TBY Love Special

1:54You got that right. For such an unloving year, we wanted to make a love special for all of you. And we think that the next year will be much better. So it's a good way to transit to the new year. Yeah.

2:10So my idea was to have a whole Tango by Year program, Tango by Love program, more or less, and only play tangos, waltzes and milongas with amor in the title. And have you stuck with this plan? I stuck with it, yeah. So all of your love songs are nice. Yeah. Wow.

2:27And I mean, love comes in many forms, also in tango. And of course, it's much more than only songs about love in the title. And I know, Michael, that you've been doing lectures on love in tango lyrics. And maybe you can give us the short version of this lecture.

2:43Yeah, that's true. I do have such a lecture. The short version, if you look at what tango lyrics have to say about love, it changes over time, and the simplest way to look at it is very much like the journey that we all make from being a teenager to being a real grown-up about the nature of love. So, um, people commonly say that tango lyrics start in 1917 when Gardel sings Mi noche triste, my sad love, but there are lyrics from before that time. So these very early lyrics, they represent the naive period when we just think that, you know, you grow up and you get married and you live happily ever after, and that's all there is to it. And there are tango lyrics like that, like La morocha from 1905, the brunette. And what happens in La morocha? She's the ideal woman and he's the ideal man. So early in the morning she gets up and she makes him a really strong mate, and then he rides off on his horse and goes off being a gaucho and being a cow herd, and she makes the house tidy and cooks the dinner, and then he comes home and it's all lovely, you know. And then 1917, Mi noche triste, the man's been abandoned, and then we get, like, three decades of blame mostly, you know, when things go wrong there's only two options, uh, forgiveness and revenge. Um, and most of the tangos are on the revenge end, exploring all the dark emotions that there are, often with quite violent imagery, anger, violence, blame, guilt, shame, often put on the woman when it comes to the shame.

4:27And then finally, they get through that into a more nuanced grey zone where it's not just about one person being right in the relationship and the other one being wrong. Some of the later tangos of Manzi are like that, and the one that I always think of very strongly is the tango from 1956 where one person makes a plea to the other to have another go at the relationship, but not from a it will all be different, it will all be grand, no, looking at life fresh in the face, but saying isn't that better than being on our own. So that's the story of tango over the decades, from naivety to things not working out and lots of blame and anger and difficult emotions, to finally working through all those emotions and saying things positively, even in the difficulties.

5:17Yeah, and I think we'll hear examples of all those three, although preparing for this it struck me that, uh, maybe because I chose this concept of are more in the title. So there are not so many of the second type, the more angry or reproachful type. And I guess that's because if you're making a tango about you hate your ex, you're not going to call it something with love. You're going to call it something with hate or revenge or whatever. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Isn't that interesting? I hadn't thought about it before, but that makes perfect sense. So the good news is we're going to hear more positive tango lyrics tonight. It is. And I think that's more fitting maybe for the second last day of the year, to keep this good spirit.

6:02Well, let's listen to love songs. And I wanted to start with a tango simply called Amor, and this is composed by Gardel, but it's recorded with Canaro and Maida in 1936, and it's about love, love's two aspects, joy and pain. And I think Canaro Maida is lovable music. I think we were talking about this in the Tango by Year programs, it's so velvety, it might us voice, so it's good for a long song. Yes, the pace is just right, and Maida's voice is like honey, like velvet, smooths off the rough edges on Canaro's often martial beats and gives a romance to the whole thing. So let's see it more with Canaro and Maida singing from 1936.

6:50 · They playAmorFrancisco Canaro · Roberto Maida · 1936

A Gardel composition about love's two sides, joy and pain; its theme is forgiveness, and Maida's velvety voice softens Canaro's martial beat.

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♪ Music · 2:19 · What the transcriber heard

9:24Yeah, so love is sacrifice. Well, I'd say the theme of this tango is forgiveness, isn't it? Yeah. Let's just go back and catch the last line of the first verse. Hoy te vuelvo a encontrar y me pierdo entre las ternuras de tu alma y tu voz. Today I meet you once again and I just lose myself amongst the tenderness of your soul and your voice. And not only that, he accepts the forgiveness, which you might say is quite an ideal view because there are, not to criticise this very beautiful song, but there are tangos in which someone is forgiven and they find it really difficult to accept the forgiveness, which I think really speaks to real life. But yeah, wonderful lyric.

10:33I don't remember it from Gardel. I just went and quickly checked and Gardel didn't record this. All right, just wrote it. He wrote the music. Rubinstein wrote the lyrics. Oh, okay. And this is from 1936. So perhaps it was in his repertoire in his final tour and he just didn't have time to record it. So that was common that Gardel wrote songs and then other people wrote lyrics that he sang. Often earlier, when he had his regular songwriting partner, Le Pera, Alfredo Le Pera, they wrote a huge number of works together. Sometimes they wrote the words and the music. Sometimes Gardel would do one, Le Pera would write the lyric, and other times they collaborated with other lyricists. But for Gardel on his own to collaborate with other lyricists is not so common.

11:17And Le Pera, I should just mention, Troilo really rated him as a lyricist because he's not normally counted, you know, just like there's a big four tango orchestras, there's a big four of lyricists, and Le Pera's not in them, but Troilo said one day, now this guy's number five, look at the lyrics he writes, they're really amazing, which they'd have to be because Gardel sang them. Yeah, so we'll hear some Gardel later, but I wanted to go to the late 20s and some happy love. And I was wondering because you said this earlier music was more naive and maybe more happy, but I guess you can't really find that in the recordings because some of the recordings are based on really old tangos, so the recording year is not really a good indicator of what type of tango you get, maybe except from the 40s, so you have a lot of this so sad and reproachful tango. Yeah, maybe more in the 50s actually, because then people are recording the few new tangos that are being composed and they give you an idea of how things are changing.

12:15So let's go to Roberto Firpo. And in 1929, he made two recordings called Canto de Amor, Song of Love, one waltz and one tango. And he must have been really in a romantic mood to make two songs for the same. It's before he lost all his money. Yeah, exactly. On the gambling or is it? No, it was the flooding of this cattle. Yeah, he tried to retire and become a cattle baron, but yeah, he got wiped out. Anyway, we listened to this tango, the waltz in tango 1929. So let's hear the tango now, and it's Teófilo Ibáñez singing about love. So it's Firpo with Canto de Amor, Teófilo Ibáñez from 1929.

13:00 · They playCanto de amorRoberto Firpo · Teófilo Ibáñez · 1929

Firpo made two recordings with this title in 1929, a waltz and this tango; played as an example of early happy love.

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♪ Music · 2:11 · What the transcriber heard

15:20But isn't it just irresistible? The Firpo beat, it's the walking beat, before the Di Sarli walking beat. So charming. Why don't we hear more of that at the milonga? People play more late 20s, play more 1929, it's like the best year for the early tango. And this is really sweet, the lyrics, and he sings, you keep on your lips a sweetness of kisses, all of you inspire me to a song of love. Oh goodness. Beautiful, yeah, I'll drink to that.

16:15Yeah, so let's go to, uh, Di Sarli and sad and painful love of the 40s and 50s. I want to play Cuando el amor muera, when love dies, which is a beautiful song from 1941 with the singer Carlos Acuña. Yes, one of the rare ones without Rufino as a vocalist because we don't have much many recordings with the singer doing well, he's just filling in Rufino's on one of his periodic absences. So presumably this one's long enough that Di Sarli felt he had to record a vocal number. So he gets one, but then Rufino comes back. So when Rufino comes back, the other person is always kept on, but they're not going to record anything else. So they just get fed up and they leave. So you don't hear this so often in milongas unless the DJ mixes it with something else. No, I guess we feel bad about mixing it with Rufino songs, but I guess you can play it as a middle song in the tanda. Yeah, I like it. It's a nice lyric and of course it's not going to be as spectacular as Rufino's voice, but still a very nice delivery. And he sings at one point, I would like to drown this passion, spread my wings and leave, but my heart screams at me. Yeah, strong stuff.

17:35All right, that's the first Di Sarli, and then I want to play a second one from Di Sarli's last recordings in 58. Call me my love. This is with Horacio Casares singing. So that's also a very painful thing about sad and painful love. It's beautiful. Let's hear them. I want to hear them.

24:07A lot of feeling into that voice. It's like Rufino, isn't it? He's doing the Rufino thing, turn up the volume to max. The first one, we don't hear it so often, but it was very interesting to hear it again, Cuando el amor muera, for several reasons. One of them, there was so much to hear in Di Sarli's piano. You could really hear what Di Sarli was doing in the piano, and there was a piano feel, it seemed, at the end of every phrase. Can't have been, but that's what it felt like. And then a bandone solo as well. So unusual, not just for the choice of vocalist, but for the arrangement.

24:45Yeah, and it's unusual with the solo, isn't it, with solos in general. So there aren't many unknown solos. When we say solo, we need another word. It's not quite as fancy as solo. Yeah. And it's late 50s. It's what you talked about, is this submerged cathedral of the solo. There's a lot of violins there. It's very operatic, not just the singing, but also the music. It's 1958, so there's not a big dance audience now. So, yeah, the sound, all the surviving bands are becoming a little bit symphonic and operatic in their delivery. But hey, sometimes that's what we want. Just not so often.

25:27From this kind of heaviness in the Di Sarli, let's go to some playful and silly love in Milongas d'Amor. There are two Milongas about love I want to play now. One is called Declaración de amor. It's a Rodolfo Schiamella composition. And it's a bit hard to translate it because there's a lot of Luntfardo. But I think, to put it in brief, it's about how to chat up girls. So it's a kind of love as a game kind of milonga. And this is with Castillo singing and backed by Ángel Condercuri. It's from 1959.

26:05And I want to play a second milonga. When a young man is enamored. That's more. Oh, gosh, yes. When an old man falls in love and makes himself look ridiculous. Exactly. It's ridiculous. Falling over himself to try and impress the young girl. And wearing a corset at night even, you know. None of us have ever seen anything like that in the Milonga, have we? No, not at all. No, never. And that's the Di Sarli with Rufino. This is from 42.

26:33So these are both really fun. And I guess in general, Milongas are more fun. Yes, and not often dealing with the theme of love. So this is particularly special. Yeah, let's hear it. So Castillo with Declaración de amor from 59. And then Di Sarli, Cuando un viejo se enamora, with 42 with Rufino singing.

29:45 · They playCuando un viejo se enamoraCarlos Di Sarli · Roberto Rufino · 1942

A funny milonga about an old man in love who wears a corset at night and does not smile for fear his false teeth fall out.

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30:52That's even funnier than I remember. He doesn't smile because he's frightened his false teeth will fall out. It's pretty harsh, yeah. Let's hope we never end up there, Michael. Please, God, mercy.

31:31And then the first one, actually, you know, just speaking to the guys now, one chat up line was actually revealed, you know, and the Argentines are the world experts in puerhapos, at least they like to think so. One chat up line was revealed, so you can all try it. You can just say to the girls, you knock Bridget Bardo, Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe into second place. See if that works. Answers on a postcard please. Yeah. It might be a bit out of the times if you say that. Yeah, we're not meaning to change it, you know. I don't know. Beyonce and who you like.

32:03Let's hear some more happy love. But this is from the late 30s and a tango by Lomuto. Sonia Comun Amor. This is lovely. This is lovely. It's a happy love song, but the music is a bit sad. So it's before this change that Troilo made that you've talked about, that the music matches more the lyrics.

32:22Yeah, but I also think that Lomuto never sounds that happy, does he? Because it's like he doesn't want to get too emotional about anything. It's a small C conservative music. Not too many emotions, please. So he doesn't want to sound too happy. So he's kind of down on the ground. Yeah, just, you know, don't get too excited, lads. It's only love. Yeah, it's only love. So Sonja Komandamor, it's with Jorge Omar singing and this is from 1937.

35:28Love is like a dream or an illusion. In this case, a good one. I mean, it could have been a nightmare, but here it's a good dream, isn't it? It's a beautiful dream. What a charming arrangement. So conversational in a different way to Canaro, but between the piano and the other instruments. Playful, but not so much that you don't know what to listen to.

35:55And you said 37 is a good year for Lomuto. Yes, it's a very good year for Lomuto, when he's got his best singer there with him, Jorge Omar. No. Lomuto Nostalquias, many other nice recordings from this. Happiness, let's move on to some tragic love from the 40s. I wondered how long we'd get away. There is no color tonight.

36:22I didn't find really a color track I want to play with amor in the title, but there is one by his former pianist, Osmar Maderna. Se perdió el amor, love was lost. And I think this is about as callow as it gets. The song even has this callow ending that Maderna plays for this. Just to say as well, in Spanish, perder, of course it is to lose, but it also has the connotation of wasting something. So if I say a special thing is coming, no lo pierdes, means don't miss it, don't miss it. It's a slightly broader meaning. All right, that's interesting. So love was lost or love was wasted. Yeah, both, double meaning.

36:58The singer is Pedro Dátila, the song is from 47 and I mean we talked about how Maderna can get a bit too wild on the piano and now he goes crazy with the piano, but this one not so much. I think it's more, to me it sounds pretty much like callow. I would have guessed callow if I hadn't heard it before. I think so. Let's see what you think. Interesting. Okay, let's listen.

39:57That was the callow ending. Well, it's the Maderna ending, isn't it? He trademarked it. Yeah, it's true. That was fantastic. I enjoyed that much more than I normally like Maderna. And I agree with what you were saying about how it sounds a lot more like callow in terms of the relationship between the melody instruments, like who took the melody and how long for. That was a lot more like callow.

40:36But from the first bars, if one paid attention to the marcato, the way the band was marking out the beat, so not the melody layer, bottom layer, you could hear immediately that it wasn't callow. A heavier beat with a much bigger roll for the double bass, so in that sense a less romantic sound than the callow sound because you don't want a heavy double bass if you want to be romantic. Yeah, at least not in the callow formula. And yeah, take away Maderna going crazy on the piano and almost, what's the word? So when he goes crazy on the piano it's effusive. Yeah, it's flowing over too much, too many notes, but here without that I felt quite a restrained quality to the music that I don't really associate with Maderna.

41:25I'd love to have heard more songs like that. And I'm sure they played a lot more when they played live. But, you know, maybe Maderna was under pressure to record the tracks where he did fancy things on the piano from his bands. Because it made them really different from the other bands. Yes. And that's what he was famous for, his touch on the piano. All right. That's your homework for this evening. Make a tanda with that song in, please.

41:52Maybe I have to mix it in the callow, then, because it doesn't really sound like, well, not the Maderna I know from this period. Yeah, it'd be tricky. Could be callow tracks. Or possibly with Domingo Federico, but then you don't need to because Domingo Federico, you've got enough to make a nice tanda. I don't know. Interesting. Interesting. You can mix just for the hell of it, Michael, you know? You wouldn't do that, of course. So we'll do it too often, you won't let me off the island.

42:20Yeah, and the final line is, today my wound bleeds and the heart dies. Can it be sadder? It's extreme, yeah. Another sad song and this will come as a surprise because it's the 1940s Canaro tracks. And for those of you new to the Tango by Ear concept, there are two things to know. That first is that Michael doesn't know which songs I'll be playing, so this is all improvised. And the second is that we'll be talking about, we don't play much Canaro from after 1938, especially tangos, because, yeah, it doesn't really make sense to me. But this one, actually, I really like. It's called Bésame, mi amor. It's about the sad farewell, and it's with Carlos Roldán.

43:03Carlos Roldán. It had to be with Roldán. So Roldán is a, it's a darker voice. He's from Uruguay, and he has a reputation as being especially good at milonga. So he's drafted into the band to sing the milongas principally. That darker voice is going to give a bit more weight to the track. Yeah, I like it because it really fits this dark lyrics as well, I think. So let's hear this one, Bésame, mi amor, Canaro with Roldán singer. This is from 1944.

46:13Nice, isn't it? That was a really good tango. I liked it. I'm not going to suddenly be doubling my Canaro output when I'm DJing, but I like that.

46:23Neither am I, but this one is good. We've got to be open-minded. There's always good music within the categories that we normally find not so enjoyable always, and that's something we have discovered during this Tango by Year series also. So let's go on to some more, let's say, reproachful love.

46:44And as I said in the beginning, there aren't so much of this kind of more angry or aggressive songs with the word amor in the title, yeah. And you made it more difficult for yourself there, because you could have also used, you know, there are two words for love in Spanish, aren't there? There's also love that's about desire. Because immediately when you just made that introduction, I thought: No te quiero más, a classic tango from 1925, I don't love you anymore. But no, not with, there's no similar title, I think, with amor. It's probably true.

47:28Querer is more like the passionate sort of carnal side of love, whereas, yeah, closer to eros, let's say. Yeah, well anyway, this is one that's a bit more, say, reproachful. It's Salamanca of all people, D'Arienzo's former pianist. This is from 1959. Hasta siempre amor. Goodbye forever, love.

47:53Yes, hasta siempre. There's a lot of good versions of this tango. There is. But I want to hear this one. It's Armando Grieco singing. And the song is about lost love. But there's also this touch of revenge, I think.

48:08What I hear in the singing is kind of: goodbye forever, love, you left me, but you're going to regret it, because you're never going to find anyone like me again. You've got to believe in yourself in that moment, haven't you? You've got to. I don't think she's going to come back to him, though. No, that's normally the subtext, isn't it? Although, you know, I always wondered, did they read that subtext at the time, or is that our interpretation of it all these years later?

48:36Like in the end of Corazón, you know, everyone knows Corazón here, don't you, guys? Yeah, Di Sarli, Rufino, 1939, huge hit. And the final stanza says, I know she'll come back on her knees one day begging forgiveness. And I'm thinking, really? I don't, you know, could be a long wait. Could be.

48:58So what about Salamanca? He was a pianist of D'Arienzo until almost, almost till this period, right through the 50s until 1957. In 1957, little known fact, although you'll know if you've read the D'Arienzo book, D'Arienzo got ill, he had a really bad hernia and he announced his retirement. So all the top people immediately took other jobs, and then suddenly D'Arienzo, Mr. Vital Energy himself, made a miraculous comeback and reformed his new band, except it was too late to get a few people back. And one of them was Salamanca, who'd already started his own orchestra, and I'm really glad he did, because he gives a completely new voice in tango that we didn't have before.

49:40It's a bit like when Biagi left, because it's not like that answer at all, it's a very different sound. And it's more like that he had this violence floating above the sounds, or characteristic, yes. And it wasn't a vision he'd had for his orchestra, they discovered that sound in rehearsals. I'm especially grateful as well to have that orchestra, because Salamanca, like Pugliese, was another communist. And he had lots of difficulties with the authorities, arrests. On one occasion, one of his records, I think, was even withdrawn from sale because it had a slightly political undertone to the lyric.

50:22How does that go down with working for D'Arienzo for almost 20 years? Well, D'Arienzo could do what he liked. So there's this story when Laborde, I think, I can't remember if it's Laborde or not, but it doesn't matter who it was, but when Laborde went for his rehearsal the first day, it wasn't Laborde, it doesn't matter, I'll remember in 10 minutes' time or someone's going to type it in the chat window. D'Arienzo didn't turn up and the singer thought, oh well, that was just a pipe dream. It was Bustos, that's right. And the reason that D'Arienzo didn't turn up to this rehearsal was because he had to go to the police station to get Salamanca out.

51:02But D'Arienzo was such a popular guy, he could just do what he liked. So D'Arienzo records lots of lunfardo lyrics at the time that lunfardo is banned. So those records, there's at least eight of them, they're not played on the radio. But he doesn't care, because people are going to buy them anyway. So D'Arienzo would just go down to the police station and get Salamanca out, pay the bail money, and if he couldn't get him out, he had a second pianist. He could cope. So this is Salamanca after D'Arienzo in 1959, Hasta siempre amor, with Armando Grieco singing.

51:50 · They playHasta siempre amorFulvio Salamanca · Armando Grieco · 1959

Salamanca's own orchestra after leaving D'Arienzo; a lost-love lyric seeing the ex on another man's arm.

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♪ Music · 2:17 · The lyrics, on the song's page

54:10I really like that lyric. For me, that's the killer line, pasaré en otro brazo. I'll see you on another man's arm. That's real pain. And it's not too overblown, his violent, you know, his difficult feelings. He just talks about that real life situation, seeing your ex with somebody else and how much that hurts.

54:34Yeah, because the final line is, when you dream about me on cold nights, I'll no longer be there. But the way he sings it, it's not like it's anger or something, it's just like sad. He won't be there anymore. And we don't know if she's going to be dreaming about him or not. Probably not.

54:51And before we go on, we've just noticed, folks, for the first time, we have more than 200 logins to the show. Ooh, nice. How about that? Dag, thank you for upgrading your account, because otherwise, the last four people would have been kicked out. Yeah, that's good. I think we have room for another 100 or something. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. Oh, fantastic. So we're so happy that you value what we do here and that we can share this time with you. It means it to us.

55:22So let's go to a waltz. And La serenata de mi amor, the serenade, my love. This is Tanturi with Castillo singing again from 42. And a serenade is a piece of music sung or played in open air, typically by a man at night under the window of his beloved. But, you know, they did this. This was going on in the 10s and 20s and 30s. I mean, I don't know how much it was still going in the 40s.

55:49But several artists recount actually doing that, you know, going with your friends and a few guitars and standing under the girl's balcony and giving the song. I never tried this. Did you, Michael? I think I should, you know. It's too cold in Norway and Britain for this. Summer love. Summer love. Yeah.

56:09And in this case, in these lyrics, the man sings under the window his lost love, and he's hoping that she'll be touched, I think. But the last word that Castillo sings is traición, treason. So I guess it's not too optimistic about winning her back. And it's not so common for waltzes, is there, with this kind of... Not with a bitter lyric, no. Yeah, bitter lyric, that's the word. No.

56:33But it's a really nice waltz to dance to. I didn't pay attention to the lyrics, so maybe I'll feel different to dance to it after reading the lyrics. Yeah, that can be a difficulty, can't it? Let's see. Let's see. Let's hear it. You know this waltz really well from milongas.

59:04Castillo's voice is... That's a completely different serenade, isn't it? Yeah. A serenade where you go to sing to the woman who's already left you. Yeah. Goodness.

59:36I mean, and I guess, you know, even if we don't know the lyric or don't pay any attention to it, you can hear that it's not a, oh, everything's lovely kind of song. There's an edge to his voice. There is a sad edge, not just to his voice, but to the whole arrangement. So very unusual waltz. I guess this is, it's 1941, isn't it? 1942, Miguel Caló's going to come along and sing Al compás del corazón, in which there is only happy feelings and no difficult emotions whatsoever, which is going to break the mold a bit.

1:00:10Let's go to the early 30s and to two singers who we have never listened to before in Tango by Year, Rosita Barrios and Luis Mandarino. And this is a tango called Viejo amor. It's from a record called Tango a Paris. So that's recorded there, I suppose. And is this with the orchestra of Tano Gennaro? I don't know the name of the orchestra, but I think it's just, it's very easy or light accompaniment. I think it's just a piano and a guitar. I'm not wrong.

1:00:43I'm really okay. I may have some things to say about this tango afterwards, if it's the one I think it is. Yeah, let's hear it. This is from 1933. And the woman's voice, we talked about this, that we played more women's voices with a bit darker voice, I think, in Tango by Year. This is quite light, but I think when the male singer comes in, they have a really nice duet, in my opinion. Let's see what you think. Viejo amor, Rosita Barrios and Luis Mandarino.

1:03:39So that's sweet. It's very sweet. What a beautiful lyric. It's the very short chorus. Que un viejo amor no se olvida ni se deja. One never forgets or leaves an old love. Que un viejo amor de nuestra alma si se deja, pero nunca dice adiós. Yes, an old love may leave our soul, but it never says goodbye.

1:04:14And this was the tango I was thinking of, because this song is known throughout South America. I remember meeting Colombian people in London who knew this song, just as a folk song. Great. The Colombians, they do particularly love tango, particularly in the city of Medellín. They're crazy for tango in Medellín.

1:04:37But still, yes, there is a version of this tango by the orchestra of Tano Gennaro, a nickname for Italian Gennaro, in Paris from 1931, and someone's posted it on YouTube, so I'll post the link after the show, then you can listen to that. There's a bit more of a more conventional interpretation with a typical backing. It's a very sweet, lovely lyric, positively. There's a folk feeling to it. I can imagine this being sung around a campfire or something, just, yes, really sweet. Yes, it's got that slightly naive quality, doesn't it? Innocent quality, innocence. That's true.

1:05:14And another tango about happy love, El jardín del amor. This is a waltz and this is Ada Falcón singing, and we love her. We've played her many times, several times during Tango by Year. And she always sings backed by Francisco Canaro. And this waltz is from 1932. Yeah, this is from the stage show La Muchachada del Centro. It's one of the big hits of the show. Yeah.

1:05:43And so here it's just her singing, right? Yes. And she's being backed by the orchestra. That's right. Yeah. And she was singing in the show, but most of the recordings went down without her maybe. There was a huge cast for the show. So not just the two singers that he's normally recording with, you know, like eight, something like that. They were big productions. Let's hear it. El jardín del amor, Ada Falcón, backed by Canaro, from 1932.

1:06:06 · They playEl jardín del amorFrancisco Canaro · Ada Falcón · 1932

A hit from the stage show La muchachada del centro; Falcón's voice and held notes, and a counter-melody by a muted cornet or trumpet.

♪ Music · 3:33 · What the transcriber heard

1:09:39He goes. Yeah. Not bad, eh?

1:10:05So in the final verse the cornet enters with the mutin. It's normally a trumpet in Canaris Orchestra, but that time it really sounded like a cornet. So if you don't know, a cornet is a bit smaller than a trumpet and makes a softer sound. And they're playing with the mutin anyway, like a plug in the end, which gives that particular sound, but that time it sounded like a cornet. Anyway, cornet, trumpet, it's not important. And it's playing a counter melody.

1:10:35And what's interesting about that counter melody is the way, so you can have melody with counter melody matching at the same time, or you can have first melody, then counter melody, call and response. Canaro does that a lot, but here they're kind of overlapping. It starts and then the other one goes for a bit. So they're kind of weaving in and out of each other.

1:10:56Now, when you said we're going to listen to El Jardín del Amor, I instantly thought of Canaro's other recording of El Jardín del Amor, Un Jardín del Amor, sorry, with a duet, a male duet of Irusta and Fuguzot singing, because one of them takes the part that Ada Falcón sings, and the other one takes the trumpet line with a lyric that's constructed out of pieces of the first line. And the interplay between those two is really, really special. So you said, I'm not going to play that version, I'm playing this other one, I thought, why is he doing that? And then Ada Falcón opened her mouth and immediately we all knew why you were playing that version, because one note, she just nails it. Yeah, and especially the suspensions, the point where she picks up a high note and holds. And the band just stops, heart stopping. What a voice. Yeah, wonderful.

1:11:49And holding the note, we're going to hear that soon in a different type of music, because now it's going to move on to some energy and hear D'Arienzo singing, or not him singing, but D'Arienzo's band singing about begging love. And I chose two songs in the love genre. One is Dime mi amor, with Héctor Mauré singing from 1941, and the second one is Un solo minuto de amor, with Jorge Valdez singing. This is from 1960.

1:12:25That's going to be high octane, isn't it? That's high octane, but it also has this, he holds the vowel in amor for like five seconds or something. It's really special. It's his party piece. Yeah, it's a lot of cream on that one. So, yeah, like he does with the Remembranza as well, Valdez' Rumen Branzo is another one where he really stretches the note. Yeah.

1:12:48First tango, you know, really well from 41 with Mauré singing, Dime mi amor. This is good stuff for dancing.

1:13:00 · They playDime mi amorJuan D'Arienzo · Héctor Mauré · 1941

A high-octane tango; Mauré holds the vowel in 'amor' for about five seconds.

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♪ Music · 3:15 · The lyrics, on the song's page

1:16:15 · They playUn solo minuto de amorJuan D'Arienzo · Jorge Valdez · 1960

Valdez, young in the band, begs for a single minute of love, in a party-piece vowel stretch like his Remembranza.

Danced to it

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1:18:29I like that way more than I thought I would. He's a young guy there, isn't he? Is he? Yeah. Because he's pretty young when D'Arienzo discovers him. And then we're like three years in, aren't we? He's 57, so he's three years in the band by this time. And he begs for just a single minute of love. Yeah, he's a young guy. When you get older, a minute's not enough any longer.

1:19:00All right, before we move on, I just wanted to make a short announcement. Maybe I'm thinking about, just to remind you about Tango by Year, yeah, we're stepping up the frequency or we're keeping the two-week schedule from now on. But in between those Wednesdays, Michael will have this Lost after parties. The lost after-parties. Because it's winter. It's Game of Thrones time. Winter is coming. Winter is coming and we can't go dancing. And in fact, we're locked down worse than ever in most of our nations, aren't we? It's awful.

1:19:40So Dag pointed out to me that the first few programs, we didn't do after-parties because we hadn't thought of that yet. So I said, how many? And Dag tells me there are four, the first four programmes. No, after party. So Dag's going to carry on on his two-weekly schedule, and I'm going to fill in on the missing weeks through January and February with the Lost after parties, 41, 44, 47, 51. So, yes, we'll post the event for that in a couple of days' time, and maybe I'll turn the tables on Dag and ask him questions about the songs.

1:20:14Well, I'll be there anyway. You'll be there anyway. I won't be as knowledgeable as you to talk about it. Let's try it. So that'll be in a week from now. But for now, we're going back to the really early stuff. We're going to 1926, to orgies and cravings for love.

1:20:31Did you say orgies? Orgies, yes. Because 1926 is not a program we're going to cover in Tango by Year. It's too early. And maybe you could say, Michael, a few words about why don't we hear tango from, say, pre-1925? Maybe people don't know this.

1:20:48This is a time when there's a lot of evolution taking place in music, not just in tango music. And that's partly in the technology. So throughout the history of music, technology has influenced performance as well as the other way around. But there's this incredible coincidence because electrical recording arrives in Argentina a bit later than it does up here in the Northern Hemisphere, at the middle to the end of 1926. And at the same time, the dance bands start to take on the ideas that the super advanced bands have been championing. And those super advanced bands are De Caro and Cobian, who's kind of given up by this point. So the music becomes more interesting.

1:21:41Anything before this period, first of all, the recording quality is generally not so good. And musically, often much simpler. Not a problem if it's just a singer with guitars. So Gardel's acoustic recordings still sound very well. But for the Typicas, often we find them a bit lacking.

1:22:01Yeah, but let's hear two very early recordings, both from 1926. The first one is by, well, I chose it for two reasons, partly because I like it, but also because of the really relevant title, which I mentioned, Orgías de amor, so Orgies of Love, or as Google Translate suggested, Gang Bang of Love. I just, about translations, by the way. You can keep that to yourself, thank you very much.

1:22:25Well, I'm at it just about translations, because I post the lyrics in Spanish in the chat window for those of you watching. And most of the translations are from Google Translate. I don't have time to go through everything and translate. So that's why it's so crap, some of it. But you get the general idea what it's about anyway. But this is by José Bohr. And can you tell us anything about this orchestra?

1:22:48Well, some of you would have seen videos. So José Bohr, a musician, broadly educated musician, not a top musician, but he first kind of shot to fame in 1924 when he did a novelty number with a musical saw. Now, there was two kinds of musical saws. If I say musical saw, those of you who know about such things will imagine something that's not a normal saw, but it's a very, very long, thin saw, which is designed for playing with a violin bow. There are images of Marlene Dietrich playing a musical saw. I don't know if she's singing as well and accompanying himself. But in José Bohr's case, it wasn't that kind of musical saw. It was a real saw.

1:23:32He was working in a piano workshop and the saw started to vibrate. So he came up with some novelty songs and one of them was called Tutankhamen. And Canaro heard that and thought, that's fantastic. And he invited Bohr in and they recorded it and it sold 20,000 copies. And then after that he went off to the United States, where he went to a concert of classical music, fell in love with the pianist and married her, and he also turns up in Cuba. Now, this is the bit I wanted to go to. He turns up in Cuba around 1928 and there's this bit of footage from Pathé News, which was this old British black and white newsreel show, and you see José Bohr seated at the piano on a terrace on a hotel somewhere in downtown Havana.

1:24:21And he turns to the camera and says, hello, I will now play for you. And I'm not exaggerating how he speaks, okay? It's really like this. I will now play for you the genuine Argentine tango. And off he goes. And I think that's been posted in the group once. If not, I'll try and dig it out and post it again. So, you know, that's a broad portrait of this unusual and adventurous man. Let's listen to his orchestra. And this is an instrumental, which is the first one today, I think.

1:24:58And this is from 1926, you say? It's from 1926, yeah. Okay, so the only reason I ask about that is because in 1927, it's after he falls in love with the pianist in America, and he makes some recordings in the United States. And you can get, there's an album, a CD that was published by the Japanese label CTA of José Bohr, and it's all these US recordings, but it's not him. Well, it is him, but it's his wife, actually. When he records in the States, his wife leads the band and it's his wife's name on the labels. And she's playing the piano.

1:25:38No. So exactly how they worked out the musical duties between them, I don't know. But if it's 1926, he hasn't fallen in love with her yet. So it's definitely him. Well, according to my database, the database I use anyway, it's 1926. So let's listen to this. Orgías de amor. Orgies of love.

1:29:08Someone asked, where's the orgy? And it's true, it doesn't sound very orgily, it's more mellow. Who knows what the lyric was? We can imagine if at dances and at carnival, the bands would have an estribugista playing with them who often didn't perform on the records. Maybe he wasn't a permanent band member, so it could be that the audience, the people buying this record, had heard it at a dance and actually knew what the lyric was when we don't. There's no way of knowing.

1:29:44Well, let's hear an old tango with the lyrics, and this is sung by Carlos Gardel. It's called Ansias de Amor. I was wondering if we'd hear this tonight. You did? Wow. Yeah. How did it translate it, like cravings for love or love anxiety? Maybe a native speaker. For me it's about Anxious for Love. Perhaps a native speaker can help out.

1:30:11And this is really early. It's from Christmas Eve 1926. The recording date, 24th of December. They worked every day of the year. So let's hear about Anxious for Love.

1:32:26Yeah, nice melody you wrote, Michael, in the chat window. It's irresistible, isn't it? Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And I thought of it because I thought you were going to play the Canaro version. But of course, we've already had Canaro. So I should have realized the game was up when you introduced it at this point in the show. But Canaro does it as an instrumental in 1927. So check that out on another kind of evening. I'd be playing that in the after party, but the after party is going in a different direction tonight. So I won't be playing any of the tangos that Dag's missing.

1:33:01I like the part where he sings, I have already destroyed that letter in which you told me that you would never give me your love again. So he's destroying the letter and hoping she'll come back to him. He's burnt it. Yeah, probably.

1:33:12And whenever Gardel sings anything, the quality improves. He can take an average lyric and make it sound like a great lyric. Yeah. Gardel gets to you eventually, folks. And for years I thought, what's this mystery about Gardel? He gets under your skin. Yeah, I'm also... He's growing on me as well, I must admit. Yeah, slowly, slowly.

1:33:32It's like what Troilo said about tango. El tango te espera. Tango is waiting for you. You know, the full quote, yes, yes, I can see someone pointing at someone in the video there. Troilo said, you don't realise it today, but one day you'll be listening to this song and you'll realise that they're singing about you and all the emotions and thoughts that are in this song, they're about you. Tango's waiting for you. You know, like Troilo's really cool about it. It's going to happen. And Gardel's a bit like that, you know. So if you're a Gardel fan, you don't need to go, Gardel's great, just go. Wait and get to you.

1:34:11And speaking of Troilo, let's move on to, listen to a Troilo track and his fabulous vocalist, Floreal Ruiz singing about my true love in Qué me van a hablar de amor. Oh, this is a real killer. High octane. Troilo from the late 40s. In terms of sophistication, never better.

1:34:28Floreal Ruiz, a singer in the Gardelian mold, he could sing a lot of the Gardel repertoire and indeed did within the Troilo Orchestra. Effortless voice control, perfect intonation, very sophisticated arrangement. You're going to kill everyone now, and this is from the recent Tango Tunes edition. They issued the third Troilo golden year edition, I think it's from 46 to 49, and I think it's some of the tracks that are fabulous, especially the later 40s here. It's what I especially like about this new edition of Tango Tunes is the tracks by Rivero in the second half of the 40s. The physical quality of the records went down because the quality of the shellac that was available after the war was reduced.

1:35:15So, um, and then at the end of the 40s, tango gets into a bit of a trough creatively, which means that fewer records are printed. So instead of a successful record selling 500,000 copies, it's selling 5,000 copies. So if 1% of the records have survived, I don't know what the number is. I've just plucked that out of the sky. Then obviously 1% is a far smaller number of records in 1949 than it is in 1941. There are far fewer examples of the record in existence. So the chance of finding a good one amongst the ones that remain is much reduced. So late 40s, we're often used to noisy recordings. So even when RCA Victor first produced the complete works of Troilo on LP in the 70s, the late 40s tracks suffer.

1:36:16And it's the ones with Rivero, who's got this very deep voice, so it's not right in the middle of the range. Now normally the voice is about here, but Rivero's is lower and it's more difficult to record. And you can hear him a lot better on this new edition of Tango Tunes. Because as DJs it's been very difficult to play Troilo Rivero, because you listen to it, you know, with your headphones on, you think, oh, this is a lovely song, and then you try it at the milonga and the people can't hear it properly. Too noisy. Yeah, yeah, that's really been a difficulty.

1:36:50So maybe that's going to shift the balance on this a little bit. I hope so. So lots of love to Tango Tunes for another fantastic edition, and so important the work these guys do. I think, you know, we don't realize how much work it is. We've got no idea. We just buy the stuff and criticize it if it's not perfect, that's what we do. But you know, like, um, you know, Jenzingo's recent project, that was pretty much two years. Amazing, we'll get back to that a bit later. But for now, um, this is from 1946, so it's Floreal Ruiz singing Qué me van a hablar de amor, what are you going to tell me about love.

1:37:30 · They playQué me van a hablar de amorAníbal Troilo · Floreal Ruiz · 1946

A nuanced, mature lyric: a man who has had thousands of love affairs but knows he still has more to learn about love.

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♪ Music · 2:56 · What the transcriber heard

1:40:26It's really a magnificent lyric, isn't it? Like you say, it's a more complex, nuanced lyric. So I just went briefly to check. The lyric is by Expositor. Yeah. He's one of those big four. Right. Some serious stuff. Yeah. What does the lyric say? So we know that there was this big love affair, but that this affair failed. But we don't know anything about that affair. The lyric doesn't tell anything about what happened in the past. So we shouldn't assume that the guy didn't take it seriously. We know that that lyric failed. But rather than what are the normal options when that fails? Yeah, beg the girl to come back, that's one option, or blame the girl and say that she's horrible, but she'll come back begging. Yeah, or hatred, another option. But he doesn't take any of those options. He just tries to put it behind him and he says, now and since then I've had thousands of love affairs. So you know, we assume that those are not very serious, but in many ways it's a more positive way to react than the other ways. And he has some self-awareness about his reaction. There's a very interesting line, I'm just scrolling back to where you posted the lyrics. Yeah, okay.

1:41:57Tenga care prender nadia sabi mas casual. So he says, yes, although I do still have things to learn, no one knows more than me. So it's not just nobody knows more than me because of all the experience that I've had. He knows that he's still got more to learn about love. So I like that, that's a more nuanced, yeah. And this in the mature group, as you said, it's in the mature group, it's by Expositor, and it's typical that Troilo would record it.

1:42:21Let's hear another one that I think is in the same kind of mature group. It's a Pugliese tango, Dos amores, two loves. And if I understand it right, the two loves are his mother and his girlfriend or his wife. And this is a theme we've touched upon earlier, Michael, that singer singing about both his partner and his mother, which is interesting in itself. But I guess it's a Catholic country, Argentina is a Catholic country. But I guess it's also about being torn between the different types of love that you mentioned earlier, about this carnal love to a partner and more family or motherly love. That's interesting. Well, it's the same theme, isn't it, because one's only torn between those because one's assigned one kind of love to one person in one's life and another kind of love to another person. That's this splitting which doesn't really work, but it's still interesting to see that theme explored in a tango. And this is quite late, Pugliese, it's from 1961 with Jorge Maciel singing. And he has a very dramatic voice, doesn't he? So it's good for a dramatic tango, I think.

1:43:26Yeah, so I'm slightly distracted again, because there's a lot of chat in the chat window about the last lyric. So no, it's not a super mature response that's portrayed in the lyric, but it's not the childish response that we so often hear in tangos. That's all I want to say. I'm not saying it's super mature, I'm saying it's more nuanced than what we normally get. That's all I wanted to say about that. Coming back to now Maciel, so elegant. What's the year of the recording, Dag? It's 1961. 1961.

1:44:07So this is when he's now recording on Polygram, not an era for which we generally hear Pugliese vocals, with a tiny handful of exceptions like El Adiós, which is from 63. So I imagine this is going to be quite an unfamiliar number to many of us. Yeah, let's hear it. Those are models with Pugliese, Maciel singing.

1:44:35 · They playDos amoresOsvaldo Pugliese · Jorge Maciel · 1961

A dramatic late Pugliese vocal on Polygram, about being torn between two loves; Lavocah notes the lyric dates back to 1932.

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♪ Music · 2:45 · What the transcriber heard

1:47:20A lot of feeling there. I love it. I love it. This is an old tango. This is a tango that at least goes back to 1932. And I want to point something out about the lyric, but actually it's something that you could all have noticed from the lyric that Dag posted. Did you notice that the environmental references that are located where the lyric took place were more like a countryside lyric than a city lyric?

1:47:49Let's move on from this quite, should we say, dramatic thing to some feel-good love waltzes from the late 30s. Another one of the woman singers we've listened to with great joy in the Tango by Year programs is Mercedes Simone. Yes, wonderful, dark and sensitive voice, and here she sings something that sounds like straight out of a movie. It probably is. It's called Háblame de amores, Mariu, it's from 1936. Technically it's a waltz, but a very, very slow one. You know, this one, I don't know it at all. It's nothing with here at milongas, I heard it for the first time last week, so I'm not surprised. But yeah, it has a really nice, and very feel-good, love lyric. Let's hear it. She's backed by a trio, typical, Háblame de amores.

1:52:39Imagine hearing Mercedes Simone live in a smoky little club in Buenos Aires. Oh, dream. I just don't understand why a dance orchestra didn't ask her to record with them. I guess it was just a bit too early. Yeah, it's really sad. It would have been 1932. Oh, think about it, people. She could have sung Melonga Sentimental with Canaro. How about that? Yeah. That would have been nice.

1:53:12And she sings from a male perspective, someone pointed out in the chat window, which is typical, I guess. She sings, you're like a cute mermaid sorceress. I like this imagery. It's fun.

1:53:24Yeah, I like it. Sometimes when a lyric is sung by the opposite gender, you see two solutions, but mostly they don't change the lyric to reflect the fact that it's a man instead of a woman. Normally, out of respect for the lyric, they keep the lyric exactly the same. There's a very small number of exceptions.

1:53:46Yeah, in general, I guess the lyrics were more from the male point of view. So let's go over to three important things in life: health, money, and love. Salud, dinero y amor. Exactly. At least an Argentine man, in that order. Yeah, exactly.

1:54:06Because we were discussing this. We played the Lomuto version, I think, in Tango 1939. And we were discussing what would be the logical order in various countries. I'll never forget, you know, the first time I went to Buenos Aires in the 90s. And I'd heard this waltz because it was quite well known early on. And I said, well, I said these three things. I was chatting to some Argentine, but I didn't put them in this order. And I was corrected.

1:54:28No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Health, money and love. I didn't put money, love last. And I was corrected by that. So this is the Argentine insight on what it takes to be happy.

1:54:42Well, I think on tonight's love special, we should put love in the first place. I think we rather should. What do we need money and health for if we don't have love? I think that's a very good question. Thank you. Anyway, let's hear the Rodríguez version. And the singer is Roberto Flores. And this is 1939. It's a waltz and it's very danceable. Salud, dinero y amor.

1:57:31Love is a valuable resource. Don't waste it. Wise words. Yeah, and health and money is good too. I mean, let's face it. As long as love is there. Providing we remember what really matters. Because yes, it's difficult to be happy when you're really poor.

1:58:03And we need to listen to some more painful love after all this happiness. Well, thank you for that, Dag. Yeah, I was beginning to get a bit happy over here in the UK. Yeah, I can see that. So I want to put you a bit down there. Thanks. Thanks very much.

1:58:17The good thing is though that I've selected three wonderful singers. So in all the sadness they sing about, we can be happy from their wonderful voices. The first is... Oh, sweet sorrow. Yeah. So Vargas, we need to listen to Ángel Vargas in the Love Special program. And in 1958, he recorded a song called ¿Quién tiene tu amor?, by Luis Stazo.

1:58:40Okay, this is interesting because we don't really associate Vargas with love songs, do we? Vargas, Agostino Vargas, either, both, we associate with songs about barrier life, with lyrics by Kedicamo. So actually this is something not super unusual but a bit less common. So this is from his solo time in the late 50s, and the lyrics is about lost love, and he misses this love that is lost. And the song and the composition and the lyrics is by a guy called Leopoldo Díaz Vélez. There's a lot of interesting lyrics by Díaz Vélez, I can't remember, but I can look up and let you know.

1:59:20¿Quién tiene tu amor? Ángel Vargas, backed by Luis Stazo from 1958.

2:02:34Sad stuff and really strong lyrics, I think. They are very strong lyrics. The line about the photograph. And that she's gone, she's long gone, and he looks at the photograph and he says, I've got this one photograph where you're smiling at me, and that's the last good thing that I still have from you. Goodness. Yeah.

2:02:56I just looked it up just on my computer, not in any bigger database. It is a lovely lyric, isn't it? But there's only two recordings and the other one is by Alfredo de Angelis. So a band like Troilo, Troilo would have looked at this lyric and considered it not sophisticated enough for him to record. Otherwise, he'd certainly have recorded it because all the bands are struggling to find good material. 1958, because there's not so many tangos being written.

2:03:25Maybe we can understand why people like the De Angelis version, even if we're not De Angelis fans ourselves, and especially not in the late 50s, if he is actually recording material like this. But Vargas is brilliant with that. Yeah, he is. Thank you for playing it.

2:03:39And let's hear another wonderful singer, which we heard already, Floreal Ruiz. And he's backed by, or he's not really backed, I guess he sings for José Basso in the early 60s. And he sings a song that we know from an earlier version by the Anglists, actually. Cómo se muere de amor.

2:03:59Okay, now this is interesting. I'm not familiar with the Basso version. Cómo se muere de amor. The De Angelis version is so interesting because it starts, you can barely call it a glosser, because normally with the glosser it's declaimed in this very poetic way, but in the De Angelis version it's just spoken in this very plain way. It's like 15 seconds. They open the scene, something very untypical. Must be Néstor Rodi I guess who did the other glosses for De Angelis.

2:04:38Ruiz makes Basso better than he would be otherwise. That's what I feel. Normally, if I would rank these two, I would rank the 1943 version with Anglais higher. But since we didn't do Tango 1943 yet, I wanted to save that one for a later program. 1943 is going to be an awesome year. I think so, yeah. I can't wait for 1943. One of the best ones. Peak Di Sarli. Peak Di Sarli.

2:05:04This is interesting because it's re-singing, so it's the same singer but a different band. And it's much later, so 20 years later, 1963. Let's hear it.

2:05:10 · They playCómo se muere de amorJosé Basso · Floreal Ruiz · 1963

Ruiz re-sings a 1943 De Angelis hit, with free phrasing; a lyric about someone literally dying of love.

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♪ Music · 2:58 · The lyrics, on the song's page

2:08:08Floreal Ruiz, Michael, he really lifts Basso, not just Basso, but also the Angolis, in my view, when he sings. Yes, he does. And what an interesting lyric, because it's not a metaphor. If one says, how one dies of love, we think it's going to be a metaphor, but it's not a metaphor here. It's about someone who really is dying of love. And we shouldn't think of that as too melodramatic. It's a well-known phenomenon.

2:08:36Not so much in young lovers, but it's very well known in couples who've been together all their lives that when one partner dies, the other partner often goes very soon afterwards. So let's not turn our noses up at the sentiment expressed in this lyric. What's different about it compared to the early interpretations is the freedom of Floreal Ruiz's fraseo. So he's phrasing, so he doesn't sing. It's much more fluid than that. So he gets a much bigger role. And that reflects the times, of course.

2:09:13Yeah, it's not so good for dancing, but I think it's... For that very reason, because the emphasis is so much on the melody and less on the rhythmic bass, which the dancers use to move around the floor. But in the right moment, not inconceivable.

2:09:27So, last of the three tangos in this section of a dramatic dying of love tango. Muriéndome de amor. Dying of love, literally. This was a big hit in 56, 57 with 12 recordings. 12?! Yeah. Rivero sang it, Ruiz sang it, Campo sang it, Oscar La Roca, Maciel, Julia Vidal, Jorge Casal, Jorge Duran with the Sali. But the one I want to play is the one with Alberto Morán singing, backed by Armando Cupo from 1957.

2:09:59Yes, no one puts more petrol on the fire than Alberto Morán. Or as they say in Argentina, con todo el carne a la parija, with all the meat on the grill. Let's listen to Morán grilling this Muriéndome de amor, or dying for love.

2:13:37What passion. This guy is definitely spellbound by this love. Twelve versions is absolutely extraordinary.

2:13:47But I have to say, it didn't ring my bell. If it rang your bell, if you loved it, great. It didn't really ring my bell.

2:13:55So for me, this is telling me that, you know, second half of the 1950s, not so many truly great compositions being written. Maybe, but with 12 record, perhaps that's a record. I don't have a way to interrogate the databases, but I can't think of another tango with 12 interpretations from the year of its debut. So either perhaps the Argentine audience, the Argentine ear hears something in that lyric that I really don't, or maybe it's really a sign that there's not enough dramatic material so people go for the songs that there are. Maybe.

2:14:44Sorry guys, if you loved it, feel free to disagree with me in the chat window. It's not a tango I'm familiar with. It's fine, we don't have to love everything. No. Even on the night of love. Especially on the night of love. But let's go to something that I think you will like.

2:15:01Biagi, I was going to say, Michael, you're going to love Biagi waltzes, and most of you, the rest of you too, but we're going to play one with the singer. So that's a double amor, Aroma, this is mighty 46, smell of love, and the second one is an early one. Loca de amor, crazy from love, let's call it the aroma of love, smell sounds too nitty-gritty for you Norwegians. You're not a romantic nation, are you, up there in the frozen north?

2:15:30Oh, we're very romantic. We can be at least. Anyway, Biagi waltzes, Aroma de amor, with Amor, singing, from 46. And then Loca de amor, crazy from love, with Teófilo Ibáñez. Yeah, that second one's an absolute classic.

2:16:10 · They playAroma de amorRodolfo Biagi · Alberto Amor · 1946

A Biagi waltz that had everyone dancing in their windows.

Danced to it · 5 of 61

• Lucas Gauto & Naima Gerasopoulou2017
• Carlitos Espinoza & Noelia Hurtado2016
• Eleonora Kalganova & Tarek MarroushiToronto Tango Experience · 2022
• Rodrigo Palacios & Agustina Berenstein2014
• Bruno Tombari & Rocio Lequio2019

Hear the record

♪ Music · 2:10 · The lyrics, on the song's page

2:18:20 · They playLoca de amorTeófilo Ibáñez

'An absolute classic' from an earlier era, 'crazy from love'.

Danced to it · 5 of 76

• Jonathan Saavedra & Clarisa AragónMilonga El Garrón · 2018
• Maximiliano Cristiani & Antonella Terrazas2021
• Agustina Paez & Sebastian Bolivar2016
• Rodrigo Palacios & Ines Muzzopappa2018
• Octavio Fernández & Ines Muzzopappa2014

Hear the record

The lyrics, on the song's page

2:20:03Fantastic swing in his last one. Loca de amor. We just couldn't not move, could we? Everyone's going, bouncing around in the windows.

2:20:32Thank you to everyone who's turned on your video. It means a lot to us. We'd love to see you, and not just myself and Dag, all the guests here, like to see you from week to week. So thanks for you, for those of you who turned on your video.

2:20:49So let's go to some love milongas. There is one milonga with amor in the title that has 26 versions. It's Milonga de mis amores. Okay. So it's written by Pedro Laudens in 1937.

2:21:06Yeah, and he recorded it more than once himself. Yeah, he did. But we're not going to listen to that one. We're listening to Charlo's solo version from that same year. We're respect by guitars. And this song is about a nostalgic, sad longing for the past. I guess we heard that before in tango, haven't we? But maybe not so common in milongas, which are usually more happy.

2:21:27Yes, they're normally telling stories, countryside happy stories. So I'm really curious to listen to this interpretation. And Charlo records with orchestras also, but I love his tracks with guitar backings. I think for most of us that's where he's at his very best. So this is from 1937. Milonga de mis amores, Charlo.

2:24:40Unusual to hear a milonga with so much singing, there's a lot of, a lot of lyrics, it is, I mean, it pushes the attention onto the lyric, whereas normally with Milonga de mis amores the lyric is an appendage. In both versions of Laurenz we think about the musical interpretation, and the next version I think of after Laurenz's is D'Arienzo's recording. Is it from 75, very late anyway.

2:25:08Okay, let's move on to what I've called two love gems, beautiful love, amor tangos. One is an instrumental from the late 20s, and I somehow missed it in Tango 1929, maybe because it's a Canaro instrumental and there are like hundreds of those from 1929. There are too many good songs in 1929 to play all the really good ones in one evening. Well, this one is called Quimera de amor, and I had to look up what is a chimera. In Greek mythology is a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail, so it's a strong, violent imagery. But despite this title I see this, or I hear this, as a rather happy and sweet melody. There's a fabulous piano and there's a Hawaiian guitar in there.

2:25:55Yeah, I mean, in English we have the same word chimera, spelt C-H, which connotes a fantasy. So in the Greek mythology, it's a real being in the English language. And therefore I suspect, possibly in the Spanish, it's a fantasy that's taking body in our imagination. All right, let's hear it.

2:26:40 · They playQuimera de amorFrancisco Canaro · 1929

An instrumental by the composer of En sueños, with a Hawaiian guitar and a melody with an 'inherent logic'.

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♪ Music · 2:21 · What the transcriber heard

2:29:01Impossible not to get in a good mood from this guitar. So good, feel good. The thing that impresses me is the melody. So sometimes we hear a song for the first time and there's such an inherent logic to the tune that you feel you've known it all your life. Ah, he's like that, I think. That's one of the reasons that people like Bach. Not the only one. Many, many more and I'm not qualified to speak about that.

2:29:37But here in tango, that melody, do you hear the logic in it? It takes this one idea and it slowly descends the same pattern of notes through the scale. It's so intelligent and clever that when you hear that, you say, oh, that's so clever. And that gives us the feeling that you've always known that tune. So, you know, we're still, what's the number? 196 guests. So not all 196 of you have heard that tango before. You know, let's be generous. Half of you already knew it. So 100 of you didn't know it. But I guess by the end of the song, you think, yeah, I know that one. Because of the inherent logic. It's Bach.

2:30:25So, you know, if you like the slide guitar, great. I love the slide guitar, the slide guitar in those Canaro tracks. It's wonderful. But that's not the thing that most impressed me about the piece. It's the incredible intelligence of the melody. And while you were playing it, I went and looked up who's the composer. It's the same guy who wrote En Sueños. Now, most of you don't know what I'm talking about, but those of you who do are having a moment, because En Sueños is a tango you know from the 1943 recording with Carlos Di Sarli, which is just absolutely magnificent.

2:31:02And an earlier recording from about 1927 with Fresedo, which is more important to listen to. And then there's a later version by the Quintetto Real, not the Nuevo Quintetto, but the original Quintetto Real, which is Lauren's Salgan Francini, like all the top guys, when tango isn't paying any money anymore. So a man who wrote very few melodies, but all his melodies are absolutely top melodies, and he wasn't afraid to break the rules. So that was a fantastic melody in that tango. I was delighted to hear it, and I promised to get back to and send us in the Tango 1943 program in a couple of months. It's one of the many, many, many enormously good songs from 1943.

2:31:48So let's move on to the last woman singer of the night. We're getting closer to the end. We need to listen to a song by Libertad Lamarca. And she has a recording called Un amor from 1940, where she sings back by an orchestra. I think this is really nice. She has a wonderful voice and it really shows in this interpretation. It's a Mario Maurano, a Maurano, not Mario Ano, but a Maurano composition and with the lyrics by Louis Rubinstein. And I guess that Maurano is leading the backing orchestra as well. Let's see it. Un amor, Libertad Lamarca. 1940.

2:35:03Isn't that beautiful? She sings it's the love I've longed for. The sweet peace of attenderness I expected. A love that I never knew. And in the midst of pain, it came to me. Optimistic. That's the kind of love song that we want. Yeah. Okay.

2:35:36Special corner, I call the next two songs, it's something special for you on the 30th of December. Two recordings of live performances that I think you'll never hear at milongas. First there's a song called Capricho de amor, and this is by the American jazz trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Fresedo. It's from 1956, and I think Gillespie visited Buenos Aires and they made this recording.

2:36:00He did. He visited Fresedo's club, the Rendezvous, and Fresedo had been three times already to New York, and yes, they made these surprising recordings together. This is one of, Dizzy Gillespie is one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all times. Famous for his cheeks in every photograph there is of him. Exactly. I can't do it because you have to exercise these muscles to a whole new level for 30 years or something before you get... Anyway, it's very special for tango, so I'm curious to hear what you think about it. Capricho de amor from 1956.

2:36:45 · They playCapricho de amorOsvaldo Fresedo · 1956

A track with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, recorded when he visited the Rendezvous club in 1956 (with Vida mía, Adiós muchachos and Preludio no. 3); not a tango for dancing.

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♪ Music · 3:45 · What the transcriber heard

2:40:30Yeah, what a good applause and it was deserved, wasn't it? There are four tangos recorded by Dizzy Gillespie when he visited the Rendezvous Club in 1956. Vida Mia, Adios Muchachos, Capricho de Amor, and Preludio Numero Tres, Prelude Number Three. With Fresedo. Many of them Fresedo compositions.

2:41:16Now, that was really beautiful to listen to, but it's not something you're just going to pop on the playlist at the Milonga, is it? So what one comes to realise about Fresedo, because late Fresedo, most people just turn up their noses. Too much sugar, and I understand that and I agree with it. But as a thinking mind for melody, Fresedo is absolutely extraordinary. So that's a beautiful, beautiful melody. The melody of that tango, Capricho de Amor.

2:41:52And it's not new then. Fresedo premiered it in 1952 with the voice of Hector Pacheco. There again, it's a beautiful melody, an exceptional melody. So why isn't it played every week? Because the interpretation is not that strong, to be honest. And, you know, it was great fun to listen to that. I'm glad we heard it. We enjoyed listening to it. But it's not great if you speak purely from the perspective of a tango dancer.

2:42:18And there are other important Fresedo melodies about which we could say the same thing, like Divigando, for example. If you don't know that, people go and check it out after the show. So there is room in our tango verse for a modern band that understands the Fresedo style to make great new recordings of Fresedo compositions like Divigando and this one, Capricho de Amor, which will be even better for dancing than the originals. And I'd like that because, so when I'm dancing to a live orchestra, I'll dance to whatever they play. But when I'm listening to the record, I'm going to listen to the best recording. So if the modern band only plays the old hits, mostly they cannot compete with the original versions. You know, if you record a 1941 Troilo Fiorentino song, who's going to be better, you or the original version by Troilo, you know, you cannot even get on the low slopes of that level of greatness. But here with Fresedo you've got an opportunity because actually late Fresedo interpretations, not very much appreciated by the public, including myself, but incredible melodies, intelligent and interesting. Let's make new versions of those.

2:43:43Yeah, I agree. Let's wait for those and then we'll do a tango 19 or 2021, yes, Tango by Year 2020.

2:43:53All right, let's go to another live performance that you haven't heard in longas. It's called Reencuentro de amor, reunion of love, and it's a Pugliese live performance from as late as 1992. This is amazing because he died in 95 and then he was 90 years old, so it's not so much about Pugliese's brilliance as a musician, of course, because he was really old, 87 at the time.

2:44:20Yes, and Pugliese has gone deaf like Beethoven by this point, and he's losing his touch on the piano before because of that. But there is a live performance and the singer is Adrián Guida and he sang. Oh, so if guys, guys, if you don't know Adrián Guida, the Pugliese Orchestra is known as an instrumental orchestra. And that's right. You know, the greatest hits, La Giumba, Negraggia, Melendraca, Recuero, they're instrumental numbers mostly. But that doesn't mean that he didn't care about the vocal numbers. And he very much appreciated the contribution of Alberto Morán to his orchestra, even if Morán didn't appreciate it quite as much.

2:45:06So I forget the, it's in the Pugliese book. I forget the exact title, but there was a tango in the late 40s that Pugliese wrote and he intended it for Roberto Morán to sing. And Morán said, no, I don't like it. It doesn't grab me. So Morán didn't want to record it. And so it wasn't recorded, but it's a well regarded number. So Pugliese still loved this number, which he'd written the music for. So he waited until he could find the right singer for it. And that right singer was an 18-year-old boy called Adrián Guida, who joined the orchestra in the 1980s. Three decades, no, four decades after Morán had rejected it.

2:45:52So when you listen to the voice of Adrián Guida, what you have to understand is that Pugliese, who's a man now in his 80s, is hearing the same contribution to his group that Alberto Morán gave to it in 1945. And all the emotions that that generates. That's the importance of Guida, so the orchestra. And not long after this tango that we're about to hear was recorded, Adrián Guida died suddenly from a hemorrhage before Pugliese, and it broke Pugliese's heart. He was terribly upset. So this is in the middle of the song he stopped singing, Guida, and you can hear some piano notes from Pugliese and an applause. And this is Pugliese, 87 years old, playing the piano. This is a real piece of history. That it is and one that's not well known, so thank you so much for offering this. Let's hear it. Singing, it's from 1992, people.

2:50:11Can you imagine? So Pugliese kept that style going so long. And, you know, I started dancing in 96, so the year after Pugliese died. There might be one or two people with us tonight. We started dancing and Pugliese was still alive. But for most of us, he'd just gone. But by a whisker, you know, he kept that style going through many decades in which it was just totally eliminated. I can't begin to comprehend.

2:50:47Okay, Michael, it's 11 o'clock already here in Norway, it's 10 in Britain. We kept going for three hours, which is more than usual, but then again it's a night of love, so a night of love should last all night. Yeah, and uh, yeah, and uh there won't be any composita tonight, obviously, because it there's no Amor in the name of that one, but I want to have a happy ending anyway. Yes, please. And I want to finish with a with a song. This song with the same title when we started, just Amor, and this is from 38, and it's Fresedo again, and it's a waltz. And um I think uh we talked about this some weeks ago um that tango time travel issue this D'Arienzo compilation of all 1940s, it's 231, and just over a week ago they came out with um with a new one on Fresedo from 1933 to 39, which is also wonderful. I've just, I've spent a lot of time listening to it this past week and before this came out I wanted to play a 1943 version of this waltz that I got from Teresa with Oscar search passing, which is also very nice, but I'll save that also for a later program. But when this one came out...

2:52:041943 is going to be a long night, you know, bring a hot water bottle. But this one is amazing, and I had this from before, but without the introduction, the harp introduction. Yeah, I was stunned to hear this, as all of you who haven't bought this new album will be stunned to hear.

2:52:25Fresedo waltzes are very special. There are very few of them and a lot of them the tempo is a bit too slow to play at the milonga, but Fresedo and romance are two words that go together, so you can imagine that Fresedo waltzes are super romantic even if a bit too slow to be danceable. And here, wow, if you haven't heard this you're going to be blown away. Let's hope so. And a big thanks to Jans, Ingo and Benedict in Brussels who have done so much work on restoring this music. Fantastic. We're so thankful for this.

2:53:00So with that, that's the last song from me and then, well, we can talk after. Really? This is your last song? Okay. This is the last song. This is the composita of the night. Perfect. What could be better? And this is with Roberto Ray singing, 1938.

2:53:20 · They playAmorOsvaldo Fresedo · Roberto Ray · 1938

The 'compasita' of the night: a very romantic Fresedo waltz, here with a harp introduction on the new Tango Time Travel compilation.

Danced to it

• Eleonora Kalganova & London Hong2018

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♪ Music · 3:02 · What the transcriber heard

2:56:22Bring in the champagne. I've got a bottle in the fridge. Yeah. So that was the final musical statement for me in 2020. And I would wish it to all of you for a better and a really good 2021. So I'll leave the music now to you, Michael.

2:56:52You have plans? Thank you very much. Thank you, Dag, for a night of love and thank you to all our guests there's still almost 200 of you here with us. So yeah, I am, I do want to play some more music for everyone. I'm, I have to confess I feel a bit nervous because, you know, normally my role on this program is to be the expert. You know, Dag takes a great deal of care about his selections, makes his selections and I make my expert comments and then I come in at the end and do my thing, you know. Here comes the expert. He's going to do his thing. But tonight is a night about love. So what kind of expert am I? No, I'm not the expert. I know nothing. So that's the first caveat. I don't know anything about love. All I can do is share to you some songs that are interesting to me. And, you know, we can chat about what the lyrics mean to us personally. Lyrics are very personal, aren't they?

2:57:56And what I wanted to do, and I did post this on the group, is to set myself the same challenge that Dag had set himself. I don't want to play any more tangos about love. Dag's done that very beautifully. What I wanted to do was to have a look around the world. What's the world got to say about love in lyrics? So that's the program for this after party. We're going to listen to songs from all over the world in many, many different languages. And I don't mean English, many different languages about love and see if we can get anything from that or not. Maybe we'll just enjoy it and that'll be good enough on this very, very strange night.

2:58:38I have to say it's been a rather strange year for all of us, particularly so in the United Kingdom on Christmas Eve. You know, as I was traveling to be with my mother and have a Christmas meal. Christmas in England is normally on the 25th, but my mother is Danish. So we celebrate Christmas on the 24th. And, you know, as I got in my car to go and be with her, I didn't know if we would have a trade deal with Europe or not. So that's been pretty stressful, actually. Let's just acknowledge that um for all our all our friends here from the UK and maybe also a source of discomfort for those of you not from the UK as well. Very strange and we still don't know what's going to happen. You know, I went to the post office yesterday to post some books and I had to fill in a new customs label for every single book that I posted to the continent. It's a trivial thing, but life is changing. So let's listen around the world.

2:59:37So I tried to prepare a playlist for that and I failed. I just couldn't do it. So this is really, what's the word, spontaneous, off-piste. So I'm going to play you some songs and I'm going to try and alternate between the sort of more introspective, sad, introvert songs, which is what I'm drawn to personally, and more extrovert, upbeat songs, because otherwise it's just too much.

3:00:14We're going to visit as many different countries and languages as we possibly can, and try and pay attention also to their words for love, because the word that people use for love is interesting and has some information and education for us in our own culture. You know, in England, there's only one word for love. Love. Whereas in Spanish already there are two, amor and querer. And that's a topic maybe we'll explore as comes up.

3:00:46So I've decided to start with the oldest love song that I have access to. And it's from France. Now, France is a great place to start if you're leaving Argentina because Argentina's connection to any other country is strongest with France. France is a culture very open to other musics and very appreciative of tango. It's the place where tango landed in Europe. And I'm going to play a song for you that was written in, let me just get this right, 1784. It was written as a poem and someone liked it so much that they wrote music for it the same year. This isn't a version from 1784, this is a version from 1966. It's Joan Bias singing Plaisir d'amour.

3:04:41Not sold a million records. Thanks for the people who pointed out the connection with the melody with the Elvis tune. I'd miss that.

3:05:00It was really easy to find French songs with the word love in the title that are marvellous songs. Not so easy with certain other languages. I don't know what that tells us, but it's something I noticed preparing. Let's play one more French song before we move on. And as I say, there's a lot. Now, a song I really wanted to play was C'était une histoire d'amour. It was a love story. Now, we have to be a bit careful with the translation because C'était une histoire d'amour, Edith Piaf, 1943. Of course, that's what it means. It means a love story, but it also means, if you're an English speaker, a love affair. If you would talk about a love affair in French, you'd call it une histoire d'amour. So if you're an English speaker, it has these two meanings that you would understand immediately if you're a French speaker.

3:05:56Now, I wanted to play the Edith Piaf version, but Serjan in the Netherlands sent me a record this week, and he's here with us tonight. So thank you so much, Serjan. So we're going to play something from Sirian's private collection, which is a French tango orchestra playing this song as a tango in 1943. How about that? It's the orchestra of Quintín Verdú, who has some really exceptional interpretations. So here is his tango version of a really brilliant Edith Piaf number.

3:06:35 · They playC'était une histoire d'amourQuintín Verdú · 1943

After-party: a French orchestra plays a Piaf song as a tango, from a record in a listener's private collection; it opens by quoting the first song.

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♪ Music · 0:02 · What the transcriber heard

3:09:34How about that? Isn't that beautiful? Did you notice that the opening was a quote from the first song? Quotation.

3:09:56Now, I'm only going to play one tango or one number. Actually, I'm not going to play any tangos from now on. That's the last tango you're going to hear. Or maybe there's some exceptions, but mostly it's not going to be tangos. Only one per language.

3:10:12So there are a number of other really beautiful French numbers that we could have played tonight, like Parlez-moi d'amour, which is a wonderful version from 1930 by Lucien Boyer. But we've had our one French number, so we're not going to hear that. We need to go on to another country and another language.

3:10:32What is love? That's a question that was asked by Cole Porter in 1929, isn't it? What Is This Thing Called Love? Very famous song. Many, many versions. And no one's got an answer to that. Not yet. And I think maybe not ever.

3:10:51The people have tried to answer it. But some people have confessed to not understanding the answer. There's a wonderful pop song by Foreigner from 1984. I want to know what love is. So, you know, 50 years later, they still hadn't found an answer, had they? And various love songs have provided us with suggestions for the answer. 1932, love is the sweetest thing. That's one answer. And Daggy offered another possibility, which is love is a bitch.

3:11:23And there's a number of, you know, Anglo pop songs from recent times with a similar emotion, like Pat Benatar, who sang Love Is a Battlefield. Even in 1955, Frank Sinatra sang Love Is a Tender Trap. So I'm not going to play any of those, but I'm going to play the question song, which is What Is This Thing Called Love?, but in an instrumental version. Now, this is Artie Shaw. Artie Shaw is a really interesting jazz band. He was a really intellectual guy, and you can hear that in the arrangements. So listen to Artie Shaw's interpretation of the eternal question from 1938. What Is This Thing Called Love? Quite dark, or light and dark, let's say, in his understanding.

3:15:19So I hope you use that instrumental as an opportunity to recharge your glasses and go and get some food, because there'll be no more instrumentals now. Where should we go next?

3:15:43So the picture that I posted. Did you see the picture I posted for the after party in the Facebook group? Could anyone work out who that was, looking in the chat window? So the photograph that I posted, that black and white photograph of a woman performer, that was Dalida actually. Now, Dalida, one of these multinational people, Italian by birth, sang in five languages? Can't remember.

3:16:18We're going to listen to her singing in 1959 in a live concert in Paris at the Théâtre de l'Etoile. Later on, she became a little bit kitsch with tracks like 24 millibachi, which is great fun, if you know it, and some others that I forget now. But for me, this early song, she had an incredibly tragic life which I don't want to talk about now, because it's too tragic for tonight. She's a magnificent performer, magnificent entertainer. So this is a song that's, I think, associated with her, one of the great songs of the 1950s. This is called Love in Portofino. This is a live recording from Paris, 1959, and you really hear her naturalness and ability as a performer. Love in Portofino.

3:23:46So full of joy, isn't it? Something I notice is how nationalism, you know, the lover wants country, it's different in different countries. So what it means to love your country in England is a country with an empire and a glorious history of dominating the globe is completely different for me than what it is for my mother to be Danish from a tiny country of five million people where everyone, literally, literally everyone on their birthday runs up the Danish flag in their back garden on their birthday. You know, you couldn't do that in England. It made something completely different. Anyway, we're in Spanish now. Let's stay in South America. So that's a really joyful, a lot of Colombian music is extremely joyful.

3:24:49I want to play you another Spanish song from Cuba now, from Bola de Nieve. Bola de Nieve, literally it means snowball. Bola de Nieve, really interesting artist. So Bola de Nieve, you may have guessed, is not his real name, it's his nickname, but he's called Snowball because his head is completely round. He had this huge, completely round head, which reminded people of a snowball, although there's not very much snow in Cuba, I don't think. And then as he got older, the little hair that he had turned white.

3:25:22And I don't know how is for you, but there's certain songs I can remember where I heard them the first time, and I can remember who played them to me. So this is one of those songs. This is Bola de Nieve. He's like a cabaret style singer. He was gay but not persecuted by the Cuban government, which is something that really surprised me. He was able to remain in Cuba after the revolution, which he did, unlike people like Celia Cruz who left and went to Miami, and he continued to perform there without persecution from the government his whole life long. This is a song, really intimate, intimate song, which I think you're going to love. It's called Tú me has de querer. You've just got to love me. If you've not heard this, you're in for a completely new experience.

3:29:30I think a lot of you have never heard him before. Do check him out. Everything he recorded is wonderful, that intimate cabaret style, which was happening also in Cuba. How about that? Where should we go next? The world is our oyster. There are a few more songs I want to play from South America, but let's go somewhere else. I have an idea. Let's go to the Lebanon.

3:30:07How about that? I really wanted to play you songs from unexpected languages. And so I looked at Persian songs and Arabic songs. And in Arabic, the person to play clearly has got to be Fairuz. Fairuz. Now, there are many great Arabic singers, but Fairuz is the best place for people like you and me to start, because Fairuz had a Western education musically as well as an Eastern education. So that makes her interpretations easy to understand. Great singers from Arabic countries, even modern ones, educated only in Eastern music. It's still great music, but we don't know how to listen to it.

3:30:59So Fairuz was born in the Lebanon in 1934, and in the late 1940s she made her first performances. She joined the chorus on the Lebanese national radio. She was only permitted to go because her uncle chaperoned her to the studio. Then in the mid-1950s, I think 1952, she recorded her first song and she went mega big. She's like the Arabic Edith Piaf. And she's still living now. She did not leave Lebanon during the war at one point in the height of the war in Lebanon. She gave a public concert in a plaza in Beirut. So that gives you some idea about who she is.

3:31:47Now, this is not going to be Fairuz's very best song, because I'm sticking to Dag's formula and I'm only playing songs with the word love in the title, because otherwise it's just too big, you know, there's too many good songs. So this is a song from Fairuz. The English title is Laura's Lover, and I can't pronounce the title in Arabic, so you'll just have to make do with that.

3:34:40What a voice! And a voice that's not purely an Eastern voice. It's midway between Eastern and Western. So with our Western musical education, we can understand it. Incredible. And it's not a best song. I think her best song for me personally is El Bint El Chalabiya. But I'm not going to play that, because it doesn't have the word love in the title. Okay.

3:35:29Billie Holiday. A night of love cannot pass without Billie Holiday, but I've decided not to play one of her most depressing songs, because Billie Holiday spent a little bit too long in the dark side of love. So I'd like to play something from her in the lighter side of love from the 1930s, when she was the vocalist with the Teddy Wilson Orchestra. This is Life Begins When You're in Love.

3:39:00If you like that, there's a 17 CD compilation of Billie Holiday's early stuff. It's all that good. Now we're going to Portugal.

3:42:27Did you like that? You know Amália Rodrigues? It's one of her last albums, 1970. All the music was written by one guy, Alan Ullman, and he invited poets to come and write the lyrics. I stuck with the formula for the night, which is songs with love in the title. But if you think that was good, I have to say that's possibly the worst song in the album, if you can believe that. All the others are better. It's called Com Que Voz.

3:43:05With that voice. There's a song in that album, I may need some help, Asmaus que trago, The Hands I Bring, which is one of the greatest songs of the 20th century. It's about someone surrendering in the face of rejection, saying, the hands I bring are these hands. That's all I have. That's Amália Rodrigues. I can't cope with any more of that. Let's lighten the mood a little bit.

3:43:38No, let's not. It's getting really late. It's 11 o'clock in the UK. We start at seven. It's four hours long. This is turning into a mammoth session. I think we need to, we're going to skip Cuba and we're going to go straight to Mexico, where in the 1950s, a new group appeared, a trio called Los Panchos. I don't know what Los Panchos means exactly, but they made the most super romantic music.

3:44:05What's really interesting about that, it's three guys and they're all playing guitars, but the third guitar is what they call in Mexico a requinto. So the word quinto means fifth. A requinto is a guitar that's made one-fifth smaller, as opposed to the guitarrón. When you listen to Argentine guitar groups, you hear an acoustic bass guitar called the guitarrón, which is one fifth bigger. So it makes bigger bass notes. Whereas in Mexico, they went the other way. And the lead guitar was a requinto, which is one fifth smaller. So you get these really sweet, beautiful treble notes, which are super, super romantic.

3:44:45Now, the Trío Los Panchos went on with different lineups for, I think, four decades. This is the original lineup, which is absolutely the best, and there are good recordings from this time. This, in keeping with our theme, I think this is from 1950, but I don't know the exact year, is called Nuestro Amor.

3:50:25So Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers there from writing 56. And Frankie Lymon was 13 years old when he performed that. Can you believe that? I can't believe that. 13 years old. Now, I don't want to play too many more. So I'll try and keep it fairly brief because we've been here four hours together now. Beautiful as that is in these strange times.

3:50:48We're going to Turkey now, and we're going to listen to Zira Eren, who Dag played quite recently. Now, Zira Eren, a woman with a deep alto voice. So a voice that might remind us of some of the German voices that we haven't had time to listen to tonight, like Mylena Dietrich or Zara Leander, although Zara Leander wasn't German. She was Swedish, actually. It's not time to play all of them. So let's just cut straight to Zira Eren, singing about the sea of love in Turkish.

3:51:25So here we are, yeah, English one word for love, Spanish two and Ashk, although the normal translation given by Turkish people is the sea of love, it refers to passionate love. So that would be Eros in Greek. The Greeks had four words for love, didn't they? Some people say six, depends whose list you read. Apparently in Persian there are 17. In English we have to make do with just one. So here's the sea of love. It's the love that she sees in her lover's eyes.

3:55:00You like? Who knew? Some of you knew. I'm only going to play two more songs. So now we're going to Russia. And actually, yes, to the Soviet Union, we're going to listen to a song by Vadim Kozin. So in Russia in the 1930s, they produced cabaret stars of universal, extraordinary quality. But Vadim Kozin, we don't really know. I'm going to play you one of his songs. It's not a tango, but he did record some tangos. And let me tell you a bit about him.

3:55:45He was a gay Russian tango singer in the 1930s, openly gay, performing in St. Petersburg. And then in 1937, he went to Moscow. And that was fine. Even after the communist takeover, they tolerated him because he was extremely popular. He started to come into problems. Homosexuality was banned by Stalin in 1934, but that wasn't a problem. But in the early 40s, he started to come into problems.

3:56:11In 1944 Beria, the head of the NKVD, the Russian Secret Service, that's the KGB today, telephoned him and he said, why don't you sing about Stalin? Kozin wasn't expecting this question and he replied, it's because songs about Stalin aren't suited to tenor voices. You know, for someone caught unawares is the most brilliant reply ever given to an interrogation by a secret policeman. Um, but it only helped him for about another year. Um, a year later he was arrested and sent to Siberia and he never came back. He never came back from Siberia. That didn't mean he died, he lived for a long time.

3:57:03When he arrived in the camp in Magadan in Siberia, the Gulag, he was recognised by the commandant's wife and she saved him. Instead of putting him into the camp, she put him in a hut where he wasn't freezing and he was fed. After 10 years, he was released, but political prisoners were not allowed to return to European Russia. They had to stay in Siberia. So he was there free for a short time and he decided already at that time, he said, I'm not going back. And the KGB discovered his diaries and re-arrested him. And he was in prison in the Gulag for several more decades. There's probably some people listening to this who know more about it than I do. So I'm sorry if I've got any of it wrong. And I'm doing my best to honour his memory.

3:57:56But he outlived the Soviet Union. That's the most remarkable thing. So the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and Kozin was still alive and still living in Siberia. And in the final few years, people began to rediscover him and they started to beat a path to his door because he was recognised as one of the greatest Russian stars of all time, which may surprise many of you because it's not a well-known name today. And you might understand that he was very much affected by his experiences in the camp. He never really recovered. And he couldn't cope with the attention that was given to him.

3:58:45So for his 90th birthday they organized this gala performance in Siberia and people flew in from Moscow and St Petersburg and all over, big names, all the celebrities, and they produced this gala performance for him and he didn't go. He spent the night quietly at home with a few friends. He just couldn't cope with it. I'll give you one quote from him from his diary, he said, life is so strange. You have glory and honour. Poets praise you. Artists paint you even better than you are. And then nothing. Silence.

3:59:27So we'll listen to one song of his. Absolutely extraordinary song. We're very lucky that it was recorded because it's from the 1990s. I mean, of course there are his records from the 1930s, but very few survive. And when friends played them to him, because he was starting to become a bit unstable, he would take the records from them and burn them. So it's very hard to listen to his early recordings. This is called I Love Looking Into Your Eyes. I'll try and pronounce this correctly. I love looking to your eyes. I think this was recorded in 1995. He died shortly after this was recorded.

4:02:59Okay, so now it's time for my last song. I apologize to all the countries whose songs didn't get played. I had German songs in the playlist. I was really looking for a song in Farsi, in Persian, but I couldn't find one I liked that had the word love in the title. There's so many great love songs. We had to stick with that formula. So the last song, let's see who can guess. It's an English language song from a film from 1944 called Meet Me in St Louis.

4:03:36And I want to finish with this song because I think for a great many of us, it really articulates how we're feeling. Because it's a song, it's a Christmas song that says Christmas is a bit rubbish this year, but if God wills it, maybe next year would be better. This is sung by a very, very young Judy Garland. It's called Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. It's a song that kills me, actually.

4:04:03Thank you all for joining us in Tango by Year. It's a great privilege to share music with you all. And we'll have the first Lost After Party Wednesday next week, which will probably be 1941. And then it will be the mystery year that Dag selects the year after that. Thank you very much.