Endre's comment

Thanks to Endre for this recent comment on my previous post on tango in London: 'Our community in Budapest somehow has the same symptoms you've just described. Related to the beginner leader drop out I use a simple but effective approach. It helped me and it helped some of my friends being desperate.' Thanks, and welcome, Endre! Good to hear from you. I'll try and add your blog to my Tango blog list, but I've had problems with that recently.

He links his comment to a post on a tango blog, Endretango, I hadn't noticed before. Endretango's native language may be Hungarian, but the blog is available in English, French and Spanish, and the English version is excellent. He advocates making a dance with an unknown partner a necessary part of every milonga evening. I already do this as much as I can, and I think many of us do it, but I've never thought of writing about it here, so thanks for putting it into words! I don't make it a rule, but I like to do it, of course. & why not, when you see the ladies standing waiting hopefully for a dance? I've had great dances and made new friends like that. After all, one of the great things about tango is that you can have an amazing dance with someone you've not met before.

(I should have made it clear in my post on London tango that I don't go to all the milongas, so when I said I didn't notice less experienced guys turning up, I was referring to a limited number of milongas. I hope those guys are are out there and busy on other floors.)

Endretango has a link to El Tango y sus Invitados, Tango and Guests, a site I'd visited before but never explored. It's difficult to navigate and I can find it only in Spanish, but it has links to a huge resource of music, including the collected recordings of Pedro Laurenz (it seems there are more early recordings than those available on the two usual CDs), Miguel Caló, Fresedo, Di Sarli, D'Agostino, Tanturi and D'Arienzo (a massive 998 tracks apparently) and many others. Working out how to use it isn't easy, and the downloads are in a compressed .RAR format, which might need another software download to decompress, but there's a lot of music at the end of it all, in .mp3 format at between three and four Mbs per track, which is reasonable. Having said that, we may well already have and know the tracks we really want to listen and dance to. The late tracks of Caló with a bouncy electric bass, and of Fresedo in stereo, are more like curiosities, but I've found excellent tracks from the earlier period that I wasn't aware of. (There again, that's probably an indication of my limits!) But when you hear one of those tandas that sound familiar but you can't place, you might find it easier to identify it as, say, Fresedo, but slightly earlier or later than the usual tracks.

The downloads include a discography for some of the artists, so it is a really useful archive. But I'm not sure I'll know what to do with 998 tracks of D'Arienzo! That's about two days non-stop listening...

Regín

I've just noticed a post by Silvia Ceriani on her Tete y Silvia blog from a while back. It's about a recent album called Reina Noche by Alfredo Rubin. The guy has a great tango voice, perhaps a bit like Goyeneche. He's the author of the poems, the singer too I guess. & poems they are, the old tradition of poem and music renewing itself in the present. Voice and guitars, like the beginnings of tango cancion 90 years ago, simple and direct, without the expense of a full orquesta. Well worth checking out Silvia's post (and the music). Some beautiful things about the milonga, about El Beso, and she's gone to the trouble of making a full translation of the poem Regín from the album, complex, allusive language.

It's on Spotify Alfredo Rubin – Reina Noches. I've been listening to it all evening. & it would be interesting to dance to, too. Very spirited milongas. Nice. There's a couple of other Rubin albums on Spotify too, so a few evenings of new tango music. Very welcome.

DJ La Rubia

A very welcome Argentine visitor at Carablanca a few Fridays ago. Maybe it was knowing where she was from that made the sound quality seem unusually good, and it's hard to say exactly why it was such a great evening. The sound quality: it reminded me of how strong the music can sound without being actually deafening in volume. The choice of music was endlessly excellent: not always familiar, but always great for dancing. Without doubt a DJ with an vast knowledge of the music, who pays constant attention to the mood of the milonga and knows how to keep people moving. It was appreciated by everyone I spoke to. Generally, I think, London tangueros don't know their tango that well in the sense of being able to distinguish between orquestas, but they are well aware when good music for dance is being played, and I think that's what really matters. I hope she'll be back, and I'm sure her name will be a future draw.