Tango By Year, by year: The afterparty
Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah · 2021-11-10 · 3:43:55
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.
What this episode gave Tangopedia
Facts said in the episode, each now cited to the minute it is said.
Firpo got the idea for El amanecer on a tram home after a late cabaret job: partygoers in the cheap seats, workers on their way to jobs, birds singing, and factories starting at four in the morning.
In 1928 the young Charlo appears on Lomuto and Canaro records as a guest, not a band member; before 1928 singers were not regular parts of the typical orchestra on records, which prepares the 1940s.
In 1926 the De Caro band already played advanced music, with the Maffia and Laurenz duo pushing it; the soft parts are Maffia.
Maizani sings with blue notes and deep melancholy, the voice of a poor woman from the arrabal; she recorded Pero José at least twice (1928 and 1931).
Canaro's symphonic series of 1929 coincides with the arrival of Ada Falcón, his muse and partner in a tempestuous relationship of about nine years; the music alternates soft and hard, starting soft, and after the Depression it starts hard.
Records played · 35
Transcript
Transcribed by machine from the audio, then punctuated; names may be misheard. Tap any line to hear it. The episode is in English, and so is its transcript.
We are live! Coming to you this evening from Bergen, Norway. We gathered together in this beautiful rainy city. And we've had plenty of water in all its forms. We got hailed on today.
Good to see you all, really lovely, really lovely that you're all back for this possibly final ever. Possibly, you said it was probably. I think this is it for sure, we're done. 39 is an even number.
Yeah, so we had this Norwich Tango by Year by Year edition and after day after Michael sat down and he was making all these notes, and I asked him, what are you doing? I'm planning what would be the after party for the Tango by Year by Year with all the important songs that I didn't play. Well, yeah, more or less. So tell us about it.
Well, I tried to stick to my plan, which is to pick only historically important songs. But of course... Sounds really boring. That's what someone was saying on the group today. First of all, I had a list of like 100 songs, and secondly, you played some already, of course. Of course. And well, anyway, we've got an after party, that's the main thing. Yeah.
Good, and uh yeah, the party started already this weekend. We've been here for uh for a few days dancing in the first post-covid tango event in Tango Brazos, uh the local club who was also one of the sponsors for Tango by Year, so it was really nice. And Michael had a lecture, presented his brand new book on Canaro this Monday to a great acclaim in Tango Abrazzo. Yeah, I hope people want to say about that just there's the Canaro haters and the Canaro lovers, but somewhere in the middle is something more interesting, that's kind of where we focused on the Canaro presentation. It could say that about a whole Tango by Year series, it hasn't been about just love and hate. Well, just broadening our tastes, I think.
I guess that's yeah that's it, so oh it's my after party, I should take it away. I wanted to say one more thing before we started because we've been dancing this weekend, but of course you're all in different parts of the world and things are going differently in your different parts of the world. So I don't know how it is for you, maybe some of you have been, that's the champagne, that's the champagne. Maybe some of you have been dancing for months and maybe some of you still haven't danced. So I just want to say I'm aware of that. We're all in different kinds of places with that, and we all wish each other well with that return to tango, however we navigate it.
So what I thought I would do, also I asked Dag, can I play anything you played last week, not last week, in the last show, and he said no. So that took another three or four of my list, and we've got a flight to catch tomorrow morning, so that took off a few more.
So I wanted to start uh well at the beginning in 1926, but not just taking exactly strictly years, but just to look at the more what was the musical scene at that time and what were the trends in music. So just as in the 40s we talk about our big four of D'Arienzo, Di Sarli, Pugliese and Troilo. If you go back to the end of the 20s and the beginning of 30s, you can talk about a big three, really, with a fourth member, a big three plus one. You might call it a big four, but in terms of success, really, it was a big three with one extra person. And the big three are Firpo, Fresedo and Canaro. And a plus one doing something quite different is Julio De Caro.
And we can take these three names and attach three streams, three musical currents to them. Firpo is a sentimentalist, which is not the same thing as Fresedo's romance. Fresedo wants romance, but romance is all about cuddling, um. Oh yes, whereas Firpo is maybe a little bit darker at times in his sentimental approach. And it's interesting to notice that nobody copied Firpo style either at the time or afterwards, he stands alone. And then you've got Canaro who's a traditionalist, following Canaro we got Juan Maglio, he was quite well represented then. Then you've got the plus one guys, Julio De Caro and all the bands that come after him, at the beginning Pedro Mafia and Petrucelli was one, both of which we heard last time.
So I'm not going to play all of these bands because we played some of them in the previous programme, or at least in the years that we want to talk about. But I do want to play a few. So we're going to start with a song by Roberto Firpo called The Dawn, El amanecer, which he recorded many, many times.
Chapter · 6:21
How Firpo's tram ride became a tango
Birds, a tram and 4am factory hammers.
“He heard this hammering sound of all the factories beginning to work again at four o'clock in the morning. Civilization meets nature.”
And Firpo says that he was going back home to his barrio on the tram after having played really really late at a cabaret, so there were all different kinds of people on the tram on the way home. The tram had uh two levels, it was a double decker, and in the cheap seats you had the people he called calaveras, skulls, the people who'd been partying really hard all night, but at the same time you had people who just got up going to work, and as they traveled back to his barrio he heard the sound of birds singing, which is why you get those bird noises in El amanecer. But also, and I think only in this version, you get another sound that he heard, which is the sound of factories starting work, and he heard this hammering sound of all the factories beginning to work again at four o'clock in the morning. Civilization meets nature. Civilization meets nature in this song. Yeah.
Illustrates Firpo's tram ride home from a cabaret: birds singing and, in this version only, the hammering of factories starting at four in the morning.
So it's a very complete kind of song and a very early composition. That's where we're going to start. Roberto Firpo, El amanecer, from 1928.
Very sweet. But the factory, did you ever notice that before? That's the sound of metalworking. I'm guessing, actually, that comes to mind because we know that both Pugliese and Troilo played at metalworkers' factories in the centre of the city. So let's go straight on and hear something from the traditional school of, in this case, Francisco Canaro. You played some fantastic Juan Maglio. Which one did you play? Nocturno? Nocturno. Yeah, very beautiful.
He's even from like a generation before but still going strong, and 1928 is the year that this young singer Charlo returns up and contributes a lot to Lomuto and to Canaro's orchestra. He's not a band member, he just appears on on the records, doesn't sing with them at dances, but it really pushes up the level. So before 1928 you don't have singers as regular parts of typical now at least in recordings. That changes and it kind of sets the ground for the 40s that's going to come. Um, apologies if you were with us in Bergen on Monday night, I'm going to play a song I played then because it's so good, which is um Canaro, Charlo's song called Entre sueños, Amongst Dreams, which it's not very well known somehow. The only 40s version is a version of um it's Miguel Caló, isn't it, from 1943 or so, which doesn't really have impact. And it's the tango of a man waiting for his girlfriend to come, so he's waiting in the room that they have, waiting for the soft footfall of her steps in the passageway. And then he knows that she's going to throw herself into his arms, and he says how much I've struggled face to face with death and I've beaten death in order to see you. So that's what's coming up now, Francisco Canaro with the voice of Charlo from 1928, Entre sueños.
A man waits for his girlfriend; Charlo's first appearance on Canaro records changes the level of the band and softens it.
He's in a good mood here. Why wouldn't I be? Why wouldn't you be? Really creative music. I love Charlo from this period with Canaro and Lomuto. With Canaro, we're getting like 300 tracks a year. So it's pretty good. It's pretty good. I hope we'll hear a little bit more of that. There are some tracks that are played, but normally it's the same half a dozen, so get out there and find some more.
So we've listened to some Canaro, that's a stronger one, a little bit softer than the average maybe for this period, but I feel that's like the effect of Charlo on the band. He makes everything sound a bit softer, just as myder will do in the late 1930s. So we've had Firpo the sentimentalist, for Fresedo you already played, you play Frases de amor. Yeah, I've written, I checked his playlist, he played Frases de amor, otherwise I'd have played maybe a rabalero which is a Fresedo composition or El espiante or there's loads of good ones. Um, who are the other traditionalists there? Juan Maglio. We've already heard uh Lomuto, maybe we'll hear from him a bit later on, but I want to come back now to the De Caro brothers.
They'll play two tracks related to that, you played Flores Negras or Francisco De Caro, which is actually, now we're going to swap roles because he's played the historically important track and I'm going to play one that's the more typical one, because Flores Negras is an astonishing piece of music but it kind of stands alone, there's nothing else like it. Super, super melodic, very beautiful melodies. Nobody ever managed to make a dance version out of those beautiful melodies, and you also played one of the Mafia Laurens band and young duos that De Caro put out on on disc, because the playing of Pedro Mafia and Pedro Laurens was beginning to excite some comment. So let's hear what the band was doing as a whole in a more typical number, and the one I want to play for you is Farolito de mi barrio.
From early 1926, to show how advanced the sound of the De Caro band was, with Pedro Maffia's soft passages standing out.
Farol is the street lamp, so the little lamp of my barrio. And it's from 1926. So that's earlier than anything else we've heard so far. And we don't normally listen to anything from 1926. Very, very early time. But the music is really advanced. You'll hear that straight away. Really advanced. And the band d'union duo, which is in 1926, at the beginning of the year anyway, it's still Mafia and Laurens playing with Mafia, who makes the softer more velvety sounds, as the senior partner and Laurens the junior partner. Don't worry if you can't work out who's who because it's really tricky a lot of the time. Let's listen to that. Yes.
What did you think of that then? Not bad. Not bad. And we were talking about the, because I asked you, who's playing the violin? And I said, oh, it's De Caro himself. Because later recordings, you took this strange, what's it called? Straw violin or something? The Cornet violin. Cornet violin. Straw, yes. I don't like the sound of that one. This is much better. I think it's much better.
And right from the beginning, you heard the band-a-nyon sound. You could hear how Troilo has incorporated that sound. That's the sound of Petro Mafia. The soft parts are Mafia, and somebody mentioned Cirilo Ortiz to us in the chat window. Cirilo Ortiz is another of the influences on Troilo, so that's why maybe his name comes to mind, but the dominant band and young force in the sound that we just heard was Mafia for 1926. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, really advanced. Pretty amazing. So we've covered the four main strings of music in the early period. What else is there to say about the early period?
We've got all the soloists, of course, we've heard a lot of those on Tango by Year, and we like playing them for you because we discovered a lot of new music that way. Yeah, um, you don't hear it, milongas, you don't hear at milongas. It's tricky to dance to. It wasn't intended for dancing. You can dance to it sometimes. What did you play? You played one Gardel milonga. I did, from 1930. Tortasos. And I don't think we heard any Ignacio Corsini last time. Did we? Who could have skipped that? I love Corsini. There was so much other stuff. Too much other good stuff to play. I think we need to play one solo recording before we move on to the next. Yes. Little phase.
And what I picked for you is a song by Azucena Maizani, one of the very, very first female singers. So the style of the women singers passes through different phases and characters. But the very early ones, they don't sound like the ones that came later. It's the first time you hear it. The sound is quite odd. We would say today, a rabalera. It's the sound of a poor woman from the arabal singing with really blue notes and a deep, deep, deep melancholy, and the one we're going to hear is Pero José. There are two recordings she made, at least 28 and 31, but I'm playing the 28 just because I want to focus on this early period. Uh, pero yo say, but I know you may know it from D'Agostino Vargas, one of the D'Agostino Vargas numbers, but we're going to know it from her because I think it's her composition if memory serves. And what is it that she knows? She sees this really smart guy swanking around in his sports car, but she knows that when he goes home he's on his own and he's not happy about it. In fact, when he leaves in the malanga, he weeps. Yes, he does. So, Azucena Maizani from 1928, Pero José.
Maizani's own composition about a smart man in a sports car who weeps when he gets home; the voice of a poor woman from the arrabal.
The woman's voice. The woman's voice in tango. Ferozze. Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, she has something in her voice. Yeah, Rosita Caroga as well also has this mournful, sentimental tone of the poor, depressed. Maybe that's what it is, it's the voice of the poor that we're hearing there.
Right, let's just move on. 1929. So that first period, let's say 26 to 28, we take that as a whole. 1929, what's the big musical event? For me it's the beginning of Canaro's symphonic series. They're not really symphonic but they're a bit more complex than what's gone before. It's arranged music and that coincides with the arrival into his life of Ada Falcón, his muse with whom he embarks on a tempestuous relationship for the next nine years or so, um, which no surprise if you ask me coincides with the period of his greatest music and most inspired music. Women, he says as he pours himself another glass of champagne.
Um, so we'll listen to the first recording in the symphonic series from April 1929, which is Ada Falcón's La Morocha, The Brunette. It's a bit of a strange lyric, really. It's almost a proto-lyric, a proto-tango, because it's like the ideal man and the woman on top of the wedding cake. She sings, I'm the brunette who stays at home all day and makes the house nice for my man. And when he gets up in the morning, I make him a really strong mate, and then I wait for him and then he comes riding back on his horse and isn't it all perfect? So I don't know about... It's a bit out of date. It's a little bit out of date. So, you know, just take it as it is. And I think I love it even more. Love is blind. What can I say? Love is blind. Just take it as it is and enjoy the quality of this voice. This is the voice of a diva, completely different style of voice to the previous generation of voices that have been involved in the mainstream of tango music up till now.
So much colour, so much colour in the music, very delicate beginning, then really quite soft underneath her voice with the conversation with Minotto on the bandagnon, and then suddenly the music goes crazy and there's all this syncopation, crazy percussion, the bass player thumping the back of the instrument with his fist trying to break it. It's very advanced compared to later, I think. I would say that actually musically that's more advanced than the 40s Canaro, which is... And what you said on Monday in the Canaro lecture is this alternation between the soft parts and the hard parts. Yeah, that's typical for Canaro. It's very typical Canaro, although what's not typical is that here it starts soft and then alternates soft, hard. But then after the great depression, which is coming up in just two years' time, it's going to flip around the other way and alternate, starts hard, so that your overall impression is often, you know, how does the tango begin? That's the bit you sing to yourself, isn't it? So that's going to flip. Play more Canaro from this era, there's a thousand tracks, it's all good.
Right, moving swiftly onwards, um, we're going to hear some Lomuto because we haven't heard any Lomuto. Lomuto is a kind of an interesting guy. Um, he apprenticed himself out to Canaro's orchestra to learn the ropes, I don't know how long that was, but just played in the back for a little while, then started his own band, which in some ways is quite similar to Canaro, but for me it's got more weight, the beat is much heavier. And Lomuto had connections with the establishment, so he ended up, whenever there was a tango ball at the government palace and the congresso, Lomuto's band would play for that. And that gives me an excuse to play one of the many, many different versions of Soy un arlequín, which is a fantastic tango. Uh, the tango's: I'm a harlequin who jumps around and dances in order to hide the pain that's in his heart. So we'll listen to the Lomuto version. I could easily have played half a dozen others that are all equally good because it's one of the best tangos of this year, which is still 1929, for the next three minutes, and again we'll hear Charlo delivering the estribillo.
A Discépolo tango about a harlequin who dances to hide the pain; picked as one of the best tangos of 1929.
Danced to it · 5 of 16
Great music, isn't it? And Lomuto's version. I think Lomuto is one of the least, or let's say the most underplayed orchestras that we have. With Firpo. Firpo also, but it's hard to find the music in good fidelity, but with Lomuto there's more records still around. Yeah, I mean, that was really clear, wasn't it, really nice clean shellac. Fantastic. Charlo's voice is great. The beats are really, you get a nice strong traditional beat.
Who are the bands with a strong beat right now? At the moment it's Maglio, who we're not hearing tonight because we've heard him last time, Lomuto, and some of the time Firpo, those are the bands with the really strong beat. Canaro's beat hasn't yet got as strong as it's going to get, I don't think. What about Di Sarli and Arastra? What about, yeah, actually Di Sarli. Yeah, that's true, 28 to 31. Yeah, he's on the scene now and his beat is, it's a great walking beat, the Di Sarli beat. Every time you hear that it's the sound of your foot rolling through the change of weight, and he didn't even dance, but he got that. He didn't, wow, no, how couldn't he? I don't know, he didn't. Yeah, also a nice version of so you're not really king.
Yeah, so I was tempted to skip 1930, but Dag told me not to, so probably not. Minotto, Minotto, I may not, I may not skip. Um, Canaro's wunderkind star band union player Minotto Di Cicco, or Minotto for short, left Canaro on several occasions but always came back, and after carnival of, um, 1929 he starts to think about going again, and by 1930 he forms his own band, which records for the Colombia label until the Colombia label is wiped out by the depression. Yeah, the stock market crash in New York was 1929, but you all remember because you listened attentively to the previous programs. The year that it gets really bad in Argentina is 1931, which is why the very, very poor shanty barrio next to the El Anse railway station is called Villa 31. Villa being one of the ways of referring to a barrio like Villa Urquiza, which is where they like to dance.
Israeli vision 31 is, um, it started out as railway trucks in the something behind the station for Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, and it's still there now and they still don't have running water. And what are they dancing in that barrio now? They are dancing, uh, cumbia villera, the Argentine street cumbia, like, um, oh what's the name of the band, come on, that plays bombo, Massacino and all them. I can't remember. My mind's in tango mode. Someone's going to type it in the chat window any moment now. Anyway, we haven't got there yet. It's 1930. Minotto has his own band, and you hear the bandoneon style reminds you of Canaro, except he shows off more. This is Don Segundo Sombra, who was a real-life gaucho whose picture you can find, if I remember I'll post it for you, like a cult folk hero. And it talks about this guy sitting on his horse, representing everything that's good about gauchos. But just enjoy the fantastic bandoneon playing from Minotto in this introduction.
From the year Minotto formed his own band on the Columbia label; his bandoneón style reminds Lavocah of Canaro, but he shows off more.
It's like Canaro only better, isn't it? Most better. Because the bandoneon player isn't being controlled by Canaro, so he does what he likes, he shows off. Then we had this a cappella piano break that made me think of Francisco De Caro. Didn't it make you think of Francisco De Caro? Really advanced. Canaro only better, and you know the adventure lasts two years and then economics puts an end to it. And so often economics is going to put an end to a great many bands.
1931. Now Di Sarli goes, Petrocelli. You play Petrocelli, really interesting orchestra. Petrocelli was the band and young player alongside Mafia in De Caro's first line-up back in 1924. So you've got to be good to do that. Cayetano Pulisi, the violin player who ends up playing with D'Arienzo famously in the 40s. His band goes, and this one, and a number of others. But it's something we can hear reflected also in the music. So what I'd like to play for you is Fresedo actually allowing himself to transmit a feeling of pain and suffering which is really unfurlacedian, isn't it? Most of the time for say though it's, well, it's sweet. It's, I also like to think it's a privileged kind of tango, but it's the kind of tango feeling I can afford to have if I live a wealthy lifestyle with servants and I'm kind of a bit isolated from what life's like from ordinary people, because we know Fresedo was born into a very wealthy background.
So you get a light touch to his music and he's playing mostly for upper class audience, but in 1931, during the height of the depression in Argentina, the music becomes really dark and like a good Madeira, it becomes like a nice Madeira for those of you who like a little tipple of that at Christmas, as we do in England with our Christmas cake. If we have any Madeira imported into England this Christmas, but that's another story. Yes. So these tracks are not very well known because at the end of 28, Fresedo quit because he fancied a trip to Europe and he did that. And then when he came back, he has just a short time recording on the Brunswick label before they go bust as well. So this is the Fresedo Brunswick recordings, not very well known, and this is a really astonishing tango, I think, called Contá siempre conmigo, which means you can always count on me. And it's Ernesto Famá singing and he wrote this tango himself, so it's a tango from a man to his friend at the height of the great economic crisis saying to his friend, buddy, you can count on me. I think it's really bad, you can come to me, which I think it's not what we think tango is going to be about. Huh, enjoy this.
A Fresedo Brunswick recording from the height of the Depression, written by Famá himself: a man tells his friend 'you can always count on me'.
That was pretty different to everything else, wasn't it? Really interesting reading your comments in the chat window. Beautiful, sad. Sasha says, the saddest tango song ever written. Well, there's a lot of competition for that. But it's a different kind of sadness, isn't it? It's not the sadness of a broken heart. It's the sadness of ruin and starvation. Misery, that's the word. Misery. I don't want to listen to it every day, but I'm always glad when there's more breadth in tango lyrics than what we imagine.
As it was playing, Dag said to me, it does sound like Fresedo. It does sound like Fresedo. Of course, yeah. The sense of melody is Frasadian, but the kind of despair and heaviness of the presentation, that's not very foreseeing, I don't think. Yeah, something really different.
So the recession lasts a long time. It lasts right through the 1930s for the typical working class Argentine. Um, Osvaldo Pugliese describes walking up and down Corrientes looking for work and seeing the guys like De Caro and Fresedo coming out of the theaters where they've just been working with their top hats and evening dress and canes and white gloves like Fred Astaire, huge rich figures, and you know just drooling at them, all desperate for any kind of work like that, and how long that went on for. But you don't see that in the music, because by 1932 people have been making this sad miserable music for a year and they've just had enough. They've had enough of making it and the public's had enough of listening to it, so that the music changes. Do you know, I've only just realized this, the music changes, yet I've explained why that all makes sense, but for the first time the music is now in one way not, it's deliberately not expressing the reality because we can't stand reality anymore. So it's like in 1932 there really is, um, a generated separation between the music and people's lives because life's too difficult now. So we, and it's been so bad for so long, we don't want the music to express that anymore.
“For the first time the music is deliberately not expressing the reality because we can't stand reality anymore.”
For example, the next band we're going to hear, Edgardo Donato. Now if you don't know Donato so well except a band you like to dance to in the milonga, you'll think, oh yeah, Donato, happy music. But when you listen to Donato's older stuff on Brunswick going back to 1929 and 1930, it's not the same, okay. It's not deeply sad, but it's got some of this weight, like the, not so different from the typical Brunswick, or even a little bit that we heard. But now he generates this completely new sound, uh, which we hear in his first recording on Victor, which was of course El Huracán, which is from the end of the year, November or December. So as we sometimes say, and now for something completely different.
Donato's first Victor recording, from late 1932: the new, deliberately cheerful sound after a year of miserable music.
That was pretty different, wasn't it? 1932, people can't stand the sad music anymore, so you get this music. And another guy who really epitomises that, I don't have time to play an example now, is Canaro as well. Also, actually, Fresedo too. But with Canaro, the change is really shocking because you get these really, really hard banging beats. Listen either to the beginning of La Muchachada del Centro or Ventanita, Florida.
How are they making the wind sound? I don't know, but you see that done in Hollywood movies. And I think they actually had like a wind-up generator. And then for Thunder, they had wooden boards and they'd shake the boards. So from the film industry, they knew how to do all this stuff. Today they're called Foley artists, aren't they? The people who do all this kind of stuff. When the trains go, I saw that in a film about the Cotton Club. That's really good. They get right up close to the microphone and they blow on the microphone.
And that's how you get the ch-ch-ch sound at the beginning of the train songs. Goodness, yes. So you can check out some of those Canaro songs in your own time. Still good music, but based around a hard beat. And a lot of the music is going that way, away from the seriousness of the situation.
Amongst all that, a band I find really quite interesting is Firpo, because Firpo doesn't change his sound. He just carries on being true to himself. He's big enough that he can still make music, although he suffers a lot in the Depression because he loses all his money. First of all, on a cattle ranching adventure, which is wiped out by a flood and then by the stock market crash where he loses all his investments. But he carries on true to his musical vision, which is something I like about him very much.
So for 1933 I want to play something from him. This is a beautiful waltz I do DJ sometimes, but it's quite a long waltz, so keep that in mind if you are tempted to follow suit. This is Under the Bridges of Paris, which, well, you'll look at the title that you know it as normally, Bajo los puentes de París.
A long, beautiful waltz that Lavocah DJs sometimes; Firpo kept to his musical vision after a flood and the crash wiped him out.
I like the French touch of that song. It went really well with the champagne. Yes, I'll drink to that. And Michael said, if you don't like this song, you have a heart of stone. Yeah, come on, Firpo waltzes. They're so tender, so tender, really. Encantadora. Encantadora, absolutely enchanting. So I'm going to... The French listeners are waving their flags in joy.
So that was 1933, Firpo keeping on the sentimental side. 1934, it turns out, is the year of Digre Viejo, the El Vino Vodaro Sextet, and this groundbreaking, world-leading tango music, which was rejected by the record companies as non-commercial. But you played that last time, so I can't play that now. I've been banned from playing anything twice. But no, that's a good policy. There's too much to choose from. It just makes my choice simpler.
But what it shows up is that there's really a small amount of really exciting good new music that's being made, but we're not hearing it. So we don't get to hear what the Vardaro six-step was doing apart from this one test recording, and nor do we get to hear what Pedro Lahrens is doing, because right at the beginning of 1934 he leaves Julio De Caro, sets up his own band, and that band doesn't record until 1937 and then not very much. So what's he doing in those three years? Well, for a start he is performing Pugliese's La Beba, which Lawrence himself records finally in 46, and Pugliese doesn't record until the 60s. So you can go and listen to those versions and then try and imagine how it sounded in 1934. He's playing Arabal as well, of course, already in 1935. And he's playing De puro guapo, which he wrote himself in 1935. Lawrence had it in 1935, the recording is 1940 I think, so there's advanced music going on but it's not being recorded.
The record companies got their fingers burnt very badly in 1930 and 29 when they signed up all these new bands and then they went bankrupt or had to fire them, so this time they're not signing up the new bands. So there's a real gap in our knowledge from this period. We get the mainstream and not the innovation. So let's listen to some music from 1935. First of all, I'm going to play the Canaro version of De puro guapo. There's a Canaro version and an Amuto version and they're both pretty good. Would have been better with Laurenz, we don't know that. Yeah, it's true, I don't know that. Maybe Laryn sounded rubbish in 1935. Well, there's a thought I'll take away from me from this night's show.
Played because we cannot hear Laurenz's version of the tango from this year.
And then immediately afterwards we will play the D'Arienzo 9 de julio, which is the track that kind of defines the whole D'Arienzo project, because that's the track where Biagi starts to push the beat of the band forward in terms of the piano contribution. You don't hear anything especially going on that's different in the piano, but the beat is insistent. That's what you'll hear, the pushing, insistent beat, like a dripping tap in D'Arienzo's own words. And you'll also notice in that second track some really interesting work from the violins, both the high violin, remember there's two different guys playing the high violin and the low violin. Normally we concentrate on the low one, which is Matzeo, but also you get the high violin of Domingo Mancuso and also the two of them playing together. So really interesting work from that. And recorded on New Year's Eve. Recorded on New Year's Eve. These guys worked hard. Yeah. These guys worked hard. So beginning with Canaro's De puro guapo, because we can't hear Laryns, and then going straight on to 9 de julio.
The record that defines the D'Arienzo project: Biagi's piano pushes an insistent beat 'like a dripping tap'; two violinists, Mattioli's low and Mancuso's high.
Yeah, and Biagi on the piano for the first time. For the first time, and actually the more I listen to it, the more I start to notice his touches. But yeah, right from the beginning, push, push, push, push, push. So that's 1935. I think you can hear that D'Arienzo and Canaro are sounding quite different. D'Arienzo's going to win the race between those two guys.
Also some very nice music from Fresedo we don't have time to play at all. I would recommend either Retazos, which is some really spooky melodies, or Casate Conmigo. Yeah. Casate Conmigo, which means let's get married. The guy's singing to this girl, I go, come on, babe, let's get married. And the first time I heard it, you DJed it here at one of the tango events, not at Jektevikin, on the place you stop on the tram. Yeah, we read that place. Yeah, and you played that. It was the tango tunes transfer, which was the only one we had then. There's also the one now from TTT, which I'd recommend that one to you right now. So that's 1935. Can't play at all. A little selection.
1936. In many ways the same as 1935, but I'm going to go off on a tangent which relates actually to one of the big tracks of 1936 which you played last time, which is Nostalgis, a very romantic melody, one of the most romantic melodies we've heard maybe since Flores negros, I'd say. And it is successful, although initially they weren't really sure whether to record it. So there's the Caló version, there's also a version with Lamoto, and you play Charlo's solo one, if memory serves. But I want to play you something that's a bit different, which does have a romantic touch, but it's not an Argentine tango. In fact it's turning into Polish night here, because, yay, Agata, hey, because I want to play you one of the, not the very first, but one of the very first recordings of the song Gloomy Sunday.
One of the most recorded songs in history, Gloomy Sunday developed a reputation as the Hungarian suicide song, written in 1932. What do we know about 1932? It's the height of the Great Depression, by a Hungarian guy who was of the same kind of mind as Discépolo, so he wrote this as a reproach against God, and the initial Gloomy Sunday, the title was called The World Is Ending. It was a tango about the... Tango optimista. Exactly. A song about the end of the world and the guy reproaches God. But as I say in my Canaro book, this lyric was too depressing even for Hungarians. Are there any Hungarians listening tonight?
Chapter · 1:15:30
Gloomy Sunday: the Hungarian suicide song
A song banned by the BBC.
So they wrote a new lyric in which a guy has suicidal thoughts after his girlfriend leaves him, and Hungary has always been one of the countries in the world with the high suicide rate. I don't know why, that's just how it is. So the song developed a reputation as a suicide song, and there were these lewd press reports, you know, well, woman found dead by river clutching the lyrics of Gloomy Sunday in her hand, and stuff like this. And then when Billie Holiday recorded it, now this is true, I fact checked this, it was banned by the BBC during the Second World War in case it destroyed morale. But the place I came across this was not the Hungarian version nor the Polish version, it was the Russian version used in the film by Michael Hoff, Burnt by the Sun, which is a film about the Stalin time and how many faithful, loyal servants of Stalinism got too close to the son of Stalin and were burnt and destroyed by it, and it's the theme song of that film. So it's a really wide-ranging piece and it still sounds fresh and interesting today.
What's the version we're going to hear? We're going to hear, I can't pronounce that, it's Fogg, his surname is Fogg, but can't pronounce his first name. All the Poles will be saying it to themselves at home. I'll just type it in the chat window. He is a beautiful Polish singer, long and successful career. So this is the Polish version of Gloomy Sunday. The actual original title is The Last Sunday in the original languages.
The Polish version of the Hungarian 'suicide song' of 1932; original title The Last Sunday, played for its Depression-era darkness.
That's beautiful. Really tragic. How many different emotions we've already heard in the songs that we've played, from El Dal Khan to that. The thought struck me as I was playing that. I mean, anyone who knows anything about the Polish musical scene in the 1930s knows that the cultural life, the musical cultural life, was perhaps not dominated, but the Jewish people formed a very large part of it. And of course, the Second World War is coming. And what you just heard is about to be extinguished. And then I suddenly remember that the original title of this song was The World Is Ending. And it's almost though you could hear that in the intense soundness of the music, like a premonition of the future. That's a scary thought. So let's play something happier.
Let's move on from 1936. What else could we say about 1936 before we move on? Miguel Caló is beginning to make recordings, beginning to find his sound. Miguel Caló made his first recordings in 1932, but it sounds like De Caro, actually. Just like Fresedo made really complex music before he found his path. So Caló's starting to make his recordings. Maybe go and listen to Las Campanas. I'm sure we must have played that on the 36th show. It sounds like Caló.
And the other thing that's happening are the old style quartets, quintets, of Firpo and Canaro. And Firpo starts first in 1936. Is it a response to the D'Arienzo phenomenon? Hard to say, but perhaps it is. It certainly is in the case of Canaro when he starts his Quinteto Pirincho. Why do I make this comment? Because it's a return to the older repertoire. Remember, D'Arienzo rejects the new repertoire of what we now call the De Caro school. It's a bad name, but it's the only name we have. And returns to the repertoire of people like Juan Maglio, you know, back from the 1910s, and says, ah, all the stuff in the middle, nonsense, we don't need it.
So now we move on to 1937, and we get Arribal, which that played for us last time. So we're not going to hear that. I could play Abandono of Laurence, but you can hear that another time. You know what that sounds like. You know what the exciting early sound of Laren's is like. So I want to inform you as well as entertain you. So we're going to listen to something from D'Arienzo, and I'm really torn what to play for you. 1937 is the year that D'Arienzo makes it really, really big and is disturbed in the musical scene. 35, 36, yes, he's on the radio, he's recording, but 37 is the year that he makes it mega big.
So the first choice for a track to play for you now could be La Pugnalada, which they perform as a milonga. Yeah, that's right. Which has its own story. You can read that in my book or in other places. But actually, it's not that exciting a track. So I'm not going to play the milonga La Pugnalada, but historically a really important track. Or we could pick another one of the tangos that has these really, really heavy syncopations, like La Pajanca, for example. But I'm not going to play that either.
I've just decided right now that I want to hear one of those really, really fast waltzes where the train nearly comes off the rails, Alma dolorida. I think it's 72 beats per minute or something like that, and the bandingón section is really dirty. It's not clean with perfect fingering like the 50s D'Arienzo. You can hear these guys are just barely holding the whole thing together, which I really respect. It makes it so exciting. And yeah, when you listen to this you'll hear how exciting it must have been to go to the milonga and dance to this. Alma dolorida, wounded soul. This soul doesn't sound very wounded to me, or if it is, it sounds like it's forgetting by having a great night of partying and champagne. Enjoy.
A very fast waltz where the train nearly comes off the rails; the bandoneón section is 'dirty', not the clean fingering of 1950s D'Arienzo.
Rock and roll. So that's 1937. It's clear that music is not going away. 1938. We've got to look at the time, five past nine. 90 minutes we're together already. 1938, great music, Trailer records, Common four. Oh yeah, Common four, and it's introverted, but Common four, really exciting but not very sentimental just yet, although it's got a sentimental touch. But we heard that last time, so we can't play that today. So I'm going to play another D'Arienzo number for 1938. I thought about playing Biagi, because he quits, doesn't inform his own band, but you played Portoclesi, so we had a Biagi.
“He sounds like the man next door who can sing well.”
Echagüe, a year in the band, finally records and sounds like 'the man next door who can sing well'.
I'm sorry, we're gonna listen to Echagüe. We're gonna listen to Echagüe. We have to listen to Echagüe. He's been in the band a year, he finally gets to record, and he really sings like a man with a Echagüe. It's really important to listen to a good transfer. I know sometimes we bang on about this stuff and some people bang on about it more than others, you know, the golden ears who say I can hear the difference between this encoding and that encoding, and I can hear the difference between gold-plated mains plugs and normal ones and stuff like that. You know, and there's a market in gold-plated mains plugs, believe me. But here it really matters, because when the music is too fast or processed you cannot hear the timbre, the natural quality of Echagüe's voice.
And Echagüe sounds like a man, but not a posh man or a rich man. He sounds like a man in the streets, just like, you know, the man next door. He sounds like the man next door who can sing well, which a lot of people could in those days, because music and singing was part of everyday life. And you'll really hear, I'll post in the chat window, you'll hear La primera terrible verdad, the way he rolls his ass. Cracking stuff. We're going to hear Indiferencia. Yeah.
Echagüe nails it. Echagüe absolutely nails it. Absolutely nails it. And did you hear the violins at the end, that stretchy part where, despite the fact that it's D'Arienzo's over these intense beats, we get a melodic passage, a passage which as dancers were invited to interpret in a melodic way, if I'm allowed to say that? And again you could hear the two different lines of the two different violin players cracking stuff, cracking stuff.
That's 1938. What else is going on in 1938? Lucho de mare has been experimenting, he's tried performing with uh el vino vadara, they performed together, they formed a band which had two pianos in it which didn't leave any recordings, but um de mare starts recording under his own accounts, there's la racha. And when you listen to those first, welcome back, when you listen to those first demario recordings, you'll notice that sometimes you can hear two pianos, although that soon goes, that's something that's going to happen a bit in tango. Accelerating now towards 1939, I'm going a bit too quick because when we get to 1943 we're going to listen to a lot of music. I've got to leave a lot of time for 1943, peak tango. But now 1939, what are we going to listen to from that? We really need to listen to some Enrique Rodriguez. I want to portray the full gamut of tango music.
Now, Enrique Rodriguez is kind of looked down upon because it's not proper tango. It's what people say. It's not an orchestra typica. It's an Orquesta Característica, an orchestra that plays Bórum dances like Foxtrotts and Pasadobles. So it doesn't really count. But why do we say that? I don't get it because Canaro records loads and loads of Foxtrotts and Pasadobles and Rancheras and Maxitsas and all of the other genres. But you don't get those on the CDs. So our impression is that Canaro is a tango band and Rodriguez has this different reputation in the interior of the country, so outside Buenos Aires. Yes, D'Arienzo is selling the most records, but the person who's selling the second most amount of records is Enrique Rodriguez, and maybe the reason his music isn't so popular is because he's identified with the poor. He's identified with the cabecitas negras, the internal migrants who are not considered proper porteños, people coming from the countryside to the city looking for work. So their time's going to come under Perón, that's when they're going to get emancipated, with all the good and bad that that entails. But we need to listen to him. It's really cracking good dance music, it's simple music, but then shows lots of the other music that we like to dance to. Is he more of an entertainer than an artist, like you characterised Canaro?
Oh gosh. I don't know enough about his backstory, but I mean certainly the music is entertaining and that's what it's for. But I also feel that this is just opinion, this is just intuitive opinion, I've got no basis in reality for what I'm about to say, but the music somehow feels authentic. It's like just the kind of guy he is, he wants to make happy party music for everybody. That's how it sounds to me.
Simple, cracking dance music from an orchestra that plays foxtrots and pasodobles; the title is ironic, 'I've got a thousand girlfriends'.
So we're going to listen to Tengo mil novias, which means I've got a thousand girlfriends. And he gives a long description of all the different kinds that he has. He has blondes and brunettes. He has a selection of all different kinds of colours. And as he does that, the band laugh at him. That's the interesting factor of the lyric. It's ironic. Argentines can be a bit ironic sometimes, which was a surprise to me as an Englishman when I first went to Argentina. I thought we were the only people who were ironic, but they're pretty good at it too. So you'll hear the band laughing and talking back to him.
This was an extremely popular song. It was identified with the first singer in the band, Roberto Flores. And then when he left, it was such a big hit that the guy who replaced him, Moreno, Amanda Moreno, was forced to sing it as well. But they didn't make another recording. They just carried on selling the first one. Enrique Rodriguez, Tengo mil novias. I've got a thousand girlfriends.
It's only the one who doesn't have one who says he's got hundreds. Yeah.
I want to play three more tracks from 1939. Ooh. Splurging. I know. If I get through by 10 o'clock, we're still on target. I don't know which order to do it in. Let's go the whole hog. Let's start off down the D'Arienzo route because 1939 is the year that the entire D'Arienzo band quits over money because they're not getting enough and they leave. And then D'Arienzo starts the new band, which is Hector Varela's band, which sounds really different. And that band is the band that will eventually incorporate Héctor Mauré. Could the band we've heard so far have incorporated Héctor Mauré, this romantic tender singer? I don't know. It's one of these open questions.
But the 1939 band goes off on its own. But the last recording session, they're absolutely on fire. I just want to play those two tracks back to back and then as a like a Cortina to the golden decade of the 1940s I want to play a recording by a soloist. It's intimate and lovely because we're also coming to the end of the time of the soloists as we come to the end of the 30s. Gardel has died, the dance orchestras have moved into that cultural space, and there isn't really a musical, social, cultural space left of the soloists, and they're slowly getting squeezed out of the musical scene. So we're going to be saying goodbye to them in the next 10 minutes.
On D'Arienzo's final session with his old band he recorded two tracks; rock-and-roll riffs, in Lavocah's phrase.
The tracks recorded by D'Arienzo on that last session were two which means for what reason, which some has taken as a deliberate choice by D'Arienzo, it's like a comment from him to his band, why are you leaving? And then the second one with um Echagüe on vocals, Trago amargo, which means a bitter draft, a bitter draft, which is what D'Arienzo had to drink when he was deserted by the band. Um, they're both really really good, lots of nice things to say about them. I want to comment on the first one just to say it's rock and roll, and I mean that a bit more precisely. Normally we say oh rock and roll, yeah it's rock music, but what I mean here is that like all good rock music it's got riffs. A riff is a short little bit. Sometimes we call them hooks, like Smoke on the Water. Yeah, that's the bit and you go, oh yeah, it's Smoke on the Water. Or the opening of Layla with Eric Clapton guitar. And this has got that, but it's tango music. So it really is rock and roll in actually quite a deep way.
The 'bitter drink' D'Arienzo had to swallow when his band deserted him.
The band is absolutely on fire. It's extraordinary to think that they were expendable. That's how good the music scene was. I guess you have to, phases have to go for the new one. Let's listen to these two. Then I'll introduce the soloist song, which will finish our tour of the 1930s. Juan D'Arienzo, 1939, Last Session, Por Que Razón.
Absolutely astonishing to me that that band just disappears into oblivion. Every single musician that you heard there, that's it. They've gone. They don't record again. Well, Juan Polito does. But for the rest, they disappear into oblivion. Extraordinary. Extraordinary. Oh.
We just have to listen to some other music. So a little sorbet to cleanse the palate, which will be the song Cortito azul performed by Ignacio Corsini. Because we listened to a lot of soloists during this time, and Dag in particular pioneered that. He played a few Corsini tracks and a lot of Imperio Argentina as well. And I think by the end of the main round of shows, we all knew that Imperio Argentina was Dag's favourite tango singer. But of those, my heart goes to Ignacio Corsini. There's something so natural about the quality of his voice that touches me very deeply. And I think he was born in Sicily, if memory serves. And he said once, the birds taught me to sing.
And Cortito azul is a tango that presents a conundrum to me, because it's one of the ones composed by Mariano Mores, who by this time, by 1939, is joining the band of Francisco Canaro, first of all, a second pianist. And then when Riccardi is told to retire on doctor's orders, becomes the main pianist. So he's a member of Canaro's band and Canaro makes what I think is the first recording of that tango on disc, but I don't like it. I don't like the Canaro version. When the pianist on the recording and the arranger is the guy who wrote it, it's Mariano Mores, he really puzzles me. He writes these beautiful tangos, really really beautiful tangos like Cortito azul, Grisel, Adiós pampa mía, like just off the top of my head three songs you all know, and yet his own versions are not very good. Sorry, it's weird, but sometimes art is like this, it takes someone else to see what's really great about one's work.
So here we'll listen to Ignacio Corsini, who's really reaching the end of his career, his last recordings are in 46 and he's barely recording at this time, so it's already one of his last recordings. Cortito azul, little blue room. It's the story of Mariano Mores's courtship. Mores is not his real name, it's his girlfriend's name, because there are two sisters who are performing, two young girls, and he joins them as a young man as the pianist who accompanies them and takes Mores as his stage name, and that's why he's Mariano Mores. And then eventually he marries one of them. He hasn't even married that girl yet, but he's courting her and they've got a little room where they meet, the little blue room, and it's blue because the room's in a really bad state when he rents it.
Mariano Mores's tango of his courtship, with the little blue room painted with a whitewash cube; Corsini, born in Sicily, was said to have learned to sing from birds.
Chapter · 1:51:58
The blue room
Mariano Mores painted a room blue after a hit.
For those of you who live in the north of Europe, you don't understand why you needed a room like this. It's because people lived with their families until they were married. So it was absolutely impossible to meet someone privately. There just was no space to do it. That's why we have the Boulin, like El Boulin de la Cagio Cultura, Troia Furentina in 1941. In that case, the room was a room where friends got together to share a mate, have a drink, play the guitar, make music away from their families because they didn't have any space of their own. But here it's a room to meet your girlfriend.
And in those days, you used to buy whitewash in these, not as a paint, but as a concentrated little blue cube, which you'd then dissolve in water. So he didn't have money before the song was released. After the song was released, he had a lot of money. It was very successful. Before not, so he bought one of these little cubes of whitewash and painted the room blue, and that's why we have this romantic tale of the little blue room. Let's imagine being there with someone we'd like to be with.
Gorgeous.
So two minutes to 10 o'clock and we've got to 1940, still on track. 1940 is a year really with a lot of diversity, more of the new bands are beginning to record, it's impossible to play everything. Um, let's start by mentioning the ones we're not going to play now because um I've already presented them to you in the previous program. D'Agostino Vargas is recording Muchacho, na flojes. Those are the first ones. Beautiful, subtle, limpid music. Really very different to the rest. Kind of surprising, actually, that it's successful when it's so different, so outside this very energetic current. But we're not going to listen to that tonight. We've heard him before.
D'Arienzo has his new band, the D'Arienzo Varela Orchestra, I like to call it. The instrumentals I find the most exciting, like Entre los Fuegos or La Bigocha, but we heard that in the previous programme. We heard one of the very, very first numbers with Héctor Mauré on vocals, Miero. So we're not going to hear that either. But I think I really can't let the evening go without listening to Biagi with Ortiz. Jorge Ortiz, a singer that suited Biagi really well, his most emblematic singer perhaps, although the couple of tracks that he records with Miguel Caló in 1943 are also really interesting. There it's more a contrast, Ortiz's strong voice with Que Lois More Romantics out in 43, our peak tango year. Here they're more on the same page, let's say, Ortiz a strong singer with Biagi a strong orchestra.
An unusual tango with a nature lyric where all the sounds of nature name the woman he loves; written by a lesser-known lyricist.
Danced to it · 5 of 12
And Todo te nombra, Everything Names You, is an unusual tango but not one that's spoken about for the lyrics, because it's not written by one of the famous lyricists. There's a kind of elitism about tango lyrics and we only talk about them if they're written by one of the really famous people. But here we have a lyric which draws on nature for all its images. How, um, I'll try to post the lyric in the chat window, it's about how all the sounds of nature are naming the woman that he loves. No city images, countryside images. Then after that we're going to listen to some Tanturi and then finally some laran's, I'll introduce that before we go. So uh Biagi.
A Tanturi instrumental played straight after Todo te nombra.
And then after that we'll go straight on and listen to a Tanturi instrumental, even though you played La Vida's Corta with Castillo, because it's just got so much energy. Tanturi is a band which when I started, we didn't know very much, but it's become more and more popular with every passing year. Tanturi seems to be more loved. So we'll listen to those two. Biagi Ortiz, Todo te nombra, and then Tanturi's Arganioras.
It's just the best. I really wonder what the rest of Tanturi was like at this time, because he's just switched record companies. He's been stuck in one of these dead-end deals with Odeon, and then he escapes. But, you know, the band would have had 40, 50, 80, 100 songs were ready to go. We've just got a few from 1940. It's not until Castillo joins that we get more material. So they would have had a huge repertoire that sounded like this that's completely lost. We've got to keep working on that time machine.
Yeah, until then we'd just have to do things like Pocus Palabras and La Vida's Corte, which you played. So before we leave 1940, we have to play Nome Extrania because it's the best variation of all time. What can I say? It's Laurence, which means there's an extraordinary amount of volume dynamic. So not in the tempo. The tempo is pretty much fixed because it's Melonguero, it's a dance orchestra, but the volume changes extremely rapidly and not in a digital way. Fast ramping from loud to quiet and all points in between.
Excitement and the running variation at the end where he plays in both directions in and out, because there's no place to breathe in the music, otherwise it just creates so much tango atmosphere for me. No mixed rain, it kind of defines why I like tango in a way. In terms of excitement there's other reasons to dance, but in terms of excitement actually this is it for me. Enjoy.
It's going wild. Oh, I can't imagine what it was like going to dance to that. Live. And it wasn't that popular. Yeah, it wasn't that popular, so there wouldn't have been many people. Yeah, some basement club like the billiard club actually, which is still there. Those 26 Bejaris, we could have gone there, danced, it's still open. Yeah, I wouldn't mind. You play billiards sometimes. Yeah, yeah, prefer tango though.
So 1941, one of the most exciting years, the year that we started with. That we started with. That we started with, yeah. Sort of in the middle of the... Right in the middle. It's maybe not ultimately, but when you're getting to know tango music, maybe it's the time that most excites, because that's when Troia Fiorentino is hitting their peak when they get to record for the first time. A back catalogue that they've had since 1937, so four years' worth of music.
Chapter · 2:10:44
Why 1942 sounds slow
Tango hit the brake in 1942.
And the first tango CD I bought was El Bandagnon CD number one, printed in Spain. I used to have to go up to London and buy them in Tower Records on Leicester Square, now Piccadilly Circus, and that was in 1994 and I was paying like 15 pounds a CD. Remember that? Remember the CD? So before or after the cassette? I think it was after. So incredible music, but we've already heard a lot of that. Dag played Te Consejo Camille, all of it is I advise to forget me, which is a really emotional number, so that means I'm not going to play a Troilo Fiorentino 1941 number, otherwise I'd maybe have played the one you played, one of my favourite tangos, or Una Carta.
The one where the guy sends a letter home from the jail to his mum and says Vieja Mum, is it true that my woman has moved another man into our flat and put our child in an orphanage? That's extreme. Or Yo Soy El Tango, which is all about just the joy of tango and the joy that we have with it. But we've done Fiorentina Fula one. It's maybe going to come back later. I don't know.
Let's listen to Milongueando en el 40, which presumably was written in 1940 because of the title, Dancing Milongueando en el 40 in 1940, written by Amanda Pontier, who was this young band-a-gnon player in Miguel Caló Orchestra. And Pontier tells the story, he says that he heard a rumor on the grapevine that Troilo was going to play this song, and when he heard it he said to his friends in the Caló band, oh come on, don't mess with me, it's not fair, and they said no, really, he's going to play it. So they went there and they waited and waited and waited, and then eventually in the gig Troilo played Milongando and Quanta and Pontius' tears came to his eyes because it was so beautiful. So that's a song that I really want to play because it's Troja's manifesto for the new music of the 1940s.
Rhythmically, very, very rich. D'Arienzo is about beat. Beat is not the same as rhythm. Rhythm is about patterns of beats and changing patterns of beats. Changing patterns maintain our interest, providing as dancers, they're not too unpredictable. Okay, I want to hear it now. You want to hear it, you're going to hear it, and then after that we're going to play something from Miguel Caló, which I'll have to introduce afterwards because we can't wait any longer. Toronto's manifesto for the 1940s movement, dancing in the 1940s, Milongueno en el cuarenta.
Yeah! That's the new music, isn't it? Sophisticated, still danceable but very, very sophisticated. Now I promised you a Miguel Caló number. I'm especially pleased to play earlier Caló because when we talk about Miguel Caló we talk about the great musicians who played with him who years later would be called the orchestra of the stars, and the most famous of those stars was probably the violin player Enrique Francini, who had a really sweet and classical tone. But in my opinion, he was not the best violin player who played with Miguel Caló. Much better was Kaplún, if you ask me, who is the first violin player in the early recordings. Francini is still there, but he's playing second violin and it's not so difficult to hear the difference. You can do it. When the violin is sweet and high and fiddling about, then it's the violin of Enrique Francini. Sounds a bit like the opening of Czarkowski's Violin Concerto, but when there's a bit more depth and body to the playing, then it's Kaplún. You're going to hear him here in a recording with a 17-year-old Alberto Podestá of Dos Fracasos.
Early Caló, with Enrique Francini, the star violinist, at the heart of the orchestra of the stars; romantic but with more body.
Beautiful music for me. I really like this period of Caló because it's romantic, but there's a bit more body than some of the other Caló. A huge number of comments in the chat window, I can't respond to them all. But just somebody asked, what about Caló's own orchestra? Sorry, not Caló, Raúl Kaplún, that first violin player. Kaplún leaves Caló and joins De Mare, so you can hear some of that kind of really strong, deep violin playing in tracks like De Mare, Sorbus and Margos, and he has his own orchestra, which records on the Teca label in 1950 or 51. But those masters were in very poor quality even before they were printed on the records, and the records themselves were printed on poor materials. There's only eight tracks, what there is in tango tunes is the best you're going to get. Have a listen to that.
That's it, 1940, 1941. Now it's time for 1942. What's the big event of 1942? It's the deceleration of pace. You heard the energy of D'Arienzo in 1937, that was the beginning of this acceleration, and that process has continued through the past four years, drawing more and more orchestras into its wake. We could for example have played Di Sarli, as I almost did, Catamarca, really upbeat music, or Aureti Rao, but then eventually this acceleration can't go on any longer, it flips and we get a huge deceleration pace in 1942, and Troilo spearheads that change.
When I was preparing my own playlist for tonight, the importance of the big four really came home to me because of course there's so much wonderful music we can play, but I wanted to play historically important tracks, tracks which showed innovation and development as well as being characteristic of their time. And time and again I was drawn less so to Disavi actually, despite the great beauty of his music, but to D'Arienzo, but particularly to Troilo and Pugliese, as people are showing how music is going to develop. So that was really quite interesting for me, just to see how important they were in terms of mapping out the entire landscape that everyone else is following. But in 1942 the landscape is about the deceleration of music. Music becomes more introvert, slower paced, softer, and the recording that really epitomizes that is Troilo's Malena.
The recording that epitomizes 1942's slowdown: it fades in as if from a distance, Goñi plays a piano solo, and it is the first arranged vocal number in the Troilo band. A first take was made in January.
Danced to it · 5 of 21
Now in fact there were two recordings. The one that we hear is a second take that wasn't made until June, but the first take was almost identical actually, and that was made in January. So we'll listen to the second one because it's easiest to hear. When the music starts you'll notice immediately that it fades in as though the music starts from a great distance and slowly draws closer and closer and closer to us, and Gony is still there in the orchestra and he plays this beautiful solo on the piano. It's the first vocal number in the Troilo band that is arranged. Up till that time, in all through 1941, only the instrumentals were arranged because they were more complicated, the vocal numbers were considered more formulaic and they didn't need an arranger for those. So this is the first arranged vocal number in the Troilo band. Malena, Troilo 1942.
Malena, who was she? There's at least four stories about who Malena was. Yeah, let's leave those stories. She's whoever you want her to be. Maybe that's the best answer. Malena is whoever you want her to be. That's why we love this song.
Well, now this is meant to be an after-party of important songs. So before we leave 1942, we'll play one more track, which is Tanturi Castillo, Así se baila el tango. This is how you dance the tango. Why is that an important... Instruction video. Well, you could experience it that way. But for me, what's more interesting about it is the fact that he makes fun of the upper classes. Castillo is identified with the working classes. So when he appears on stage in the stereotypical suit, the top button is undone and the tie is loose, and it's a really big tie. And the handkerchief that he's got in his breast pocket, it's a really big handkerchief in a loud colour, and it's spilling out of the pocket.
A tango that starts by mocking slicked-back pretty boys who know nothing of the beat: the working class voice asserting itself.
So he subverts a little bit the norms of the time, and the first line of the tango goes, what are those pretty boys, no, they're slicked back hair, what do they know about tango, what do they know about the beat, and then he goes on and on and on this topic. And we hear that apparently fights broke out in the Molongas as people felt themselves identified by this polemic. So this is the voice of the working class beginning to assert itself, and this is only possible because the capacitas negras, the poor internal migrants, the working class is becoming a bigger proportion of the population of the city, and they're about to become enfranchised under Perón in 1943. So this is a growing movement, and Castillo is going to become more and more popular. Cantor y Castillo, Assisi Baila el Tango, 1942.
So that's 1942. In general, a year when tango slows down and becomes more lyrical, when the lyric becomes more and more important. And now it's time for 1943, which some of you may know, I kind of consider to be the peak year of the whole 1940s thing. OK, it's not in the middle of the 1940s, but when is the golden decade of the 1940s anyway? The golden decade of the 1940s starts in 1937, doesn't it? With Arabal and D'Arienzo's La Pugnalada and Omero and La Pajanca and all those really heavily rhythmic tracks. That's when it starts, 1937. And when's it finish? 45, 46, okay there's great music from the end of the 40s but it's rather small in number, and tango itself is almost extinguished in 48 and 49, zero recordings, very, very few recordings. So the golden decade of the 40s is really 37 to 45, so it kind of makes sense that 43 is the peak of that time.
And I'm going to play four tracks because I'm allowed to, and we're going to start with Uno, which is perhaps the most important composition of 1943. I think there's eight versions from the year, something like that. A tango about the impossibility of love, but still hoping for it. So someone who hasn't quite given up hope. It's Discépolo again, of course, giving us this beautiful lyric. There's an interesting story about why it's called Uno. Of course, Uno is the first word of the lyric, but originally it was called something completely different. And apparently it acquired its title in another way because the song leaked out before it was officially released. Somehow Fresedo got hold of it and he was performing it. And because it didn't have a name, because it hadn't officially been released, people couldn't ask for the number by name. So when they wanted to hear it they would just hold up a finger like this, play that one. So that's how Uno first got its title.
Chapter · 2:33:55
Why tango is called Uno
A tango with no name.
And the version I want to play for you is D'Arienzo with Mauré, because Mauré's voice is super lyrical, it's one of his top three lyrical songs, isn't it? There's a Maras and Lilian in 44, which is the end of the D'Arienzo Mauré years, but here in 43 it's almost as lyrical, really super, his voice soars. I really enjoy this performance, and so let's hear it. The other artists we're going to hear from 1943 are Carlos Di Sarli, who we're going to listen to because of the complexity of his piano music, and I think Troilo with Marino, if we have time, we'll do one more, but let's listen to this first. D'Arienzo, Mauré, Uno, 1943.
Perhaps the most important composition of 1943, with about eight versions; Mauré's voice soars in this version, one of his top three lyrical songs.
Oh, yeah. Beautiful, slow, D'Arienzo, rich and lyrical. D'Arienzo could be rich and lyrical, at least for this period, at the beginning of the 1940s, when that was the current and D'Arienzo was forced to swim in that same stream. 1943 is Di Sarli's best year. That's a ridiculous, stupid thing to say, but I just said it. And why would I say such a thing? It's because of the complexity of the rhythm.
“1943 is De Sali's best year. That's a ridiculous, stupid thing to say, but I just said it.”
So Di Sarli plays clean, clear rhythms for dancing, but when you listen really closely, you start to hear that they're more complex than you think they are, and some of the clearest examples of polyrhythm. What do I mean by polyrhythm? It means poly, multiple, rhythm, rhythms. More than one rhythm being present at the same time are in Di Sarli's music and mostly it's in the left hand of the piano because as we all know the piano was the only instrument that was allowed to improvise in Di Sarli's orchestra and everyone else had to do what they were told or be sacked. That's how it was. Very difficult being a session musician in the Di Sarli Orchestra.
So 1943 you hear some really quite exciting funky things going on in the left hand of Di Sarli's piano. There's three or four tracks that we could have played, also some beautiful counter melodies. I know that Todo of Di Sarli Rufino from 1943 is one of Dag's favourite tracks as well as one of my favourite tracks, but I want to concentrate on the rhythm of the piano now. So Hugh, we could have played, I've chosen Anselmo Acuña, El Rezero. So Anselmo Acuña is a man's name and Rezero is another name for a gaucho, a cowboy, again with the voice of Rufino.
Chosen for the funky polyrhythm in Di Sarli's left-hand piano, said to be some of the clearest in his music.
Originally titled Muchachos, se armó la milonga, changed because lunfardo was forbidden; Castillo was already singing with Tanturi.
Hot damn! So much rhythm! So much rhythm! Oh my word. So now I'll tell you a few more songs from 1943 that I'm not going to play you. I'm not going to play you Tanturi's Muchachos, comienza la ronda, which is a really important tango historically, because originally, of course, it was called Muchachos, se armó la milonga which is lunfardo for to get together to organize, the lads are organizing the milonga, they're getting the milonga going, but that was lunfardo and then the Perón regime gave into the Catholic Church and introduced censorship so they couldn't record that and the story goes that Castillo was already singing with Tanturi and was going to record it. And that was the last straw for him. He was already thinking about leaving. And when the lyric was changed, he quit and went solo.
And, of course, it's recorded by Campos. So we could play Campos, but we heard Oigo tu voz in the previous programme, so I don't really need to play that. And we haven't heard anything from the Orquesta Típica Victor. And, OK, it has different phases. And this little final phase in 43, 44 is really special. So we could have played Una vez, but there isn't time. So I'm not going to play that either. And Pugliese makes his first recordings in 1943. Come on, I've got to play one of those, haven't I? I'm sorry, there isn't time. The instrumentals, not so typically Pugliesean. That's an easy excuse to make. What about the vocal numbers with Roberto Chanel, like Farol, a tango about the working poor? I'll play something by Chanel later, or I'll try anyway. Very romantic sweetness in the violins, maybe not entirely typical of the Pugliese oeuvre, but something really, really important for this year.
But I will play one more number from 1943 before we move to 1944, which is a Troilo-Marino number. So Marino has joined the band of Troilo as second singer. There's a lot of pressure on him. Who the hell can sing alongside Fiorentino in Troilo's orchestra? But he manages. And the track I'd like to play for you is Farolito de papel, Little Paper Lantern. Why this particular one? Because it's one of the tangos which shows Alberto Marino's supreme vocal control. He can go from fortissimo to the quietest whisper in just a moment, and that's what you hear in this tango. Also in some others, like in Siga el corso, for example, perhaps even stronger there. So, last track from 1943, Troilo, Marino, Farolito de papel.
Shows Marino's supreme vocal control, from fortissimo to a whisper; Marino joined as second singer next to Fiorentino.
Danced to it · 4 of 6
So that's 1943. Peak year of tango. I played three tracks and didn't play half of the ones I would have liked to play. Which brings us on to 1944. And I'm only going to play one track from 1944. 1944 is actually the year that Horacio Salgán starts his orchestra. Is it? Yeah. It doesn't record until 1950. He starts an orchestra, and right from the beginning, he's using different kinds of voices.
So Carlos Di Sarli records with Jorge Durán in 1945, which is more, it's a bass baritone, right, not a tenor, but he was already singing with Salgán the year before and Salgán actually got an opportunity to record from the record company. They thought, oh, this new young orchestra is interesting, um, so they said yeah, you can come and record but you can't record with that singer, you know, his, his voice is just all wrong for tango. And Salgán refused, he said if I can't come with my singer I'm not coming. So we could have heard what Salgán sounded like in 44 but out of professional integrity we have to wait for six years. There we go.
So just as an example of the continuing romance of the period which isn't going to last for very much longer, let's listen to Carlos Di Sarli with Alberto Podestá, Podestá in his second stint with the orchestra after he's been pushed out by Rufino and returned after Rufino has gone solo, singing the white chapel, La capilla blanca, one of the most romantic dreamy tangos ever recorded. Um, I just put this out there and you can say what you like because Rufino is very nice for some reasons with Di Sarli and then Podestá is very nice for other reasons and one, one Millingera was asked about this, you know, what's the best, you know, what do you prefer, and he said when the woman's in your arms, Podestá. I think that was a smart answer. Have a listen, see what you think.
One of the most romantic, dreamy tangos ever recorded; Podestá is in his second stint after Rufino went solo.
My friend here is lost in a dream after that. Beautiful music. So that was 1944. The other event, 44, Domingo Federico, who's left Colossus, starts making his own recordings. Saludos. Something you can listen to after the show.
1945. Di Sarli starts with Durán. We were just talking about that. The singer that Salgán had discovered the previous year. But you played La vida m'engañó. There's so many beautiful tracks, but you don't need to listen to them tonight. Tut labus me diran adios. What was the one I was thinking of playing? Don't let the stars know. May the stars never know. Very beautiful. No time to listen to it. It's getting a bit fast, isn't it? There's so much good music.
1946. Historically important. The 1946 La yumba. And please play and listen and enjoy and dance to the 1946 and not the 1952, because the recording engineer in the 1952 got all excited by the fact that he had a new tape machine and saturated it. The sound is actually very poor. And the 1946 one, you can hear much more of what's happening. The Pugliese Manifesto. You've got to listen to that.
What else? Nelly Omar starts to record with Francisco Canaro, just 10 numbers over two years. And the level of the music is much more sophisticated than Canaro's other material. Does that mean there's a different orchestrator, different arranger? No, it's Mariano Mores. It's the same guy playing the music. Canaro could make complicated music when he wanted, but he doesn't want to. So they're very, very special numbers, but the opening of the Canaro, Omar, Adiós pampa mía, oh God, I can hear it playing in here right now.
Omar records just ten numbers with Canaro over two years; the special arrangements are by Mariano Mores.
Really super significant in 1946, historically speaking, didn't make much impression at the time, is the appearance of Piazzolla's own Orquesta Típica. Have a listen to El recuerdo. Piazzolla playing first bandoneón in his own band, of course a very strong bandoneón section. This is new music, new and innovative music. El recuerdo, you may know this from Carlos Di Sarli.
That's modern, yeah, that's modern, modern and exciting. Nice to see that some of you like that. Now I did promise a Chanel number. I'm trying to squeeze in as much music as I can in the night so we'll play Fuimos. It's not typical, I really have to say, it's not typical of Pugliese at all, super, super romantic and soft with a lyric by Homero Manzi. Listen to this and then we'll try and accelerate through the rest of the decade as quickly as we possibly can.
Lavocah squeezes it in as a Chanel number, though it is not typical of Pugliese at all.
Danced to it · 5 of 129
So I think we can say that 1946 is a very, very rich year for tango. We didn't even play any Troilo. I played some Troilo Ruiz last time from this period. There's also the extraordinary record of St. Bohemia, five-minute tango romanza.
So let's move on to 1947. I'm not going to play anything from 1947. If I did, what would I play? I'd probably play Ene Ene of Pugliese, which is composed by Ruggiero, which shows that Ruggiero has completely understood what Pugliese's music is all about. Aggression and force. Married to Beauty. Very lovely track.
And I'm not going to play anything from 1948 either. I've played too many 1946 songs. There isn't that much music in 1948. If I were to choose something, I'd choose Sword. Did that play that last time? I think he did. Also some good Pugliese stuff.
1949, we haven't heard any gobi yet tonight. Doug did play a vocal number with macell from 1950, estas in mi corazón, which is a really interesting track, and there's also a gobi macell Remembranza. And in all of those tracks, Maciel sounds rather different than he will do a few years later, once he starts to work with Pugliese. That's much, much later.
So 1949, I'll play just one track, only one track, which is a gobi number. From Pugliese, we could have played Malandraka. We heard that in the last show. We could also play But Cattuso, I really encourage you to listen to Cattuso, because it's not very well known. It's Ruggiero's second big number from the orchestra, and it's full of aggression, but also it's harmonically very dense and complex and challenging. Very interesting. But what I will play for you as we leave the 1940s is Gobi's tribute to his childhood friend, with whom he would listen to Julio De Caro together, Orlando Gogni.
So that's the 1940s for us. Beautiful advanced music, but actually in 1948 and 1949, tango is kind of in crisis. Very little music being produced, and that's largely been the end result of the censorship that was introduced in 1943, because that slowly cut tango from its roots. When you go to Buenos Aires, people use linfado expressions and they say vos, and if those things are banned in popular music, it's forcing music to be less connected to the people. So little by little the life blood of the tree is being drained, and by 1948, 49 the tree's in really bad condition. And then finally it changes, there's a delegation goes to Perron and begs for these changes to be reversed, and he agrees, and then we see tango begin to reinvigorate itself in the early 50s. But now of course in the post-war period there's new music being imported from abroad, there's competition, um, and not just from what we might think, like rock and roll that's going to come, there's competition from the rest of South America because the record companies are beginning to import that music into Argentina.
What are we going to listen to from 1950? I thought about playing a Francini Pontier track to you, it's not my favorite orchestra. This is Enrique Francini violin and Armando Pontier bandagnon, who were friends and had left Calot together 1945, 1946, started their own band. They have a wonderful track in 1950, Alos Amigos, I like it very much, there's a lot of interesting things musically. We don't need to hear it tonight, so I'm not going to play that, something you can listen to after the show. A really interesting track for me signifies the changes that are going on would be D'Arienzo's Canaro in Paris, which is really a return to the old style of the 1930s. You've heard that many times, so I'm not going to play it right now.
We're going to hear instead something from Julio De Caro, who's made his comeback, and I'm kind of over-representing him here because Doug did play the Dakara track Aníbal Troilo, but I want to play another one. This is Mi dolor. Mi dolor was composed by Carlos Marcucci, and you can hear Carlos Marcucci, who was a bandagnon player. He had his own orchestra in that pre-Great Depression time, which he led from the bandagnon playing his own composition Mi dolor, and my suspicion is that this is now in the Dakara repertoire because Marcucci has now joined the band of neon section and is leading it, so he's brought this with him. Dakara from this period is completely different from the early periods. It's rich and warm and juicy. Maybe you know this. If you do, enjoy. If you don't, listen to this, this is something else.
A Carlos Marcucci composition likely brought into De Caro's repertoire by Marcucci, who joined and now leads it; the De Caro of this period is 'rich and warm and juicy'.
Danced to it
That's punchy. That's very punchy. That's very punchy and juicy and melodic.
So what we can hear now in 1950 is that tango music is splitting into streams that are really quite separate. But when we go back to 1943, even Mr. Punch D'Arienzo himself is playing lyrical romantic music. But D'Arienzo's Canaro in Paris has got nothing to do with this. Tango music is split. And D'Arienzo is playing old-fashioned music from the 20s, but other bands are playing modern music from the 50s. So we see this parting of the ways, and other music is making inroads.
Antonio Tormo, a folk artist, records a countryside number whose title is El Rancho y la Cambincha, which sells four and a half million copies in 1949. Now the population of Buenos Aires at the end of the war was about 12 million, so I don't know exactly the population of Buenos Aires of, um, sorry, of Argentina, the whole nation, end of the war 12 million, 1949 15 million, and you sell four and a half million records. One in three people in the nation, every family, every family pretty much has got that. That's mad, four and a half million. And D'Arienzo has just sold 1 million on something, and that's big. Di Sarli's Organito de la tarde sells 2 million in 1954, and that's news. So that's massive. You can listen to that after the show. We don't have time to play it.
But from 1951, I want to play something of the modern stream, which is from Troilo, and it's a Piazzolla number because the bad boy of tango has come back to his dad. And both Troilo and Fresedo, Fresedo's in some ways a modern guy, even if we don't always appreciate his musical choices, both of them are recording the new material that's being produced by Astor Piazzolla. The one I want to play for you is Preparense, Getting Ready. So this is Piazzolla's arrangement for the Troilo band, of course, reviewed and approved by Troilo, from 51.
One of the new Piazzolla arrangements played by Troilo, 'reviewed and approved by Troilo'.
Really beautiful, beautiful music and some new textures. So when we heard the double bass, I think playing harmony with a viola at one point, really unusual texture. Loved music. So we're only going to play a few more tracks now. We're nearly finished. That was 1951. What else could we say about, I think we've said enough about 1951. I'm going to play only three more tracks. I'm going to, we could go forever and we've got a plane to catch at six o'clock tomorrow morning. And we're well into the show.
So I'm going to play two tracks from 1952, and then after that we'll introduce the bridge out of the golden age of tango music. 1952, I want to play two tracks that could not be more different, both of them in a way however traditional tracks, one more obviously than the other. The first one I'm going to play is Carlos Di Sarli's La cachila.
Eduardo Arolas's tango with the only really long piano solo in Di Sarli's music; Lavocah hears Beethoven.
Danced to it
When Felix Picherno played tracks, not necessarily this one but similar ones of Di Sarli, he used to start decrying Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin. But this is Beethoven. Carlos Di Sarli's piano solo in La cachila is Beethoven, absolutely magnificent. Some of you discovered for the first time this evening, but some of you discovered a little while ago, there are very few solos in Di Sarli's music. Mostly the band play tutti, everyone is playing together the same theme, and the interventions like the little piano fills or what the violin does, they're very short, so a long solo is almost unheard of in Di Sarli's music. This is the only really long piano solo in this entire earth, and yeah, for me it's Beethoven. From 1952, Eduardo Auroles' La cachila by Carlos Di Sarli.
“For me it's Beethoven from 1952.”
I can't get over that. That's just so powerful. Extraordinary. And by way of complete contrast, what we might describe as one of the last shouts of the old guard. Rosita Quiroga, the first female singer to start recording back in 1924 or was it 22, records Apología tanguera, which, yes, she wrote the music. Kadikima wrote the lyric. This is kind of like a manifesto for what tango should be, but 1920s style. Cirilo Ortiz is playing the bandoneon together with the trio of guitars with which he played, like that intimate guitar bandoneon music that we know from the 1930s, like you played Soledad last time. Apología tanguera. Apologia means apology, but the word apology also has an extra meaning in English and old-fashioned meaning, justification. So this is the justification for tango 1920 style from a veteran of that era, Rosita Quiroga.
Ortiz on bandoneón with a guitar trio: intimate guitar-bandoneón music of the 1930s.
So, before the last song, it's the end of our odyssey, Dag. Yes, it is. 39th programs. Blimey. April. April the 9th, something like that, last year we started. Year and a half.
I mean, the pandemic's not over, but it's kind of over and it's coming to an end. Don't worry about it. You know, we're able to dance again. Most of us are dancing again. Maybe not as much as before. Not as freely as before. So it feels kind of quite natural that this project's come to an end. I've loved it. I've learned so much. I was really glad to do this after party. It was interesting for me to go through the whole Tango by Year once again. I've really been touched by the way all of you have made a community first of all and also have accompanied us through the year. Yeah, very precious. Lots of good memories from that.
So I want to play out with something modern. In 1955, Mariano Mores wrote a piece of music called Tanguera, which means that the woman tango dancer, Tanguera. His own recording is from 1957, so I could play that because, you know, it's our program and we can do what we like. There's a 55 recording from Francini Pontier, but I don't want to play that, and I'm not going to play Mariano Mores's own version either. I'm going to play one that's very similar to it though, which is by Carlos Vigari, who is one of Troilo's former pianists. He formed his own band. It's a similar arrangement with that nice pizzicato introduction but a little bit more weight and depth to it, and then that's going to be the end of the show.
Final track: Mores wrote the tune in 1955; Lavocah plays a version that is close to Mores's own 1957 recording, not Francini-Pontier's of 1955.
We wish you a very good night from Bergen. It's been fabulous. All good things must come to an end. Well done guys and good luck with your tango. Happy tango, whatever you're doing, and God bless and keep us all.
Chapter · 3:42:36
A record nobody could miss
Four and a half million records in a country of 15 million.
Tango By Year is Dag Stenvoll and Michael Lavocah's, published here with their permission. The audio plays from SoundCloud.