One evening recently at 33 a friend alarmed a few people: a milonga was playing and she suddenly started to jump up and down, saying 'One two three hop... It's a polka! One two three hop!' Calm down dear, someone said. But she was insistent, and I was intrigued. The music was some kind of milonga, and the rhythm she was dancing fitted it well. & I believed she knew what a polka was.
So I was delighted to read that the polka was very popular in Buenos Aires at the end of the 19th century, and that it may well have played a part in developing the slow habanera rhythm of the candombe, a dance with strong African roots, into... the milonga. Was milonga a cross between polka and a candombe on speed? & is the Brazilian samba an Africanised polka?
Somebody thinks so. Robert Farris Thompson, Professor of the History of Art at Yale wrote TANGO: the art history of love (Vintage Books, 2006) to demonstrate the profound, but now almost invisible, influence of Africa on the music and dance of Argentina.
Invisible if you don't know where to look. Old documents, artwork and photos, and people's memories, contradict the quite striking absence of Africans from the streets, public transport and milongas of Buenos Aires. I was stunned to read that the milonguero Facundo Posada recalls as a child being warned not to bother people who had fallen into a trance while dancing to the cadombe rhythm at the Shimmy Club in Buenos Aires around 1945. Upstairs at the Shimmy Club tango and jazz were danced: the basement was blacks-only, and at night the drums would start up and the spirits of Africa would manifest themselves.
In 1810 Buenos Aires was 34% black but by 1887, after years of immigration, it was 2%, around 8,000. By the mid-20th century the black community numbered about 2,000. Thompson charts the significance of African roots in tango. Black musicians were prominent, including several early bandoneon players who helped define the use of the instrument in tango. There were black lyricists: Gabino Ezeiza wrote over 500 songs. And the rich African tradition of dance fed into tango. A short film, Tango Argentino, featuring a dancer called El Negro Agapito was made around 1904, but sadly it no longer exists. Three great 20th century dancers, El Cachafez, Todaro and Petroleo acknowledged black teachers, partners, influences. Copes' first teacher was black.
Thompson writes to show black influence, but doesn't mention social tango. He calls dances 'choreographies', and the line of dance he follows to Copes leads rather to the stage, to tango fantasia, than to the milongas. & sometimes the comparisons are a bit forced: the distant facial expressions and lack of conversation in tango shows African origin. He clearly has no idea how much attention it takes for most of us to follow the music and navigate a crowded floor! & that we choose to enter a world of conversation without words. With music and without words we can fly; it's not a style copied from anywhere. But he has unearthed a rich background and a lot of detailed information about the music and dance: I just wished the book had at least a CD.
He claims that the habanera was Afro-Cuban: others have traced it to the European contredanza which came to Cuba from French Haiti with refugees from the 1791 Haiti revolution. He himself talks about how rhythms and dance moves traveled up and down the South American coast. Realistically, where does any good tune or rhythm come from? Tunes and rhythms travel easier than viruses because people, musicians especially, seek them out, and they take no storage space. I can't help remembering the story about the record company in the late 50s/early 60s that sent a team of recording engineers far up the Amazon to record the purest, unadulterated tribal music. When they listened to it again in the studio they were horrified to realise they were listening to a version of... Jailhouse Rock. The missionaries must have given the tribals a transistor tuned to edifying matter and told them not to touch that dial... Music travels instantly now, but even two centuries ago it traveled fast. A mariner whistles a tune he heard in a port, a local boatman hears it and it's copied from him far up-country by a merchant who crosses the mountains to...
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