than orchestra singers, and detours into European and Polish tango, noting Polish tango's largely Jewish musician community, later destroyed by the Nazi invasion. Radio El Mundo also launches this year, setting up tango's growing radio presence.
1936
Tango 1936
episode 14 · 2020-07-22 · 3:27:16 · 39 records
1936 sits in the shadow of Carlos Gardel's death the previous year: his body only reached Argentina in February and his last film opened in April, so his loss is still being processed as the new dance-orchestra sound keeps building toward Juan D'Arienzo's breakthrough the following year. D'Arienzo himself has an overlooked, joyful year: 24 sides, all with Rodolfo Biagi on piano, almost half of them waltzes, and one recording, Don Esteban, for which two completely different takes survive. Canaro is turning out around 50 titles a year, including novelty 'tangón' numbers, Fresedo is building a smaller, jazz-influenced band around harp and vibraphone, and Julio De Caro is experimenting with a thirty-piece 'international' orchestra and the all-star studio quintet Los Virtuosos. The emotional centre of the episode is Nostalgias: nearly cut from a 1935 Gardel tribute show for being too hard to sing, it only became a hit after Charlo heard it performed in a Buenos Aires nightclub and took it to the radio.
1937
Tango 1937
episode 6 · 2020-05-13 · 2:56:20 · 37 records
1937 is the year Juan D'Arienzo breaks through nationally: his first Radio El Mundo broadcasts start 1 January, and his April recording of La Puñalada (a tango turned milonga on pianist Rodolfo Biagi's suggestion) becomes the hit that makes his name, though singer Alberto Echagüe, who joins the band this year, won't record until 1938. Established giants show the strain of staying current: Canaro records D'Arienzo's own hit as a straight tango, a sign he can't keep up, and Roberto Firpo starts a nostalgic old-style side quartet as his sales slip. Pedro Laurenz debuts as a bandleader with four recordings, including the advanced instrumental Arrabal, which some musicians mark as the true start of the 1940s Golden Decade, while Aníbal Troilo's new orchestra debuts live at the Marabú in July but won't be heard on record until next year. The episode also touches tango's international reach, from a Japanese singer recording for Victor (part of a Japanese fascination with tango predating the 1980s revival) to the music's growing hold on Buenos Aires dance floors, still shared with jazz.
1938
Tango 1938
episode 31 · 2021-02-10 · 3:15:28 · 37 records
Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah call 1938 explosive: one of the first great years for dance music, with D'Arienzo at his peak and the war in Europe approaching. Biagi is let go by D'Arienzo in June and has his own orchestra recording by mid-August on rival label Odeon, while D'Arienzo carries on with Juan Polito at the piano. Troilo and Lucio Demare make their first recordings, but the label system (RCA Victor and Odeon the only two left after the Depression) gives new bands one disc and then silence for three years. Around July the public turns from instrumentals towards vocal tangos with an estribillo, the shift visible in the Canaro and Fresedo discographies. Jazz is not dead: Harry Roy's British band tours Buenos Aires and scandalizes tango lovers with a rumba La cumparsita. The show leans on the danceable, with detours into soloists (Corsini, Magaldi, Mercedes Simone) and the advanced, non-selling end (Laurenz, Troilo, Demare).
1939
Tango 1939
episode 19 · 2020-09-30 · 3:55:18 · 50 records
Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah treat 1939, the month the war began in Europe, as a surprisingly narrow year in Buenos Aires: D'Arienzo's triumph is almost complete, while Troilo, Tanturi, Demare, Caló and Laurenz make no records, Pugliese and Gobbi are not yet in the picture, and the age of the soloists has faded since Gardel's death in 1935. What remains is D'Arienzo at the height of intensity with Echagüe and Polito (the show's pick for his best year, ending with the last session of that band, whose titles read like a premonition of its mass walkout), the first records of Di Sarli's new band with a 17-year-old Rufino, Biagi's new band, Canaro's hardening with Famá and the arrival of Mariano Mores, Fresedo, Firpo, Lomuto, Donato, Rodríguez and De Caro. Dag adds Soviet tangos and a Berlin La cumparsita, and Lavocah's afterparty explores the musical connection between Europe and Buenos Aires and Poland's mostly Jewish tango world that was about to be extinguished.
1940
Tango 1940
episode 7 · 2020-05-20 · 2:34:06 · 32 records
1940 ends D'Arienzo's three-year monopoly on tango: Carlos Di Sarli returns from Paris, launches his own orchestra, and is crowned 'orchestra of the year' with a residency at the Marabú that outlasts anyone else's. D'Arienzo, meanwhile, loses his entire band over money and rebuilds a leaner, faster, more modern outfit around arranger Héctor Varela within about a month, ending the year with a new 19-year-old singer, Héctor Mauré. Pedro Laurenz, far less commercially successful (zero recordings in 1939), is doing, in Lavocah's words, everything Troilo would later be celebrated for, just a year early. With Europe already at war, the episode's one non-tango detour is 'When You Wish Upon a Star', 1940's big American hit about hope, set against the darker history of Fresedo's Plegaria, later used as a death march in Nazi camps.
1941
Tango 1941
episode 1 · 2020-04-09 · 1:59:57 · 24 records
Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah spend their first Tango By Year on 1941, one of Lavocah's favourite tango years and the last year of the music's initial fast, rhythmical explosion. Troilo finally escapes a three-year dead-end record contract and signs with Victor, launching his breakout year; D'Arienzo, a year into a rebuilt orchestra arranged by Héctor Varela, is playing as fast as he ever will and gains singer Héctor Mauré. Biagi, D'Agostino, Laurenz, Caló, Fresedo, Di Sarli, Firpo and Tanturi are each finding or defending a personal sound, while Julio De Caro, tango's great modernizer, has lost direction chasing D'Arienzo's success and now makes music too undanceable for the milonga. All of it plays out against the war in Europe, which Buenos Aires' Italian and Spanish immigrant communities follow in the daily papers even as the tango world dances on.
1941
TBY Lost Afterparty I - 1941
episode 26 · 2021-01-06 · 3:18:27 · 44 records
The first of the 'lost after parties' fills in for the missing talk after the Tango 1941 programme (9 April 2020). Lavocah plays a long second selection of 1941 recordings that Stenvoll did not play, from Biagi and D'Agostino-Vargas to Fresedo's different rhythms (foxtrot, candombe milonga, conga), a Tanturi section, Canaro milongas, Lomuto, D'Arienzo with Reynal and Di Sarli and Troilo instrumentals with their new transfers; Stenvoll then adds his own 'after-after party' with songs he left out. The talk covers the year's intense dance-music energy, shellac and master-destruction history that explains poor transfers, and details like Agua Florida cologne, the first recorded El choclo with lyrics, and a technical mistake on Di Sarli's Germaine master. Interleaved are jazz and classical pieces from 1941 chosen for the mood of the pandemic winter.
1942
Tango 1942
episode 16 · 2020-08-19 · 3:51:00 · 50 records
1942 is the year lyricism takes over tango, led by Troilo's arrangement of Malena — the first proper vocal arrangement written for his orchestra, after a run of vocal numbers delivered almost spontaneously — and matched by D'Agostino, Caló, Di Sarli and even D'Arienzo reaching for more romance and space. Miguel Caló has his commercial breakthrough with Al compás del corazón, a song its own singer Raúl Berón almost refused to record, while Carlos Di Sarli poaches 18-year-old Alberto Podestá straight out of Caló's band. It is an unusually prolific year for dance tango — D'Arienzo alone makes around 33 recordings, Troilo 27 — and, Lavocah and Stenvoll agree, almost all of it will already be familiar to dancers. Formal censorship is still a year away (it begins in mid-1943 under Perón), but self-censorship is already visible, as in two competing takes of Malena's third line; the war in Europe surfaces obliquely too, in older songs like Biagi's Bélgica and in the closing, deliberately non-tango choice of We'll Meet Again.
1943
Tango 1943
episode 37 · 2021-04-14 · 5:51:57 · 27 records
The last regular year of Tango By Year, chosen as 'the summit of tango': D'Arienzo reaches his peak melodic output with Héctor Mauré, Di Sarli's music is complex but sounds simple, and every orchestra from Troilo to Laurenz, Tanturi, Caló and Pugliese is near its best. Hundreds of new tangos appear, Alberto Castillo goes solo and becomes the first soloist to be huge, Goñi leaves Troilo and Basso replaces him, and tango milonguero (tango for dancing) reaches its maximum complexity. Lavocah argues the soloists' rise and the war context (Stalingrad, the changing fortunes of the Allies) explain why tango begins to go downhill after 1943. The show runs over five hours and ends with a long afterparty.
1944
Tango 1944
episode 2 · 2020-04-15 · 2:35:33 · 23 records
1944 marks the full handover from Juan D'Arienzo's rhythmic dominance of the late 1930s to Aníbal Troilo's lyrical, more complex style, which every other orchestra is now following. Pedro Laurenz, Carlos Di Sarli, Ricardo Tanturi and Ángel D'Agostino all slow down and thicken their melodies, while singers reshuffle: Alberto Marino and Floreal Ruiz join Troilo as Francisco Fiorentino departs, Enrique Campos has already replaced Alberto Castillo at Tanturi, and Domingo Federico leaves Miguel Caló to start his own orchestra. Argentina's wartime neutrality cuts tango off from outside musical influence, letting the genre develop on its own terms, even as a global shellac shortage makes records physically noisier. Osvaldo Pugliese, not yet famous, and the fifth-ranked, lightly-regarded Alfredo De Angelis both get their first look-in on the show. The episode doubles as a birthday celebration for Michael Lavocah, recorded on his real birthday.
1944
TBY Lost Afterparty II - 1944
episode 28 · 2021-01-20 · 3:12:11 · 40 records
This is the recovered after-show talk from the second-ever Tango By Year episode, 1944, led by Michael Lavocah rather than Dag Stenvoll. Lavocah recaps what Stenvoll played in the original broadcast (Laurenz, Di Sarli, Tanturi, Caló, D'Agostino, D'Arienzo and Troilo) and then plays roughly forty more 1944 recordings the main show never had time for, with Stenvoll joining partway through. The talk circles back to Osvaldo Pugliese, whose orchestra is 'bursting onto the scene' in 1944 even though recording quotas kept him from cutting some of his best compositions, and to Alberto Echagüe, whose more nuanced singing with D'Arienzo this year strikes both hosts as a real discovery. Along the way they place 1944 tango against wartime popular music in the United States, explain the Cuban pregón form behind a flower-seller's tango, and close by setting 1953 as the next year on the show.
1945
Tango 1945
episode 10 · 2020-06-10 · 3:35:51 · 44 records
Dag Stenvoll (broadcasting from a fjord municipality south of Bergen) and Michael Lavocah treat 1945 as tango at its zenith, the point where the fast early-40s style has opened out into a melodic golden age. Three of the big four orchestras change their main singer: Alberto Morán arrives at Pugliese, Armando Laborde replaces Héctor Mauré at D'Arienzo, and Di Sarli swaps Podestá for the baritone Jorge Durán. The war ends, which slowly cuts Argentina's wartime export income that had fuelled the tango boom, and shellac shortages finally start to hurt record sound quality. Pugliese is still romantic, with his harsher signature style 'bubbling under' for 1946 and after; Troilo has a year Lavocah calls full of quality; Piazzolla's early orchestra accompanies Fiorentino. The show ends with an afterparty of Lavocah's picks (D'Agostino, De Angelis, Demare, Biagi, Tanturi, Di Sarli, Pugliese) and the note that there is no La cumparsita from 1941 or 1945.
1946
Tango 1946
episode 20 · 2020-10-14 · 3:24:26 · 47 records
1946 is a diverse year, hard to sum up in one line: Di Sarli sounds much as he did the year before, Troilo keeps developing his own individual line, and Pugliese finally records La Yumba after preparing it for three years or more, a turning point for his orchestra. D'Arienzo grows lighter and more sophisticated, with the growing influence of arrangers Varela and Salamanca. Several bandleaders who split from Miguel Caló at the end of 1944 but missed 1945 make their recording debuts this year: Osmar Maderna, Francini-Pontier, and Astor Piazzolla's short-lived, dance-unfriendly 'Típica.' The show also marks a landmark reissue: a two-year Belgian restoration project (Tango Time Travel) puts out the complete 1940s D'Arienzo discography, 230 tracks, in far better sound than anything available before, especially the hard-to-find 1946 Armando Laborde sides. The post-war setting (the episode opens on Édith Piaf's 'La Vie en Rose') frames a year when, as Michael Lavocah puts it, tango starts going in many directions at once.
1947
Tango 1947
episode 3 · 2020-04-22 · 2:09:07 · 24 records
By 1947 tango is deep into the golden decade, which Lavocah dates to 1935-37 rather than 1940, so this is year eleven, not eight. Pugliese and Troilo are now the dominant creative forces; D'Arienzo still sells well but has stopped innovating, and the music overall has grown far more complex as three successive waves of style (D'Arienzo's beat, the Troilo/De Caro lyrical school, and Pugliese's extremes) stack on top of each other. New tango composition has collapsed to under half of 1944's output, a side-effect of the lunfardo radio ban imposed under 1943 censorship, forcing orchestras back to older repertoire. Baritone voices (Jorge Durán) start joining the catalogue of tenors, and wartime shellac shortages are making records noisier just as some bands want wider dynamic range. Once-major orchestras (Biagi, D'Agostino, Tanturi, Federico) are visibly declining, while rarer names pointing toward tango's future (Gobbi, Francini-Pontier, Piazzolla) get real attention.
1947
TBY Lost Afterparty III - 1947
episode 30 · 2021-02-03 · 2:45:26 · 29 records
The third 'lost afterparty', revisiting 1947 ten months after the original two-hour show and playing everything that didn't fit the first time. Where 1944 was beauty and lyricism, 1947 is darker and more complex: the Golden Age has passed its peak and censorship is starting to bite, a year before the government bans Pugliese's orchestra and folk singer Atahualpa Yupanqui outright. The orchestras skipped first time round get their turn — Tanturi (now missing singers Castillo and Campos), D'Agostino (newly split from Ángel Vargas), and an unusually sophisticated late run of Canaro recordings with guest singer Nelly Omar. The second half belongs to the year's two giants, Troilo and Pugliese, including a 1947 Radio El Mundo recording of Troilo's 'Los Despojos' that was never commercially issued, and Pugliese's 'Bolero', which jokes about Latin dance music's growing threat to tango.
1948
Tango 1948
episode 23 · 2020-11-25 · 3:24:52 · 39 records
Lavocah calls 1948 a curious year: tango is at a low point, with very few recordings (Canaro makes the most at 13, D'Arienzo 12, Biagi four, Laurenz none) as the censorship enforced from 1943 and the Perón government's pressure dry up new material and wear down the bands. Eva Perón's calls asking orchestras to play free concerts for her foundation helped drive some to disband, and Pugliese was banned in the whole country and nearly lost singer Roberto Chanel, yet his music became sharper and more complex (Negracha, Patético). Troilo (Sur, Cafetín de Buenos Aires, Ojos negros) and Pugliese are the year's stars, with Gobbi an honourable mention; D'Arienzo is already moving toward his 1950 style, Francini-Pontier, De Angelis and Tanturi offer a quieter, prettier sound, and Di Sarli records only two tracks. Stenvoll also plays Finnish tango, Cuban music by Arsenio Rodríguez and a Polish song in the after-party.
1949
Tango 1949
episode 35 · 2021-03-17 · 3:54:37 · 43 records
Stenvoll and Lavocah describe 1949 as the year the 1940s party ends: the crisis that began with censorship and state pressure in 1948 is at its worst, Di Sarli gives up, Laurenz makes no records, Biagi makes four, and there are few new songs, hence the medleys. It is the last year the lyrical, singer-led style dominates Buenos Aires before the Piazzolla-influenced instrumental turn of 1950-51 (Troilo, Fresedo). D'Arienzo sounds softer and more joyful, with strong instrumentals that foreshadow the 1950s; Pugliese reaches his own style with Malandraca; Gobbi is the rising vanguard; Troilo is at his most lyrical, just before a break with RCA Victor. The second half is an afterparty with more Gobbi, Pugliese, Troilo and a bundle of one-offs, and ends on Julio Sosa's arrival, Jorge Vidal's discovery and a long lyric reading of La rodada.
1950
Tango 1950
episode 12 · 2020-07-01 · 3:47:48 · 45 records
Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah call 1949-50 the biggest change tango music ever had: it emerges from the crisis brought on by government censorship and repression, new local labels break the long Victor-Odeon duopoly, and about nine orchestras record for the first time. Dag plays many obscure new bands (Mancione with Fiorentino, Kaplun, Salgán, D'Alessio, Gobbi, Francini-Pontier) alongside the soloists Marino, Castillo and Rivero. Troilo is out of contract after leaving Victor in 1949 and does not record for around a year, but pushes Piazzolla's modern arrangements; Varela leaves D'Arienzo mid-year, taking singer Laborde, and D'Arienzo has already turned toward the simpler 50s style; Di Sarli does not record; De Caro makes his warmest, best music. Pugliese in 1950 is Dag's favourite year, with Jorge Vidal and Alberto Morán, and the long second hour is a Pugliese fest. The show ends with Rivero's La cumparsita (Buccino orchestra) and a long afterparty.
1951
Tango 1951
episode 4 · 2020-04-29 · 2:18:22 · 26 records
After the late-1940s crisis, when censorship and a contracting post-war economy drove many orchestras to fold, tango roars back in 1951 with a harder, less lyrical beat. D'Arienzo's comeback Cumparsita becomes a huge seller while his band sheds its star singer; Troilo turns modernist, bringing Astor Piazzolla back as arranger, which splits dancers and triggers a brawl at one of his gigs; Di Sarli returns after a two-year break and, by simply doing what he always did, suddenly sounds like part of the new style. New labels (Tecal, Music Hall) spring up to record it all but lose their masters within a few years, and new modernist bandleaders (Fresedo, Salgán, Gobbi) emerge alongside Pugliese's harder-edged vocal experiments. The year also marks endings: lyricist Homero Manzi's death prompts Troilo's instrumental elegy Responso, and Francisco Fiorentino makes his final recordings in Uruguay, four years before his own death.
1951
TBY Lost Afterparty IV - 1951
episode 32 · 2021-02-17 · 3:16:35 · 36 records
This 'lost afterparty' revisits 1951, a year the hosts found far more diverse than expected once they moved past the 'big four' orchestras. D'Arienzo turned backward to a leaner, faster 1930s-style sound after splitting from arranger Hector Varela, while Troilo went the other way, fully absorbing Piazzolla's modern ideas both as arranger and composer. The vocal 'tango song' era that had dominated since 1938 was fading: 1951's repertoire was mostly instrumental, solo singers like Mercedes Simone and Ignacio Corsini were losing label support, and Pugliese's Barro shows Alberto Moran beginning to break free of the decade's tightly integrated singer-orchestra formula. The show also surfaces several obscure or short-lived orchestras (Lorenzo Barbero, Victor D'Amario, Florindo Sassone, Raul Kaplun, Joaquin Do Regis, Mario Demarco, Jose Basso) and closes, after the main broadcast, with a bonus set and a preview of the series' next, much earlier target: 1926-27.
1952
Tango 1952
episode 17 · 2020-09-02 · 3:29:41 · 44 records
By 1952 the single direction tango had in 1950-51's up-tempo revival has fractured: Troilo and Pugliese keep developing their sound, while D'Arienzo and Di Sarli mostly repeat what already made them famous, with D'Arienzo even pulling back from the previous year's instrumental experiments toward straight vocals. The 'big four' orchestras dominate the year almost completely, crowding out the newer bands that had broken through in 1950-51. Several singers move from orchestra employee to independent star with their own guitar or small backing group, including Ángel Vargas, Edmundo Rivero, Jorge Vidal and Nelly Omar. Odeón introduces tape mastering this year, prompting Pugliese to re-record much of his back catalogue, not always for the better. The episode closes with an attached 'lost afterparty' set stacked with Di Sarli and a run of milongas, plus a solo cortina from gypsy-jazz guitarist Oscar Alemán.
1953
Tango 1953
episode 29 · 2021-01-27 · 3:26:02 · 38 records
Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah call 1953 a tricky year: on the surface the big four (D'Arienzo, Di Sarli, Troilo, Pugliese) are going strong, but D'Arienzo and Di Sarli have stopped developing, and Troilo is recording less since the 1951 deaths of two close friends, Homero Manzi and Enrique Santos Discépolo. Outside the dance hall, tango faces three challenges: rock and roll, mambo and above all folklore, which gets a push from a new Law of Live Music that backfires for tango because cinema owners hire cheap folk groups. The show leans on the advanced end: Elvino Vardaro's one-off all-star disc, Gobbi, Pugliese's two great Morán discs, Salgán, Lucio Demare's solo piano, and Troilo with Berón and Casal, then closes with Ranko Fujisawa singing Sur with Troilo and Grela before General Perón. A short afterparty plays other rhythms: a rumba, milongas, a folk-tango fandango and a zamba.
1954
Tango 1954
episode 21 · 2020-10-28 · 3:35:42 · 44 records
On the surface 1954 looks like 1950-52, but Lavocah argues the wide base of tango is shrinking: small venues are closing, imported music and a rising folklore boom compete, and a law that forced 50% Argentine live music ended up employing cheap second-rate folklore acts. The top layer is intact, with Pugliese (new singers Miguel Montero and Jorge Maciel arrive in mid-year, Alberto Morán leaves) and Di Sarli (back at Victor after three years on Music Hall) as Stenvoll's two lighthouses. D'Arienzo repeats his late-1930s style, new tangos are scarce so bands recycle foreign songs, and a hint of kitsch and reverb creeps into the sound. Soloists with guitars (Rivero, Marino, Vargas, Chanel) and Japanese singer Ranko Fujisawa add variety, and guest Jesús Mela, son of Pugliese's presenter Luis Mela, recites his father's gloss live before a Pugliese record, as it was done at the milonga.
1955
Tango 1955
episode 24 · 2020-12-09 · 3:14:43 · 40 records
1955 is, in Lavocah's words, the end of tango's golden age, politically and musically at once. Pugliese is jailed for six months as a Communist political prisoner from January to July; in June the military bombs the Casa Rosada and Plaza de Mayo, and in September the Revolución Libertadora finally topples Perón, after which Peronist-linked artists are banned, including singer Nelly Omar (for the next seventeen years) and folk singer Antonio Tormo. Musically the traditional dance orchestras largely stagnate: D'Arienzo mostly recycles old hits and Troilo records only about six songs all year, while Pugliese keeps moving forward the moment he is released (recording Emancipación that September) and Piazzolla, studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, records a landmark set of non-dance, self-composed sides. Alongside Pugliese a small 'evolutionary' wing pushes further still, from Alfredo Gobbi's dense, far-ahead-of-its-time Camandulaje (which Pugliese himself only dares record in 1973) to Jorge Caldara's post-Pugliese experiments. The show closes with a long bonus set of extra 1955 recordings and the hosts announcing an upcoming all-amor 'Love Special' and a run of 'lost afterparty' episodes for January.
1958
Tango 1958
episode 9 · 2020-06-03 · 3:11:16 · 35 records
1958 is presented as the last year the series would cover, two generations on from the first episode (1941), because by the hosts' own account there is little new tango music left to explore past this point. The golden age is agreed to have ended around 1955: dancer numbers have collapsed, famous venues like D'Arienzo's Chanteclerc Cabaret are closing, and even a French Eurovision winner gets turned into a tango for lack of new material. The Big Four diverge further: D'Arienzo churns out fifty simplified, fast-to-arrange recordings, Pugliese pushes further into modern, dancer-challenging territory, and Troilo, past his energetic peak, makes fewer but carefully chosen ones. It is also Carlos Di Sarli's last recording year before his death the following year, closing a thirty-year career with the deeply personal Bahía Blanca, and a year when necessity creates new sounds, from Fulvio Salamanca's accidental style after D'Arienzo's near-retirement to Argentino Galván's explicitly non-dance Los Astros del Tango project.
1959–1969
Tango 1959-1969
episode 40 · 2023-10-04 · 3:28:15 · 29 records
A reunion programme covering the 1960s, the decade after tango stopped being a mass social-dance phenomenon (around 1955). Stenvoll and Lavocah show a fragmented scene: Piazzolla's quintet and the 'generation of 55' playing for listeners, small groups such as the Salgán-De Lío duo and Quinteto Real, Pugliese's late masterpieces, and dance bands that carry on (D'Arienzo with Bustos and Valdez, De Angelis, Caló, Varela). Argentina is under two military coups, the pop 'nueva ola' takes over, and RCA Victor's Ricardo Mejía destroys the master recordings. It is also a decade of few new tangos, but Lavocah calls Bronca (1962) the one that expresses the coup and D'Arienzo's El último café one of the great tangos of the 60s.
Troilo special
episode 13 · 2020-07-08 · 4:24:19 · 40 records
A special for the second edition of Michael Lavocah's book on Aníbal Troilo (more than 25 new tracks, more on the post-mid-40s orchestra). For once Lavocah knows the orchestra but not the tracks or order, and Dag Stenvoll plays from Troilo's career in a deliberately non-chronological order, from his first recordings in 1938 to his last in 1971, avoiding the songs already heard in earlier shows. They trace the three phases of his career: traditional dance music to the late 40s, a transition in the early 50s as he embraces Piazzolla, and the later concert era. They go through the singers (Fiorentino, Marino, Ruiz, Rivero, Berón, Rufino, Goyeneche, Nelly Vásquez) and the pianist Orlando Goñi, with Lavocah giving detail on Troilo's character, generosity, grief for Homero Manzi and the story of La última curda. The talk ends with a Tango Tunes transfer discussion (missing bars in old CD transfers) and a 1943 La cumparsita.
TBY Love Special
episode 25 · 2020-12-30 · 4:08:21 · 46 records
A special on love in tango music: Stenvoll plays only tangos, waltzes and milongas with 'amor' in the title, from 1926 to Pugliese live in 1992, while Lavocah gives the short version of his lecture on how tango lyrics grow up. Early lyrics are naive (La morocha, 1905), then from Mi noche triste (1917) come about three decades of blame, forgiveness and revenge, and finally a nuanced grey zone in later Manzi and 1950s tangos where people plead for another try. In a long Lost-After-Party-style closing set Lavocah drops tango altogether and plays love songs from France, Colombia, Cuba, Lebanon, Portugal, Mexico, Turkey and Russia. The show also announces that Lavocah will host 'lost after parties' for 1941, 1944, 1947 and 1951 on the off-weeks.
Tango By Year, by year
episode 38 · 2021-09-01 · 4:24:01 · 49 records
This is episode 38 of Tango By Year, a one-off reunion special that Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah broadcast together in Norwich four and a half months after the main series' last 1943 episode. Instead of one year, they play roughly fifty recordings in chronological order from 1926, the year electrical recording reached Argentina, through 1955, the year they both call the end of tango's golden period, tracing the sextet era and the Dicarian school, the 1931 crash that wiped out many orchestras, D'Arienzo's rhythmic revolution from 1935, the early-1940s flowering of the 'big four,' wartime lyric censorship from 1943, and the genre's early-1950s second wind under Salgán, Gobbi, a returning Di Sarli and an increasingly ambitious Pugliese. 1952 and 1958 are explicitly skipped. They close, outside the stated range, with Troilo reciting his own 1968 poem 'Nocturno a mi barrio' over bandoneón and guitar, closing both the episode and the series itself.
Tango By Year, by year: The afterparty
episode 39 · 2021-11-10 · 3:43:55 · 35 records
A reunion afterparty from Bergen in which Lavocah and Stenvoll walk the series year by year, from the mid-1920s to the 1950s, with a few recordings per year. Lavocah frames the early period as a big three (Fresedo, Firpo, Canaro) plus De Caro, then shows how the Depression darkened the music in 1931, pruned the sextets and the new bands, and how D'Arienzo's 1935 insistent beat started the milonguero 1940s. He singles out 1942 as the deceleration into a more lyrical tango (Troilo's Malena), 1943 as the peak (Uno, Di Sarli's piano polyrhythm, Marino's vocal control), and 1948-50 as the crisis of censorship and the new competition from imported music, ending on Di Sarli's La cachila and the first Piazzolla arrangements for Troilo.