'Allez chercher des poissons dans les arbres!'

...said the fruit and veg shop manager, giving a loud and very public earful to her boss, who was apparently stocktaking, across several square metres of perfectly ripe peaches, €2.70 a kilo, about £1.50 per pound, obviously unconcerned about job security. Or maybe she'd already lost it.

I've been wondering about the English equivalent. It's a wonderfully derisive remark, and 'Go look for fish in the trees' hardly does it justice. Of course a lot depends on tone, and she gave it plenty, but I guess the translation just doesn't have the rhythmic directness of the French. Derisive, and a bit surreal, too. Remember it for your next visit to France, just in case you need to tell someone to get lost in expressive (but perfectly decent) French.

& a national newspaper reports on a chess tournament in Kolkata at which the French champion, Russian by birth but now French, nodded off at the board. & stayed nodded. His opponent must have grinned, and held his breath for fear of waking him, as the minutes ticked by. Finally, an hour or so later, his clock rang and he awoke, but the time he was allowed for the match had expired. & so he (and la France) lost.

Can it really be fun if we don't take it seriously?

Tony Walker circulated a link to an article about tango in Times Online: if you don't get his emails, the article is here. The article points to the emotional seriousness of tango, as of relationships in general. But isn't it fun? Yes... but can it really be fun if we don't take it seriously?

This relates to this ongoing discussion about cabaceo, but to me the discussion is about an approach to the milonga in general, even about how seriously we take each other, rather than about whether we should follow an arguably outdated piece of tango history.

Some time ago I went to ask an acquaintance to dance. She was busy chatting with a (girl) friend; I 'hovered' for a moment but she didn't look up, so I walked away. Later she asked me why I hadn't danced with her that evening. Well, it's impolite to interrupt a conversation and, although I was sure my interruption would have been welcome, in the back of my mind there was the feeling that she wasn't 'ready' to dance. Sure, she would have jumped up immediately to dance, but uppermost in her mind would have been another way of relating, another mindset, a lively verbal activity, and it would have felt a little uncomfortable because, for a moment, I wouldn't have trusted her sudden involvement in dancing.

Tango needs a degree of commitment to the partner you are dancing with. The importance of cabaceo doesn't seem to be as the traditional method you use to ask your partner to dance, but as to whether you are maintaining a receptive mood for a dance, and whether you want to dance at that moment with that partner; and cabaceo is still the best way to deal with all that. If you sit watching for a sign – which male or female can ignore or accept – you are ready and committed to your dance, and to your partner, in a way you aren't if you are enjoying some jolly socialising, and sort of fall into a dance casually. & if you start off in a receptive mood, you're going to enjoy your dance a lot more, and get a lot more out of it.

We might be able to think of more appropriate and contemporary ways of organising a milonga than the cabaceo, and if they work as well, fine. I think the principle to keep in mind is how we maintain a focus on a dance we think is important enough to focus on. We might treat tango as more than a recreational activity. We all know it's seriously good for us!

Gotan

A new tango course is advertised in Nice. 'This isn't that old kind of tango: this is "tango nuevo", and it's danced to music like the well-known Gotan Project...' Groan, and Gotan, that dull mechanical electro-beat with a bandoneon that can hardly play eight notes, and then without conviction or passion... Oops, put a glass of wine in my hand someone, and tell me to shut up.

Antibes, the sea

Cabaceo (again)

When you're on metered internet you start to realise how much time it takes. Check the emails, write an answer, read a few blogs, that's half an hour; €2, please... A new post? Another €2.

There's an interesting post on the use of cabaceo in Toronto at Irene and Man Yung's Tango Blog.

I'm still not sure where I stand on this one. I found the serious cabaceo milongas (the 'line-up' ones) in Buenos Aires intimidating – but then I didn't know anyone there. It's also clear that this kind of cabaceo grew up in a social climate quite different from the European or American present, a climate in which it was quite incorrect to have men and women who weren't closely connected sitting near each other. (Apparently they could dance together but not sit together.) At the same time the cabaceo, along with the practice of clearing the floor at the end of a tanda and taking a different partner, imposes a kind of order on a milonga, which tends to make the dance the focus of the evening, to the benefit of the dance.

This might seem excessively formal in our social climate, but a London milonga is a bit blurred between a dance and a social meeting, and what you do on the floor is less visible, less emphasised, perhaps less important, since the lights are kept low. As Irene and Man Yung say, it looks "lively" and "friendly" and "jolly" and "noisy" but this isn't necessarily the atmosphere for tango. Added to this, London dance venues aren't dedicated tango venues, so the layout of tables and chairs may not be helpful. What we do in London has 'just growed'. Of course, so did the cabaceo: people looked at how they organised their dances, saw the needs and the problems, and acted to resolve them. Adopting any solution wholesale isn't likely to be satisfactory, but I think it's a good idea to look at how we do things, and see if they can be improved. At the same time, of course, events have to pay their way, which means giving people what they want, or at least what they expect.

It would certainly be interesting to see how a milonga on fairly traditional lines would work in London, as an experiment. That's why I think the report from Toronto, a sort of 'limited overs' cabaceo*, is so interesting.

(* 'limited overs': a game of cricket played for a very limited period of time.)

Picasso Cezanne

Picasso Cezanne (advertised in that order) at the Musee Granet in Aix. Picasso had a life-long admiration for Cezanne, so it's strange the two haven't met in an exhibition before.

I'm first attracted to the Cezannes, paintings in which drawing, the structure, remains visible on the surface, painting visibly composed of marks, painting moving definitively away from the 'photographic'. Cezanne's doubt and hesitation: the apple is here – no, hang on, it's here; he adds a touch of colour, then comes back a day later and draws it again, a bit lower down, to the side. You can see this in the portraits: they add up to expressive portraits but if you look closely they are composed of a number of slightly different view-points. & flattening: tables are flattened against the picture plane, and even in landscapes there's a flatness. Of course Japanese prints were by now well-known and admired, but Cezanne himself says that the intense light of the south flattens the appearance of landscape.

Which is where Cubism started: what you see depends on where you are, and when you are looking. Perspective, the single viewpoint of the lens at a single instant, is ignored, outdated. & a painting is a collection of marks, of signs. But there was another very significant influence on Picasso: African art, which wasn't another 'style' but an art that didn't try to describe the world, an art with a purpose, an art of exorcism, a creation that had the purpose of intercession. When Picasso thought of this, his connection to Cezanne became more tenuous. As a result, much of the exhibition is taken up with superficial similarities: Cezanne and Picasso both painted landscapes, still lives, portraits, but their ways of painting, even what they were trying to achieve, seem very different, Cezanne always doubting and uncertain, and Picasso, who gives the impression of never doubting anything, affirming life and the creative force.

But both painted skulls. There are a few of Picasso's skulls in the show, but sadly none of Cezanne's (nor of his Mte. Ste. Victoire paintings either). I'd love to see a show of their skull paintings together...

Aung San Su Kyi

Total: the name's appeared a couple of times recently. Jane Birkin recently released a song (in English) called Aung San Su Kyi: she's been active in France on behalf of the Nobel Peace Prize winner. I heard the song on the radio some nights ago, recounting, in that sad vulnerable voice, the treatment of Aung San by the Burmese junta. & that was the first mention of Total, a French company that, in conjunction with Chevron, runs the Yadana pipeline that pumps oil out of Burma – and dollars to a junta that controls one of the poorest and most backward countries in the world. The song is a precis of the Earth Rights International report, released on 10/09/2009, which claims that 75% of the Yadana revenues go directly to the junta and that, instead of being spent locally, much of the money finds its way into secret bank accounts offshore of Singapore.

And the other mention? Total is one of the sponsors of the Picasso-Cezanne exhibition.

It's astonishing how toothless world opposition to the Burmese junta appears to be. Politicians say it is bad: the rest of us seem to shrug our shoulders. The report doesn't seem to have been mentioned in the UK press. The recent 'trial' of Aung San, like the suppression of the monks' protests and the deaths not so long ago, seem to have passed with a bit of token outrage. Shamefully, the junta looks secure for the time being: oil supports the junta, since Burma has little other trade with the outside world, and the report suggests that if Total pulled out, Chinese companies would take over...

Aix and dance

I like Aix-en-Provence. It's an old town-sized city, with university city facilities; it's warm, the light is marvellous, it has tango, the Mediterranean isn't far, and the countryside around, including the 3,000 ft Mte. Ste. Victoire, is just amazing. Yes, I would like to live there.

& it has more dance than tango. The internationally-known French choreographer Anglin Preljocaj moved his company there a few years ago, establishing a custom-built centre, the Pavillon Noir, perhaps a surprisingly static but obviously pragmatic glass and concrete work place and centre. It has since been recognised as a 'Centre Chorégraphique National'.

The Preljocaj company visits London regularly: I saw their Rite of Spring at Sadler's Wells few years ago. His work is inventive, lyrical, challenging, intensely physical, with a wonderful sense of how amazing human bodies in motion can be. The climax of the Rite of Spring can be seen here: warning, if necessary, scenes of nudity. & of course the company is active in the streets of Aix, giving public performances and workshops.

Breaking news!

Breaking news! Another video of Ricardo Vidort has surfaced. Here it is:

& in March I noted that Alberto Dassieu was visiting Zurich, and I linked a couple of videos. Actually I wanted to point out that here was a great tango dancer and teacher within reach of London: I hoped, in vain, that someone with a bit of money might think if getting him over from Switzerland. The page is here: the second video, the D'Arienzo, I've watched again and again. Two moments stand out: at the very beginning when he and Elba Biscay first make contact it's like two magnets. And then there's an extraordinary turn at 0:34 that always makes me smile: you can hardly see Elba's face, but a glimpse suggests she's grinning from ear to ear.

& now a couple of videos of his Swiss visit have surfaced, filmed in beautiful HD. Interestingly, this one features that same vals, but it's a more sedate version. Elba Biscay is known as one of the great milongueras, and it's a pity she couldn't visit Switzerland. Or London.

Rivertango

Rivertango - from one open-air milonga to another, but Tangocommuter commutes - moved from the river outside Tate Modern to Spitalfields this year, probably because it coincided with the Thames festival, but it is surely a vast improvement on the Tate Modern site, which is overrun by by a flood of visitors, where dance-floor invasions are the order of the day and one never knows who is there to dance or just to watch, with a cold damp wind blowing off the Thames: as a place to dance it's unsafe and uncomfortable, a nightmare. Spitalfields is altogether more of a milonga, under the canopy, which gives it a bit of a protected, intimate feel. There are tourists in Spitalfields, and the odd unsupervised toddler or visiting rock n'roller intrudes on the dance floor, which admittedly is hard (the floor, that is), but it's easy enough to spot who's there to dance, and it feels like a milonga. I hope the move to Spitalfields will be permanent, because one visit to the riverside site last year was enough for me.

As for the two £25-a-head milongas, I am told that the Sexteto Canyengue gave note-perfect renditions of tango scores, as classical musicians can, and incidentally gave a perfect demo that, although tango is played from the notes on written scores, the way those notes are played, their precise duration, the precise speed of phrases, the changes of speed within phrases, the exact emphasis, the 'attack', all of which give tango its own distinctive swing, are almost as important as the work of the composer and arranger. Was that worth £25? & the fact that other milongas, which usually charge 1/3 of that price, closed 'in favour of' this extravaganza, leaves me gob-smacked. Surely something expensive and exclusive has to earn the right to be expensive and exclusive, and it doesn't sound as if it did.

Place Richelme

Place Richelme is in the centre of Aix. It's not a big square; on the city map it is only a crossroads, but it is easily the most memorable of the city's squares. The daily market under the massive plane trees, is said to be one of the best in Provence, a land of great daily markets. Then at midday what's left of a huge array of farm-fresh fruit and veg, and other high-quality food, is packed away, the smooth marble flagstones are hosed down, and the cafes spread out their chairs and tables under canopies for the rest of the day. By evening it has the atmosphere of a southern European city: in the cafes and on seats spilling out onto the square people sit and watch football, yelling at the goals, pizza delivery boys roar by, kids wander around licking ice creams, drinks are served to people chatting at tables under the trees, under the stars. You sit out in a tee-shirt and shorts until late: it's warm and it feels good.

But that's not the end of the story. Every Sunday night from early July onwards, between 9.30 and 1am, there's a milonga on the smooth marble flagstones. Because the surroundings interrupt constantly until late in the evening, it doesn't have the concentration of a London or Paris milonga, and there's a certain contrast between the dance in one corner of the square and the relaxed party evening elsewhere. About fifteen couples take to the 'floor', which slopes upwards nearly a metre at one corner, but there's plenty of room for everyone. The dance is about the same mix as London, some salon, some nuevo, a lot in between; some smooth and skilful, some... I didn't find the music that good: for instance, it's odd to hear Biaggi in the third or fourth tanda of an evening, because it isn't easy music to dance to. It's a social and drinking evening with dance too, although they're obviously serious about their dance. At the Paris milonga I went to there were more women than men but here numbers were about equal, and everyone was obviously on good terms, so I didn't try very hard to get a dance. Anyway, it would have been hard to convince anyone I was serious, in worn blue canvas sneakers.

But the good news is that it's there. Take a pair of half-decent shoes, introduce yourself to the organisers beforehand and pay them the recommended €2, sit at the tables where the dancers sit, order a drink and join in. A friendly, open event. I found some photos from a year or two ago here.


According to blogger this is my 201st post. Here's to the next 200!

Something different...

It's about this time of year that Tangocommuter, exasperated by lack of sunshine, folds up a bicycle, throws a tent and a sleeping bag into a holdall and jumps aboard the cheapest available transport to sunshine – which usually means the south of France. Avignon beckons, but this year the first stop is Aix en Provence largely because, as part of a big exhibition called Picasso-Cezanne (advertised in that order), the Chateau of Vauvenargues is open to guided public visits for the first time ever. I looked down on it from the summit of Mte. Ste. Victoire a few years ago, knowing that Picasso is buried there, but never thought a visit would be possible. It has remained in the family of Jaqueline Picasso and has been kept as it was during their short occupancy.

It's a 17th century chateau, though parts of it are much older, and it had fallen into disrepair. It had been asset-stripped by Marseilles businessmen who owned it briefly, it needed re-roofing, and central heating and modern plumbing had to be installed, no mean feat with walls over one meter thick. & it was infested with scorpions. However, it was turned into a beautiful studio home, huge spare rooms, with breath-taking and breath-giving views of the forests on the northern slope of Mte. Ste. Victoire. Picasso boasted that he had bought Cezanne's Mte. Ste. Victoire, but he was exaggerating by 50%: the grounds of the chateau include only the entire northern slopes of the mountain.

But Picasso, then in his 80s, began to suffer angina, and the nearest doctor was miles away, so the stay at Vauvenargues was brief. An extraordinary place to visit, and the nearby village is enchanting.

The 'grounds' of the chateau include everything you can see in the second picture (except the sky).

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur

The first few rooms, some earlier maharajas, are beautiful work but a tedious fantasy world: the maharaja seated amidst endless rows of identical ladies in his garden. Or perhaps it wasn't even fantasy... But they do have fun at Holi, the maharaja and his endless cohorts letting off steam by squirting coloured water at each other, and the artist had a good time, too: having painted the scene meticulously, he splashed paint all over it.

Then we come to Maharaha Man Singh. While still a child he was deprived of his kingdom by an evil uncle. He was kept in hiding by loyal supporters, but the difficulties of this weighed on him, and he decided to give himself up. That night in a vision, the story goes, the founder of the Naths appeared and advised him to wait a few days. In those few days the uncle died and Man Singh inherited his kingdom. The Naths were - still are - an order of yogis, reknown for fierce determination and unswerving discipline in meditation. Many stories are told about their mental powers. In person they can be intimidating. Not a good idea to fool with the Naths.

These events obviously changed Man Singh's life, and this is reflected in his court paintings, which tend to feature identical Naths rather than identical ladies. But at a certain stage Man Singh instructed his artists to turn their attention to metaphysical issues. There are a lot of painted images relating to Indian 'myths' and Ajit Mukherjee has published impressive books of paintings of tantric diagrams, but for the most part they are diagrams.

The imagination of Man Singh's artists was wildly challenged when it came to depicting the arising of existence out of nothingness, and they found extraordinary solutions. There are several triptychs reading left to right: the left showing just burnished gold, the centre showing partly formed images, with the final painting on the right. There are a number of wonderful depictions of the body-as-universe, as it is in tantric thought. And finally there is a room of long paintings of figures floating in a sea of pattern. Utterly strange and mysterious. & most of the paintings are big. Nothing miniature in size or concept in the paintings on show.

Dreams

I'd been reconsidering my idea of going to Buenos Aires again this winter... and then I received an email.

Much as I like the idea of December 21 being midsummer's day, of having two midsummer's days in the year, of winter not really getting under way until January, it's an expensive trip, and I've been getting some good dancing in London. Do I really need it? & I have to admit the city itself doesn't appeal to me that much. I'd rather spend what little I have on a place closer to the Mediterranean...

Some months back I suggested a London tango festival to which six or eight of the very best experienced milongueros and milongueras would be invited to teach and dance for a couple of weeks. It was, of course, impossibly expensive to organise, but I see nothing wrong in suggesting something that is a really good idea, even if it isn't possible. Who knows, someone with the money might like the idea too.

Then a month or so ago I got an email from an older milonguero in Buenos Aires. I'd linked a video of him that I really liked, and he wrote to thank me for this, and said that if ever I got that festival under way... So I felt I had to write back apologetically and say that it was 'un sueno, y nada mas'. Then a couple of days ago I got a reply from him which says, as best I can translate, 'Please may I say that there is nothing more beautiful in the life of a human being than dreams. Some can be realised, others not. But they are always dreams and are nourished daily (son alimentan a diario).'

I was quite moved by that; it seemed so courteous, thoughtful and even poignant. In Latin America dreams may well be more sustaining than we'd imagine in Europe. So... I think I'm going to have to start looking for flights again. After all, it's the people you visit, rather than the city.

Forgery and renewal

The forger's work is said to be convincing at the time, but later starts to belong to the time when it was made. The 'Vermeers' of Van Megeren now look nothing like Vermeers but rather resemble the bad late 19th century painting he grew up with. But he was imprisoned in Holland at the end of WW2 for selling a national treasure, a Vermeer, to Goebbels, effectively charged with treason, which carried the death penalty. It wasn't until he painted a 'Vermeer' in the presence of witnesses in his prison cell that he was believed, and became a bit of a national hero.

I wonder how Elmyr de Hory's drawings will stand up to time. He was a gifted artist with an intimate understanding of the sensibility and style of most 20th century artists, and found he could make an easier living out of it than developing anything of his own. He made such beautiful Picasso and Matisse drawings that the 'experts' were usually fooled. Of course that isn't illegal; signing them or claiming they are by another artist is illegal, and Elmyr claimed he never wrongly signed a drawing... When it all began to unravel in the late 1960s he committed suicide rather than face prison in Ibiza. Orson Welles' film about forgery, F is for Fake, shows him at home in Ibiza, casually making an exquisite Matisse, explaining how Matisse's line was hesitant -- and then burning it, laughing. After that, provenance, rather than the expert eye, was regarded as trustworthy, until provenances began to be forged...

& music? If original recordings of D'Arienzo suddenly became valuable, I guess the discs and recording techniques could be copied, but the music would be something else. D'Arienzo was an orquesta, not an individual, and they played together nightly. In any case, musicians, like art forgers, carry with them the sensibility of their times. Classical music isn't played now as it was 50 years ago. There's a new kind of rhythmic urgency, and it's hard not to think that this comes from a generation of musicians whose background includes Coltrane and Hendrix. When I first heard that wild bandoneon solo in the Cumparasita of Orquesta Escuelo, I assumed it was a new arrangement, then a few weeks ago I heard it again, note for note - in an old D'Arienzo recording. But it sounds new, and so it should. Even in playing old scores, musicians bring in what they have heard, and renew the music.

On feedback

A quick note to say how amazed I am at all that response. First, I'm delighted that Andreas' class and approach provoked so much positive interest, since it is a style of dance I like. I think he has a 'pedagogical method' (to use Gustavo's phrase) that works really well. It isn't perhaps traditional: a teenager learning dance in Buenos Aires in 1940 probably wouldn't need to be told how to maintain good posture. Most of us have worked at desks so long that we need a bit of help. And I found everything he had to say was interesting, to the point and useful.

And this feedback makes even more apparent the value of the internet: we can comment, ask questions, get answers, with a kind of ease that just wasn't possible until recently. All this and watch videos too.

A quick point: I think Andreas called what I wrote a 'review', which seems to suggest 'a reviewer', a distant expert passing judgment, which isn't how I see myself. I make notes for my own benefit on things I've experienced, in order to formulate thoughts and to remember. Even if I write for my own benefit I'm glad to do it in public because I value the feedback.

Andreas Wichter at Carablanca

I always think there's a difference between teachers of dance, and teachers of steps. There seems to be a good number of the latter, and they tend to encourage students to be 'step collectors', '...the kind of tango dancer no one wants to meet...' as Oscar Casas remarked witheringly.

Teachers of dance teach steps too, but they also teach you to dance, a much more complex and complete teaching.

Andreas talks more than most teachers, but it was all to the point, and interesting, and he was listened to attentively. He started by talking about good posture, the vertebra between the shoulder blades pushed forwards, the chin pulled a bit back, so the chest leads. Then walking with good posture to the music, on the beat. Then walking in single and double time. It had never occurred to me that double time can be led through the shoulders: for want of a better idea I'd always pushed ahead and just hoped my partner would step back fast enough. Then the close embrace, walking in close embrace, and finally walking in the embrace in single and double time. All well-explained, reasonable, practical.

Talk of the social dynamics of male and female in tango. We were recommended to try to use the cabaceo, since that removes from the woman the need to refuse a dance to a man hovering in front of her.

It was a good evening. The class was well-attended, particularly for a warm Friday evening in mid-August, and there was a good crowd right until the end of the milonga too. Very impressively, Andreas was there throughout, dancing with anyone who was interested. I've never seen a teacher do that before. If they don't already know, it gave a fair number of partners a taste of how good close-hold salon tango can be, I'm told. It was the first of two lessons, but I hope he will be back in the autumn, as he lives and teaches in Totnes now. He learned from the late Gavito on his visits to Switzerland. He said that technically Gavito wasn't a good teacher [ed. I've misrepresented his remark: please see the Comments for a clarification by Andreas], but he was an inspiring one, he changed peoples' dancing lives.

Carablanca feels good these days. Even around the edges it's beginning to look a bit like a Buenos Aires milonga, plates of hot empanadas going around, (vege and non-vege) and wine at a reasonable price. A place where you can go and relax for an evening, have a bite to eat, meet friends, chat and dance.

Sin pensamiento!

I spent a few happy hours with Tete and Silvia in Buenos Aires last winter, struggling to get through things I ought to have learned earlier, and laughing a lot with them. I took away material I'm only just beginning to lead confidently in milongas, as well as a few phrases Tete likes to repeat. Silvia was translating, so I wasn't paying attention to the original, but I'm pretty sure he said 'sin pensamiento' – 'without thinking!', she'd translate. 'You are thinking' he'd observe: 'Don't think!' 'Piensas! No piensa!' – I guess that's what he said. It was a small room and it was hard not to worry about whether there was room for that new line of steps, but he was always right. I was thinking, rather than... rather than dancing, I guess.

There's a wonderful basic Buddhist meditation. After reminding yourself that you aren't doing this to develop superpowers for your own selfish ends, you sit comfortably and stare at a blue flower. (Why blue, or even a flower, I'm not sure.) The first experience is 'the waterfall': you try to stare at the flower but suddenly you find your mind is overflowing with thoughts. They were always there: you just never noticed. If you persist with the flower you find your thoughts are like ocean waves, one after another then, much later, like occasional ripples on a lake. Finally you are 'sin pensamiento', calm water.

I remember the waterfall when I first started trying to dance tango: is the floor slippery, what's my partner thinking, it's warm, what do the people watching think, shall I do the class tomorrow... it was endless. These days it's a lot quieter. I wouldn't want to suggest that Tete might be a Buddhist sage, or that tango is really a spiritual path, but 'sin pensamiento' might actually be a great accomplishment, in dancing as in meditation. Following the music through time and space, without thinking. The mind can give up words for a while, and it's a relief!

PS I'd be grateful to anyone who can correct my castellano...

The three-minute question

There have been some interesting discussions on music recently. Jantango, who is close to the source, got an answer to the three-minute question recently.

So is a tango three minutes because records lasted only three minutes?

Well, records never needed to last three minutes. They could have been bigger or smaller, they could have revolved faster or slower. In fact it looks as if they were designed to record three-minute songs. It was a convenient length, it was the length people wanted, and still like. My memory of English folk songs is pretty distant, but it wouldn't surprise me if they are three minutes long, mas o menos. Perhaps the precursors of recorded tango lasted about three minutes too.

What do we get in three minutes? Most tangos, and most songs generally, are A-B-A in structure. It's a structure people seem to like, it works well musically and in a song. 16-bar blues follow much the same pattern. In practice, we get three segments of around 16 bars each. 16 bars to a minute, mas o menos, 48 bars start to finish. 48 bars of four beats each, that's 192 beats in three minutes, which is... 64 beats a minute. A familiar number. 192 heart beats to a tango.

& some hard evidence: I've got the piano version of Sur here, 'Letra de H. MANZI, Musica de ANIBAL TROILO'. It's in two pages: A and B. There are three verses, corresponding to A-B-A. A has 17 bars, B has 18 bars.

Jantango writes that Julián Peralta, who teaches at the National Tango Academy in Buenos Aires, was a member of Orquesta Tipica Fernando Fierro and is presently with Orquesta Astillero, gave this answer to the three-minute question: '...a tango is a synopsis rather than a novel. It says what is necessary musically and sometimes with words, in a couple of minutes. It is complete with theme and variation.' Which I really like. He says that it gives us everything we need. & if we need more, well, we just play three or four of them, one after the other! What would a milonga be like if each tango went on for 12 minutes?

Astor Piazzolla: In Portrait

A lot of thanks to the BBC for two documentaries in the early 2000s. Tango Salon, about the Confiteria Ideal and the people who go there, has some wonderful material, including Geraldine and Javier at their best together, Gerardo Portalea, 'Pupi' Castello and others, although it spends rather too much time with less interesting people. Astor Piazzolla: In Portrait, now re-issued as a DVD, is a perfectly-focused biography. It introduces us to Piazzolla and the people around him, family, musicians, friends, all remarkable, and it's wonderful to spend an hour in their company.

The DVD includes interesting interview material that didn't fit into the biography. Whenever his son, Daniel, saw him he was sat at the piano from 7 in the morning until the end of the day. 'He provoked inspiration: he sat at the piano with zero inspiration and sooner or later the music was coming.' But his hands were deformed from playing bandoneón since childhood: he was a good pianist, he always used the piano for composing, but couldn't play professionally. He had '...manos gigantes de bandoneónista, manos enormes. He could play chords that no other bandoneónista of the time could play' says Fernando E. Solanas.

Pablo Ziegler sits at the yellowed keys of his old Steinway, plays a piece of Piazzolla's characteristic 3/3/2 rhythm, and then the same piece in the old tango rhythm: 'It's this very square rhythm' he says, laughing, but making us hear how closely the two are related. He plays a few bars of the familiar adagio in La Muerte del Angel, very moving, and then breaks off and points out its relation to jazz; you suddenly realise it is familiar Piazzolla, but it could have been Errol Garner or Art Tatum.

French accordionist Richard Galliano played with Piazzolla, and talks about Piazzolla's free phrasing with a solid beat, about the modesty and honesty in his music, beautiful phrasing without sentimentality. He also talks about the beauty of the single line, comparing Piazzolla with Miles Davis, a similar deep sensitivity, and wonders what could have happened had they played together. (They played on the same stage, but not together, at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Both controlled their bands very tightly: perhaps there was no way they could ever have played together.)

British pianist Joanna MacGregor, who played Piazzolla's music with two of his musicians, observes that '...there really is a psychological and emotional depth that you don't find necessarily in contemporary music... and a sort of darkness' in his music.

There's also an interview with Amelita Baltar: a short, amazing extract of her performance of Loco, loco, loco is in the DVD.

The DVD also includes an entire 45-minute concert, called Tango Nuevo, with the sextet, for a small audience: lucky people! A reminder that 'Tango Nuevo' was the term coined by Piazzolla for the music he himself wrote. Watching that entire concert suggests that playing bandoneón is a bit like simultaneous touch-typing on two very hard keyboards with different layouts, without being able to see either, while supporting and controlling very precisely a bellows in between them. In fact it's like touch typing on four keyboards, since the notes are different depending on whether you're opening or closing the bellows. It's an difficult, intensely physical instrument to play, particularly at Piazzolla's level. A remarkable composer and a great performer

A great many of Piazzolla's recordings are on Spotify. I was delighted to find the soundtrack to that haunting, haunted, dark Argentine film, Sur, by Fernando E. Solanas, for which he was awarded Best Director at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. The CD is headlined 'Astor Piazzolla' but in the film it's clearly not Piazzolla, but bandoneón player Nestor Marconi with a small, first-class band and the intense, damaged voice of Goyaneche, playing and singing throughout the film in the streets at night, music that is a direct presence in the film rather than background, arranged by Piazzolla and with one or two tracks composed by him, but not performed by him. Absolutely the best film with tango music, and the best tango music I've heard on film.

Also on Spotify is the Naxos CD of Piazzolla's complete music for solo flute and guitar, a wonderful fresh sound: baroque tango. (Joanna MacGregor remarks on '...all the counterpoint in his music. He's a man who really did study his craft.') & Piazzolla's opera, Maria of Buenos Aires, is there, and his recording with Gerry Mulligan...

Incidentally, there's a website, www.piazzolla.org which has audio and video tracks, discographies, biography etc.

&...

...milonga, but hardly as I know it. Have fun!

A real treat

The riches continue to pour out of Marisa Galindo's archives. This (and a few others) appeared two days ago. For anyone who saw Mingo and Esther Pugliese at Carablanca a few weeks back, here's a reminder of how they were in 1991. Plus a charming little 'incident' involving Pupi Castello and Roberto Tonet...

Summer

Tango and food

Tango al Fresco was its usual amiable self: all the fun of the milonga, but out of doors, surrounded by trees and gardens on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. We've been lucky this year: both events have been bright, but overcast enough to keep off the sun's heat. The floor was crowded, as ever, and people aren't really used to dancing in small spaces, but it was great. We ended up in a huge picnic, presided over by Paul and Michiko, with masses of excellent home-cooked food. (The pictures are from the event a few weeks back: this Sunday was much busier.)

A French woman who lives in London and plays musette, a smallish French button accordion, was at the picnic and gave us an impromptu concert. She plays, sings and runs a band professionally: check her out here. Since she likes tango music and the dance I asked her why they don't play tango, and she said no, it's too repetitive, not free enough, actually boring to play.

It's a strange paradox: the dance is improvised from start to finish, but the music is highly organised. The tango player lives with disciplined ensemble playing from written music scores, night after night. Would we continue to dance if we had to dance exactly the same steps, night after night? I've often wondered why tango never embraced the longer format of recording in the late 1940s, as did jazz, but jazz had always been a series of improvisations held together by choruses, and it was natural to extend the improvisations. Unlike tango dance, the music isn't improvised: if a band wants to play a seven-minute tango, someone has to sit down and write the score. Maybe it's beginning to change, but the golden age tangos were played from written music. I must recommend Rodolfo Mederas, Julio Pane, Joaquín Amenábar playing solo bandoneón, as they have complete musical freedom. Dancing to Joaquín Amenábar's solo bandoneón in London last winter, was a great experience. Maybe 'Fifi la Mer' could become 'Flor del Mar'...

Geraldine, Gerardo and Gustavo

Thanks to Simbatango for the good news that Marisa Galindo has put a personal archive of her videos onto YouTube. A lot of treasures there to be enjoyed. Amazing to think that four years ago YouTube had relatively little tango. It's become very valuable.

Geraldine Rojas and Gerardo Portalea together first caught my attention. & it's such a wonderful dance, intensely tender and gentle. Even the way he steps seems to show care and respect for this gifted child who dances so beautifully, and he offers her space in which to dance beautifully. Portaleo late in his life and Geraldine early in hers: there's a sense that they recognise and respect this polarity. & the music comes across very clearly.



Geraldine Rojas and Gustavo Naveira together is very different. Gustavo is a true virtuoso, dexterous, lightning-fast, and capable of endless extraordinary variations. And yet there's something hard about it. She has to keep up with him, and dance to his music rather than having the opportunity to dance to the music as she hears it; it's as if she's in an exam and needs to find the right answers all the time. Instead of the sense of two human beings, they start to look a bit like speeding marionettes. And then there's that avalanche of 'steps' towards the end, which seems out of all proportion to the music. Too many steps!



You could say Gerardo Portalea is a very limited dancer beside Gustavo. He gets through a whole tango with fewer than half a dozen steps, he's slow, lacking inventiveness, energy, liveliness. It's probably just me, but I know I'll watch that clip of Geraldine Rojas and Gerardo Portalea many times, and still be moved by it. I can't say that of the clip of Geraldine with Gustavo.

Tango and Dreams

It seems strange to me, even perverse, that though I spend a lot of time in tango I have never, ever, in four and a half years dreamed about tango. If I spend so much time with it maybe there's no need, but it occurred to me that I do dream about landscapes I no longer live in. I used to work 3,000 feet up in the Himalayan foothills, and I had friends 7,500 feet up in a 'hill' station. The road between climbed a mile, along 25 miles of twisting stomach-churning switch-back grind in old buses. There was a path, too, which I used whenever I had time: a five-mile walk to climb a mile. It took a few hours, from the heavy summer heat below up into cool fresh air, or vice-versa and, either walking up or down, for me it's still the best walk in the world. & I don't recall ever dreaming once about it while I was there, but I do now. It's become a metaphor, a dream-world visual shorthand for difficulty, anxiety, with cheerfulness and comfort at the end of it. A few years back I had a bit of 'flu, or a seriously bad cold that went on for a weary long time, and I dreamed of struggling up that hill and getting to the top. I knew the moment I woke up that I was better.

This seems to tie in with thoughts about other people's tango stories. They are the real thing, but they aren't mine; the meaning I was told is in relation to the way other people see their lives. It's possible to compose a collection of other peoples' stories but it doesn't seem a very interesting or even honourable thing to do. What is interesting is to find something in those stories that is mine, and to make something out of that, in the same way that distance makes a hill climb into a metaphor rather than a 'real' thing.

All of this comes together after last Friday at Carablanca, a great evening because I enjoyed some good dancing, but also because I heard some extraordinary stories. There was also a demonstration which amazed me by the amount of arm-wrestling, his left to her right, something I'd been warned against from my first lesson onwards. It was also extraordinary for how busy and inelegant the dance actually looked, in contrast to the calm elegance of the music. I'm a bit sorry I didn't bother to film it, as I'd love to remove the tango tracks and try replacing them with... perhaps the sound of all-in wrestling? The groans, the cries, the cheers... Just out of curiosity. Soundtracks are so much the key to how we see film, it's always curious to consider changing them. That spooky corridor could become gentle and happy, and that tango performance could look quite different to a different soundtrack.

&, in the context of watching Ashes of Time, perhaps a milonga could be filmed in terms of the dance and all the fragmented narratives around it.

Ashes of Time Redux

I've seen Wang Kar Wai's films in reverse order: I saw 2046 first, and I've just watched Ashes of Time, one of the first films he directed after a decade of writing for the Hong Kong film industry.

Ashes of Time Redux is simply a staggering film, and it's hard to know where to begin; the acting, the story-telling, the cinematography, the music, the setting... Astonishing that when it was first released in 1995 it didn't create much of a stir. It wasn't until WKW, by then well-known, discovered that the original negatives had been so badly stored that they were disintegrating and needed restoration, spent time restoring and revising the film, re-recorded the sound track with Yo-yo Ma, and re-released it as the redux, that it's really come into its own. There's some question about how much digital enhancement was used, but that's not new: it's been used in films since the late 1970s.

Chinese films are often visually striking, but this one is in a category of its own in the use of image, and of the potential of film and filming. A lot of credit to Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, but it's WKW's film, his imagination, his way of working, his ability to use the talents available to him to get more than the best out of them.

A couple of visual moments: towards the end, at a transition point, WKW fills the screen with fire. I think it's a combination of the way the fire is shot, with the contrast of preceding scenes, dark, quiet, cool colours, that makes that fire like nothing I've ever seen before. (& I've seen forest fires up close.) & there's another moment, when the bandits appear, galloping across a foothill in the desert, against a blazing yellow background, sand, as flat brilliant yellow as a wall painted with emulsion. In long shot, of course, so they are flattened against the flat colour, and they keep rising up over the foothill: the beginning of the action part of the film, fighting, shown in brief blurred fragments. The background, the desert, is an important part of the film, and it looks amazing.

The film is amazing to look at, both the desert background and the faces in the foreground; the meeting of Ou-yang Feng and Brigitte Lin, for instance, under stunted trees in intense daylight, but this beauty is just the nature of what we're looking at, never a distraction. There are several stories, and they all interconnect, often in implausible ways. Ou-yang Feng (the late Leslie Cheung) lives alone in a hermitage in the desert as a fixer, usually 'fixing' the elimination of people for reasons of revenge. A perplexing couple, a brother and sister who want each other eliminated, but who are actually the same person, or are acted by the same person, a village girl who has no money, only a mule and a basket of eggs, are two of his clients. Sword fighters come to him looking for work: one survives, another doesn't. Desperate people. The end of the film isn't a climax to all these separate stories, but the discovery of how Ou-yang Feng came to be there in the first place, a story of love, of death, of nostalgia, a story about memory, loss, the seasons, a cyclic story...

In the extras, WKW appears, interviewed; calm, articulate in near-perfect English, eyes completely hidden behind the most impenetrable of dark glasses, like a blind seer. One can only wonder what visions he sees in there. The films are so moving, so intense and perfect, they might well hide tears, too.

False Economy

I read this in a Guardian review of a recently published book, False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World by Alan Beattie: "'Just as good policies can make the poor rich, repeated wrong turns can plunge a first world nation into the ranks of the third world. At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina was among the world's richest countries; the creation of a landed oligarchy and then Peron's myopic populism meant that, 100 years later, it was a serial bankrupt.' The book ends with a warning: 'If it does not address the flaws that brought its financial system into crisis, the US could end up like Argentina.'" Which is a breathtaking warning, not to mention a breathtaking summary of 20th century Argentine history.

I grew up with the notion of Argentina as an impoverished distant land of vicious generals in ridiculous hats, but we've got to remember that they (including Galtieri, and Noriega from Panama) were trained, indoctrinated, in the infamous School of the Americas, based in Georgia, USA, where they were taught to be paranoid and to use a wide range of counter-insurgency measures. There was a terrible distortion of Latin American politics as a result of the cold war, and the people have suffered greatly. All it takes is a couple of wrong turns, and then the global situation made it a lot worse. The country is getting back onto its feet; it takes time, but there's optimism and creativity, and a huge respect for creativity too.

Through tango, we're all implicated in Argentine history, in the economy that supported the production of up to 100,000 tango recordings, and also in the poverty and suffering of the second half of the 20th century. You can visit ESMA, the naval centre in Buenos Aires where until 1983 detainees were held and routinely tortured, and from which they disappeared, if only to get an idea of the background against which most of the older teachers, of their children who teach now, and of the partners you dance with in the milongas, grew up. Everyone wants to put it behind them, but it shouldn't be forgotten. If you lose your past, said musician Branford Marsalis, you lose your future. He was talking about music, but it's another warning.

Good news!

I've just spotted that Andreas Wichter and Monica Lopez will be teaching at Carablanca on August 21 and August 28 (the updated programme).

While we've struggled to dance like Tango por Dos in London, our friends on the continent have been getting on with social dancing. Andreas Wichter is now based in Totnes, and I think this is his first teaching in London. I hope there will be much more. It's getting harder all the time to get social dancers from Buenos Aires: they are the old masters, but they are old now, not so many of them ever spoke English, and enforcing UK immigration policy occupies so much more of the time of our border authorities that recently they failed to spot an illegal immigrant who entered the country underneath their bus as they returned from France. He ran off in Folkstone and hasn't been seen since. It's unlikely that he was a milonguero desperate to get here to teach us.

Fortunately there are now good dancers and teachers of tango salon on the continent. Andreas Wichter doesn't boast of years spent with Tango por Dos, nor of having choreographed Broadway tango shows. He says: 'We are salón dancers and teachers, not show dancers. So you will see neither choreography nor open embrace figures in these videos. We just dance pretty much as we would in an (uncrowded) milonga.' It's got to be a refreshing change of emphasis.

Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch was one of the great creators of contemporary dance, running her own company for many years in Wuppertal, the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, which achieved international acclaim. She died at the end of June.

On a visit to Buenos Aires with her company in 1994 she saw Tete Rusconi dance, and they became friends, performing together. The whole story has been added to Tete and Silvia's website, with some good photos: it is here. On YouTube there's plenty of Pina Bausch, and plenty of Tete and Silvia, but sadly there's nothing of Pina and Tete.

Can tango change?

There was a comment a few weeks back that '...it's not right to think that the dance cannot change', and I'm still not really sure what that can mean. On one level the dance is always changing. No two dancers dance identically; everyone dances their own tango, and that is how it should be, in constant renewal. We aren't choreographed show dancers who work hard to present simultaneous and identical moves; we don't slavishly imitate our teachers. Moreover, there's a limit to what two people in close, or fairly close embrace can do together to that music on a crowded dance floor. But my impression is that that limit had been very fully explored by 1950, if not earlier.

'Nuevo' dancers seem to suggest that they are the creative leaders of a new tango, of exciting new directions and new possibilities, but I wonder if that isn't just marketing talk. I have to admit I don't watch them a lot, but I've never noticed anything that wasn't explored by Todaro (1929-1994) (in this video of him and his daughter from the early 1950s) and 'Petroleo' (1912 - 1995), as taught today by Mingo and Esther Pugliese, a detailed exploration of all the possible ganchos, saccadas and barridas at every step of the giro. The style and presentation may change, but I'm not sure the core of the dance has changed.

Pablo Veron dismisses claims to a tango nuevo dance as deceitful, in an interview with El Tangauta in December 2008 (you have to create a login to access the material). 'Speaking of tango nuevo as a dance is difficult because the name proposes a division with the past, and that is very debatable, relative and deceitful. It is the definition of the music of Piazzolla, and to copy the name, as if that was enough to be equivalent and thus to be different, does not seem correct. It is as if they want you to believe that they invented tango. In that case: What was danced before? Tango is tango and has always been transforming itself since its origins, and if each renewal was a new tango, today we would have many new tangos. Tango was made by all of us dancers of all generations who contributed something, and this has been happening for more than 100 years!'

A rapid exploration of possibilities seems to have happened in cinema in much the same period of time. The language of cinema, the way stories are told with pictures and sound, was perfected between 1900 and 1930 and that language is still current. The way von Sternberg shows the stories of his two 1932 films, Blonde Venus and Shanghai Express, both with Marlene Dietrich, is totally familiar, even contemporary. The opening to Shanghai Express is one of the most memorable opening sequences ever, a classic piece of film-making. There have been technical advances, but the basic visual language hasn't changed much, and yet we still enjoy films.

Contact improvisation seems the only area in which a tango-like dance actually changes and develops, but there it starts to move into an area of contemporary dance. Personally I find there's a huge legacy in tango to discover, to try to perfect, and to enjoy. Dancing it well is most important to me: and it's important to enjoy dancing to the music, and I can only hope that as many partners as possible will enjoy it with me. & if 'change' means to be a step collector, what's the point? That's sterile, futile.

I recently came across this from Ney Melo: 'There will never be a step, sequence, or trick in tango that will come close to matching the power of the embrace.' Yes, yes, and yes again!

Capsulitis...

...is the inflammation of the membrane that protects joints. It frequently affects the joint at the base of the second or third toes and the ball of the foot. It's more common in women; even if you don't wear high heels you'll probably still dance on your toes. Apparently most patients are found to be wearing shoes that are too small. It seems to be important not to ignore discomfort in that area: try to dance through it and it will get worse, and long-term inflammation can damage the joint and deform the foot. A friend and dance partner has just been put out of action for a while. Beware! Seek expert help early.

Eva Wolff

Since I'm always going on about the Orquesta Escuela: the BBC broadcast a short programme about Eva Wolff, a bandoneón player from Belgium, who won a scholarship to study with the Orquesta in 2001, and now lives and plays professionally in Buenos Aires: it should be here. It's in the Musical Migrants series.

Happy Together

Happy Together (1997) is a surprisingly tough, difficult film by Wang Kar Wei, which really took me by surprise. I think of In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004), both of which I saw before Happy Together, and remember some of the most beautiful female actors China and the Chinese territories have found, dressed and presented with alluring elegance. Zhang Ziyi, the young princess in House of Flying Daggers, in sumptuous 1940s brocade costumes and elaborately elegant hair, for instance, and male counterparts to match. Not that these films are lacking in toughness; their lack of certainty about event, sequence and character make them constantly challenging.

But the tale of two young Chinese men who have run away together from Hong Kong for various reasons, whose relationship is turbulent, intense, often violent, and ultimately disintegrating as they struggle to survive in Buenos Aires, came as a surprise. There's not a great deal of 'plot' in the conventional sense. Ho Po Wing (Leslie Cheung) is the more resilient of the two, getting work as a doorman at a tango club – and meeting other men. They manage to buy an old car to visit the Iguaza Falls in the north of the country, but it breaks down. They learn a bit of tango, and dance together, but it's hardly a 'tango film': it's more about being an outsider speaking a foreign language and struggling to survive in a difficult city.

Ho Po Wing meets another young Chinese traveller, who invites strangers to tell stories into his tape recorder: he takes Ho Po Wing's story down to the lighthouse at the extreme south of Argentina, a place where it is said that reconciliations take place, but the 'story' on the tape is just the sound of sobbing. & Ho Pi Wing does finally visit the Iguaza Falls, an overwhelming, destructive force of nature, like desire, and beautiful, too. The compassion and emotional strength of the film is extraordinary. & like all Wei's films it looks amazing, black and white for the more intense scenes, and powerfully altered colour for the run-down boarding house at the edge of the old docks in La Bocca: the area has probably been 'regenerated' since then. Homage, I guess, to Argentine novelist Manuel Puig, (Kiss Of The Spider Woman) in style, although Puig has a dark sense of humour. Happy Together is a film of despair.

The 'Extras' reveal that Wang Kar Wei kept his cast and crew in Buenos Aires months longer than planned, writing and filming scene after scene to try and work out what seemed to him the right sequence. Everyone became increasingly fraught and homesick: Tony Leung reveals that at one stage he'd packed his suitcase, bought a ticket and plotted his escape. All of this, of course, fed into the film, which won Wang Kar Wei the Best Director award at Cannes in 1997, and some Best Actor awards elsewhere.

Stories

Carablanca was closed last night, so I went to Negracha and had an unexpectedly good evening, dancing for the most part with partners I didn't know.

I'm always fascinated by tango stories, the one-sentence stories people tell strangers about themselves in between dances. They always follow the same pattern: a situation, then an event that leads to a new situation. It's a traditional story pattern, in a single sentence. Less is usually more: so little is said that a lot is often suggested, intentionally or unintentionally, or perhaps simply imagined. Immediately, you know a lot about your partner – and nothing at all, really. I've thought of writing them down, but although they actually say very little, and the teller can be anonymous, there is something quite personal about the telling of them. I'd feel uncomfortable about writing them here for anyone to read.

An evening with plenty of dancing in a crowded room: it gets easier, particularly with a partner who can be led easily. Yes, it's a lot more pleasant in an open space, and Negracha was crowded, the usual clogged-up floor. Not that there were actually that many people there: it's just that their dancing takes a lot of room. Beginners and gancho-throwers occupying the line of dance: not much to chose between them! I notice that Igor Polk, the deep apilado man, or rather the man with the deep apilado partner, comments on it (you'll need to scroll down to 2009 April 20). He observes that forming a 'bus' of several couples moving round is one possible response, much as I've heard the 'convoy' suggested here. More interestingly, he says that '...floor stagnation is quite a recent phenomenon' and he wonders why.

& Leandro Palou and Romina Godoy, Tangosoul, were there. Good to see them again briefly. I haven't attended their classes for a while. & good music: plenty of favourite D'Agostino.

You said candombe and I said canyengue...

… which rather confused things. I'd never sorted out the difference: now I need to.

Candombe is the only music with drums we're likely to hear in a milonga. It's still a big part of the popular music tradition in Uruguay, but has more or less disappeared from public view in Argentina, along with most of the black population. But it used to be there: the black milonguero Facundo Posadas told RFT that when he was a child in 1945 the candombe drums used to play at the Shimmy Club in Buenos Aires for black audiences, who would go into trance, and that he was warned not to bother them. RFT says: '...key candombe steps were inserted into the habanera and the result of this was the milonga'. Facundo says: 'The candombe of today is not the candombe danced a long time ago. But the little that remained we put into the milonga.'

According to RFT's sources, canyengue was the pre-1900 precursor of tango, and it started to evolve rapidly after 1900. Rodolfo Cieri and his childhood friend, 'El Gallego' Manolo learned the canyengue of 1900, along with tango, when they were growing up in the 1940s. 'El Gallego' Manolo and his partner Martha Anton still teach in Buenos Aires.

RFT claims an African origin for both canyengue and candombe but says that along the way they met the polka, newly arrived from Europe...

(RFT = Robert Farris Thompson: Tango: The Art History of Love, an exploration of the black origins of tango music and dance.)

The Alfano Decree

I haven't seen this referred to anywhere else, but perhaps we should all be aware of it:

"On July 15 around 200 Italian bloggers gathered at the Piazza Navona in Rome. They wore gags to protest a proposed law that is a direct threat to internet freedom in Italy. If passed it could impose heavy fines on bloggers who don't correct 'offensive' comments within 48 hours. Hundreds of other bloggers 'froze' their blog posts for a day in a show of solidarity with the protesters.

"Given the appetite for repressive measures in Italy these days, it's not surprising that Italian bloggers have become a target. Berlusconi and his sycophantic retinue of crypto-fascists, compliant bureaucrats, models-turned-politicians and party girls doesn't like negative attention.

"Italian bloggers are some of his most vociferous critics. Legislative measures are under way to place them on a short leash and possibly put some of them out of business altogether.

"The tactic being employed is the so-called Alfano proposal, named after Justice Minister, Angelino Alfano. But you could also call it an 'internet killer' because in effect it is an attempt to silence and intimidate online critics by means of a law that is at root anti-democratic.

"The Alfano decree has already been approved by Parliament and if passed by the Senate, will become law. The provisions have far-reaching implications for freedom of speech in Italy.

"If a citizen deems a blog post to be defamatory, he or she can lodge an official complaint that could require the blogger to edit the offending content within 48 hours. A blogger's refusal to correct 'offensive' comments would allow the denouncing citizen to sue for as much as $18,000... The effect will be to mute blog content, particularly criticism of government and public figures.

"Bloggers are already liable to penalties in the case of defamation. The Alfano proposal is a bureaucratic tactic that crosses the line and handcuffs bloggers as they sit at their keyboards. It is nothing less than an attack on a fundamental freedom under the guise of 'responsibility'."

More music notes

I'm afraid I under-represented Emilio Balcarce. I wrote that he was ...'an octogenarian who takes on a new orquesta, directs it, and writes its repertoire'. But he is also a composer (Bien Compadre, Si Sos Brujo, La Bordona among others) – and he played bandoneon with the Orquesta Escuela too. Although he often conducted them, you may hear a bandoneon that is incredibly expressive, that really sings, that has an incredibly fine sense of volume and a marvelously supple sense of rhythm, and that may well be Emilio Balcarce. A truly extraordinary musician.

Fabio Cernuda, a bandoneonista from Buenos Aires, recently completed a discography of music recorded by tango musicians: it took him 20 years. Between 1902 and 1992, 90 years of accoustic recording, he found an astonishing 70,000 tracks were recorded. Not all of them still exist as records, unfortunately, but what an achievement. In terms of duration that's about 5,000 full-length classical symphonies: in terms of quantity, in a single century Buenos Aires may have produced almost as much music as the whole of Europe in three centuries. Perhaps that's indicative of the importance of tango in creating an identity that unified the diverse cultures of Buenos Aires.

Some music notes

I enjoyed Color Tango but, as someone pointed out, their performances are still very much Pugliese: nothing wrong with that, but the arrangements they use are those familiar from Pugliese recordings. There are five albums for free (plus a few ads) on Spotify.

I've liked the Orquesta Escuela since I first heard them a few years ago, and the arrangements they use are new. The film Si Sos Brujo hardly mentions that Emilio Balcarce, who was an arranger and bandoneon player with Pugliese and who directed the Orquesta, seems to have written new arrangements for everything they play; an octogenarian who takes on a new orquesta, directs it, and writes its repertoire. I wanted to link their Cumparasita from the Contrapunta album, which is just absolutely the best and a long-time favourite, and was actually the first tango I heard in Buenos Aires: stuck in downtown gridlock the driver turned off the radio and put on a cassette – and out came this very distinctive Cumparasita. I wanted to link it, but you can't link from Spotify, and although LastFM has the Contrapunta album, for some bizarre reason they have substituted another Cumparasita, by 'Various artists' in place of the orquesta one, and it's dire. But the album is available as a download from Amazon for £5.99, which is great value and has the right Cumparasita on it. Listen out for the bandoneon solo: it rocks. Like any Pugliese-style music it would be a challenge to dance to, but it's exciting listening.

But it's easy to link their Gallo Ciego and La Bordona.

A music journalist and music addict, musically illiterate and with no music skills, spends a year at the Royal Academy of Music learning composition, trying to understand his obsession. He can hardly tap out a simple rhythm to start with: music, its structure and how it's made, has to be explained to him from the very basis upwards. The luxury of suggesting ideas to groups of talented students to improvise on, and having another talented student to write them down, is his. How to be a Composer is on BBC4: the first episode is here, for anyone within reach of the BBC. The editing is innovative, very fluent. (PS. & some of the best young and not so young faces I've seen anywhere for a long time. There is hope for the world, and it is called music.)

Schools

I remembered reading this interview with Maria Nievas a while ago, and dug it out again last night. Maria Nievas, lying about her age, first went to milongas when she was 12, and when she was 14 she started to dance with a young Juan Carlos Copes, who she danced with for many years, in Paris and on Broadway, and around the world. Here she is, interviewed by Silvia Rojas:

“I learned by watching, girl, nobody taught me,” she starts to tell, this living legend of the milonga and stage tango…
- So, what do you think of the schools?
- I’m against the schools. Absolutely! It’s a con. Nobody’s the owner of the truth in tango. I always tell them when I give a lesson: there’s no better teacher than to go to the milonga! Wear out shoes, get kicked and have your feet stepped on, and do the same yourself. It’s true, girl!”

I listened to a recent programme on jazz trumpeter Booker Little, who died aged 23 in 1961. He was one of the first generation to learn to play jazz in school, whereas his peers had learned on the job. I was struck by his observation that learning jazz in school led to an over-reliance on technique, a tendency he had to struggle against. & I wonder about the tango academies of present-day Buenos Aires. I can't help imagining a syllabus: third semester, major in Estilo Milonguero with a minor in Villa Urquiza... (PS. I hope I'm being unfairly cynical.)