Bouncy music, and the art of the DJ

'If this DJ has played any music that isn't bouncy, it must have been before I arrived' said a partner whose insights I value. She'd been there most of the evening, so it was a serious criticism -- and a disappointment.Sadly, the art of putting together an evening of tango music for dancing is a mystery to me. Of course I know what I like and don't like, and I write to explore that. Writing is a way of looking for answers.

Just ten years ago tango wasn't easy to find. If record shops had tango sections, they were for Piazzola, with maybe some Pugliese. Tango wasn't that easily available online, either. But it seems that about ten years ago record companies discovered a new product they could market. It's not a kind of dance music most of us grew up with, and it's amazing how fast it has become familiar to dancers here. 

By about five or six years ago the quality of an evening's music had become a regular topic for conversation during milongas. The DJ is a frequent reason people go to a particular milonga here these days: I came because so-and-so is playing, and I like her/his music. It's also a reason I've heard for not going to other milongas. Since a few years ago, a vast range of excellent tango has become easily available, and hard drives have become huge, so music doesn't have to be compressed. I think there's an audible difference: 78s may sound a bit scratchy, but the sound quality of the music is often quite good. Heavy compression makes music dull. You might not notice it at first, but compressed music sounds dreary after a few hours. DJs put in a lot of work collecting different versions, new high-quality transfers, and the days when they played evenings with a limited range of low-quality recordings from five or ten CDs are gone.

How visiting Buenos Aires DJs organise an evening that draws you into a marvelously satisfying musical space is a mystery. It's an art that some European DJs have mastered too, but I guess that long practice and life-long familiarity with the music are a big part of it. I asked Silvia Ceriani last summer when she was in London if she had a system of tagging the music on her laptop. She laughed. 'No! I know my music!' Thousands of tracks, and she can pick out tracks to make coherent tandas, and fit them with each other. 

(I include the UK in Europe. Make of that what you will.)

So why the evening of bouncy music? It's a paradox that just when a huge range of music is available, it seems that there are DJs who play long sequences of similar music. Yes, there is bouncy tango, but to play it all evening is exhausting for many dancers, and it's a style of DJ practice that looks more to the 100 Club than to the milonga. I'm sure it's well-meant – keep it lively, keep people on their feet. I've heard it's the expected DJ style at some events. I get the impression that there's a move in Europe in general to play a much simpler range of music, whole evenings when the tempo and emotional range of the music are simplified, avoiding in particular the slower, more emotional music. It's easier to keep moving to a regular rhythm and to straightforward music, so no Di Sarli! No D'Agostino! No Fresedo! Probably no Troilo! Much too difficult! But if this is a temptation, I think it should be avoided. Perhaps you can live on beans on toast, but it would be a pity to miss out on a very much wider range of food and flavours that nourish you in many different ways. 

There's an amazing range in the music, from the bouncy to the sublime, the sophisticated to the simple, the energetic to the laid back. There's emotional music, there's lively music, there's beat music, there's melodic music. & some music – Troilo in particular – often combines many ranges. An evening of one kind of music or one tempo gets tedious. Each kind of music provides a setting for another kind, a contrast. The real genius of the DJ is in knowing how to assemble a sequence of music that keeps the ear (and the rest of the body) happy for hours, and it takes DJs with a wide and intimate knowledge of the music to make each tanda exciting, so your eyes eagerly search out a partner. DJs like that are very much welcomed by dancers!

'Just Dancing Around'

This is a link to a 50-minute documentary made by Mike Figgis in 1995 after five weeks filming with William Forsythe's Ballet Frankfurt during the rehearsals and performance of a new programme. I had the DVD on loan a few years back and it's great to find that it's now on Vimeo. Even greater that Figgis himself uploaded it, so it's unlikely a copyright owner is going to come and remove it just when you want to watch it. 

'It's not about steps, anyway. Choreography is about organisation. Either you're organising the body or you're organising bodies with other bodies, or a body with other bodies in an environment that is organised. There's these framings of organisation, for me. & this seems to be the challenge of choreography at the end of the 20th century.' Not tango choreography, of course, nor tango either, but this statement about contemporary dance has some resonance with tango. It seems to be a surprisingly clear statement of the experience of dancing in a milonga, the experience of how we organise the body with other bodies and in an environment which is a cultural and historical framing. Steps? It's not about steps...

& if you think 'Ballet... no thanks!' watch just the first three minutes.

'...and the Tango was born. Come and learn the basic steps!'

It's so dismaying to keep reading this view of tango! Not that there aren't basic steps: of course there are! It's knowing that when teachers talk about teaching 'basic steps' they mean teaching patterns they call salidas, giros, sacadas... 

What are the basic steps we learn when we go to pre-milonga classes in Buenos Aires? The first two are putting one foot in front of the other, or behind it -- walking. A simple act we take for granted. But walking is not that simple in dancing tango. Why else would beginners and more advanced dancers alike at group classes in Buenos Aires spend 30 or 40 minutes at the start of each class they go to, practicing walking? Stepping forwards, stepping back, with teachers and their assistants coming round to help you get it right, to get your walking so it works well when you dance in close embrace, and so it looks good. & it's not so much about walking to the music as it's taken for granted that timing is precise. It's the way of walking that matters, the way of using energy. Simple patterns of steps are also taught, but the priority is how you walk, the basic steps of tango.

If we try to walk in close embrace in the same way we walk on the streets, or the same way we step backwards in daily life without reconsidering the way we walk, our tango will be awkward, insipid, and probably uncomfortable to our partners. It's a different kind of walking, and moreover we need to learn how to make each step count. This is tango from the inside, not just the superficial appearance of tango footwork. It's never insipid, it doesn't look awkward, and it's unlikely ever to feel uncomfortable.

More from the milongas

I've just updated this post. The videos I thought had been removed are still there: I posted the wrong link. As I said, they aren't the best videos, but altogether they give a good view of a very enjoyable milonga. & a friend has just sent me this link to a series of videos of the Lo de Celia milonga posted by EQZ tango DJ, with posts of some excellent music too. This started at the beginning of the year, and is ongoing. So now we know how people dance in Buenos Aires!

Blog list problems on Blogger

No sooner have I found a way out of one problem on Blogger when another pops up. I can't update the blog list. Many people have reported it on the forums. Google's 'expert reply' in 2013 is that they are working on it night and day, but I have yet to find their answer. It's suggested that the problem is because individual computers manage cookies/filters/scripts and security measures differently. (So I guess it gets dismissed as 'user error'.) If anyone has found a simple answer please let me know.

I wanted to add one blog This is European DJ Konrad Krynski's blog about tango music and its stories.

I also need to update the address of the Realitypivots blog, the story I've always enjoyed of living on a smallholding in the woods of North America while maintaining a connection with tango. The scene has shifted to Thailand, and the new address is here. In reply to David's comment, I've done what I can to push the Ricardo Vidort website onto the net, but it's not up to me. However, I'm told that much of the material is already available on the web, though not collected into one place.

Walking

I was delighted to find this clip recently.



It's a short quote from a TV documentary made in 1999, in which Royal Ballet soloist Deborah Bull explored four kinds of dance; hip-hop, swing, belly dance and tango. (I wrote about this clip here, before I found it.) The tango programme includes a sequence with the author and broadcaster Clive James who was then a regular tanguero. A pity the whole programme isn't available. In this clip one of the earliest tango dancers in the UK, Christine Denniston, teaches Deborah to walk, and outlines some of the background of social tango.

Sadly, perhaps, the programme ends with a highly choreographed tango performance: I could wish it ended with Deborah happily lost in a Buenos Aires milonga. I watched it before I started classes in London, and the insights of this clip in particular stayed with me. & I've read that Susanna and Cacho amazed Londoners with just how close together they danced...

Interesting thought: Christine says that because there were relatively few women in Argentina in the years when tango evolved, men had to work out how to please the women they danced with, as women had plenty of choice of partners. The pressure to evolve came from that need. Currently in London the opposite is true; there are often many more women than men. It follows that there is less pressure on men to improve their dance, as they can usually find partners, although this must be offset to some extent because men who do dance get more practice.

(I've worked out how to embed video! It used to be straightforward until a software upgrade a few years back. Since then, an HTML embed code pasted into the text editor has been simply published as embed code. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I should try inserting the embed code into the HTML editor rather than into the text editor. Either that, or write in the HTML editor from the start.

& someone asked if I knew how to enable comments. It's under options in the post settings on the right of the 'compose' page.)

Some videos of Ismael Heljalil

I was totally astonished to see a couple of videos of Ismael Heljalil dancing with María Nieves at La Nacional a few months ago. Surely that's not the María Nieves, the tango queen of Broadway, and long-time partner of Juan Copes? The María does still dance, but recent videos of her don't greatly resemble this María, who is almost certainly younger. (The María was born in 1938.) I've never seen Ismael Heljalil outside Lo de Celia, looking frail in a heavy sweater which I assumed protected him from the airconditioning, but there's no doubt it's him in La Nacional, looking well and minus the sweater.

I first saw him on TangoandChaos. At a time when there were few videos of salon tango on YouTube, TangoandChaos suddenly electrified many of us with a series of videos of traditional tangueros from the then distant world of the Buenos Aires milongas. So this is what tango looks like in Buenos Aires! We'd heard about it but never seen it. The very first of these videos was of Ismael Heljalil in Lo de Celia, and the music was No Me Extraña of Pedro Laurenz. McGarry wrote a thoughtful introduction to the video and the music. As he says, there's no 'real giro', but what strikes me is that it is a dance full of turning. The opening phrase is about thirty seconds, and the couple calmly turn back and forth in one corner of the floor, and the dance continues like this. It's a dance suited to confined space, and of course the constant turning gives the lead a mental picture of the space around. 


(Apologies: this isn't from the T&C site, as the video there loads slowly -- it was set up before YouTube got so good.) I still love to watch this clip, and I still find No Me Extraña (along with Paisaje, also from Laurenz) just marvelous music. 

I enjoy watching clips of the complex and energetic dance of Ricardo Vidort. Ismael's dance may be deceptively simple by comparison, but as an example it's less intimidating. The content of the dance is the way he dances, rather than the steps he uses. It's not a particularly slow dance, but wonderfully effortless, smooth and unhurried, energetic, and calmly precise on the beat. The more recent clips of Ismael with María are more of the same, but in La Nacional, which is well-lit and more open than Lo de Celia, so the dance is clearer. I enjoy watching this María: I like her simple elegance, nothing superfluous, and her total attention to the music.

Not to dismiss the María who, it's said, claimed her success came without ever taking a lesson. 'The first time I danced the tango, it entered my skin through my feet, passed from my skin to my blood and through my blood to my heart. It requires no acrobatics, you simply have to devote yourself to your heartbeat.' & her comment on a recent Mundial del Tango was brief: 'Menos aire y mas piso', '[There should be] less air and more floor'. 'Tango acrobatics' is an oxymoron.

There are also two excellent videos of Ismael in Maipu 444 from Jantango and three tangos in Lo de Celia from Isa Negra tango.

17 tangos at Lujos milonga

I've just noticed that Tangotradicional videoed 17 tangos at Lujos milonga in October 2012, over two nights I think. A while back I wrote that it would be wonderful if there was an online camera at Lujos so it would be possible to drop in at any time and watch the dancing: it's not quite happened yet. I wrote '17 tangos' but the 17 clips include rock and chacarera, and sadly many of the tangos are shortened, but it's still a treat to watch much of the dancing here. 



Lujos is one of the top milongas for dancers, and the tango is usually as good as it gets. The venue is more spacious than El Beso, and it's much less of a hothouse. There's a lot less chatter than in Normarin1's videos, which are of some of the more sociable milongas, so the dancing is much more focused. For video the great advantage is that the lighting is good, and (unlike El Beso and Lo de Celia) there's usually space on the floor and around it. Apart from La Nacional, there's nowhere else I know that you can get such a good view of what some of the best social tango looks like at home. There was always a solid core of the older generation, and in these clips I recognise familiar faces, among them Ricardo Suarez, Javier Gramigna, and of course, Oscar Kotik, who organises it with Lucia. 

Marina2x4 also has videos of tandas at Lujos. 

P.S. Apologies, I made a mistake and linked this to the Abretango channel, so I was puzzled when the videos weren't there. In fact all those videos are still there -- on the Tangotradicional channel. More or less the same people, I think, so it wasn't an unreasonable error. I'm delighted to have found the videos again. A great pleasure to watch.

More chest!

At the end of a tanda I asked the Very Experienced Partner about the need for a lead to be decisive without being in the least rough. 'More chest!' was her immediate, clear and memorable reply, without hesitation. 'More chest is never rough!' she added.

She made it sound so straightforward, and yet... It's easy enough for leads to remember, at the start of a tango, to straighten the back and shoulders, breath in and hold the chest forwards, but imperceptibly it all slumps, the initial good contact with the partner deteriorates, and leading can become more awkward. Tango developed among people whose posture was naturally good, who weren't slumped at terminals all day, who walked a lot more than we usually do. Most of us don't have good posture, we tend to be round-shouldered, our heads habitually inclined forwards, our lower backs curved out, as they are when we sit at desks and tables. It can be a submissive, despairing posture.

Good yoga, Pilates or Alexander teachers can help correct this, and get the back straight and the head stacked on top of the vertebrae. It's essentially the body's natural posture, the position in which it works best and is least prone to injury (lower back injury in particular), and it's really the only good starting posture for tango. Or any other kind of dance: if you go to the stage door cafe at London's dance theatre, Sadler's Wells, you'll start to notice two species of human, those who have straight backs with their heads in line, and... well, sadly, the rest of us

Juan Carlos Pontoriero

I was devastated to get this from a friend yesterday:

Lovely film of Isabella dancing with Juan Carlos.
Unfortunately, I think he died around 15th April. I heard he was attacked on a bus on the way home from El Maipu & had a heart attack.
My teacher had just been sitting at the same table, talking to him earlier that night.

This!

I love this!

Sometimes I come across a tango video that really lifts me up, and this is one of them, uploaded very recently, although the milonga was in 2012. Many thanks for it, it's a real joy. 

(I still can't embed videos: the embed code gets printed in the post, with no video in sight. It's a pain!)

& I notice how much 'dip and lift' energises this dance! It's one of the clearest examples of what a good friend and teacher kept saying to me: Con el cuerpo! Con el cuerpo! [Dance] with the body! Meaning, not just with the feet. It's decisive and tender, physical and very gentle.

It's uploaded by Isabella Szymonowicz, who has a wonderful tango blog which I'd never noticed before. At a casual glance I read her posting on Juan Carlos Pontoriero (with whom she's dancing in the video), some clear and simple instructions on how to write a tango, and a really valuable link to a US site from which a pair of high quality suede stick-on soles, backed with an industrial-strength adhesive, can be purchased for about £16. & they ship internationally. Almost too good to be true. Other interesting possibilities for your shoes there. 

& other interesting posts on Isabella's blog. Oh yes, and an excellent interview with Alicia Pons.

Dos porteños tocando el piano

This link is here so I don't have to go looking for it again. Two extraordinary musicians from the same time and place, Buenos Aires.

Abrazos

I'm enjoying the soft, gentle, almost hesitant embrace of another London partner... and suddenly feel something is missing. I experience a wave of nostalgia for the portena embrace. I don't remember ever dancing with a portena whose embrace I could describe as soft and gentle, certainly never hesitant. Not a single one. I could describe the portena embrace as direct, strong, emphatic, even confrontational, but not soft or compliant. A portena embrace seemed more like a challenge: 'You want to dance with me, so make me dance!' Warm and direct, nothing uncomfortable, nothing apologetic. You might not notice this when you're watching, but I think it's something you're likely to feel if you dance there.

I get the impression there's a whole industry built up around 'decoraciones', even though they aren't much use in improvised social dancing. I never noticed this industry in Buenos Aires, where teaching seemed to emphasise the woman standing up to the man, so to speak, an emphasis on a firm, positive embrace. No compliant partners who seem all too eager to follow there, and I often felt I had to work to get a good dance, I had to put energy into a clear and positive lead. There's an element of resistance, and I can feel nostalgic for that toughness, the sense that an equal energy meets my energy. We meet on equal terms, and I'm challenged to prove myself. So even if the resulting dance doesn't go far (there's probably not a lot of space to move in) it feels full of energy. A very positive lead and follow is essential if you want to move together in a small space, and when you get it, the dance doesn't feel like a 'lead and follow' situation, just two people moving as one. That's the magic of it!

Of course, women can be shy about close embrace with partners they don't know – and so can men! In a Buenos Aires milonga the only opportunity a man and woman have of being together is on the actual dance floor, which encourages them to be more direct, more open, when they dance since the social situation is limited off the floor. Adapting to the different height of partners isn't always easy. But I think the real problem is a kind of teaching that just teaches patterns of footwork, ignoring a good walk and a good embrace, the art of putting emphasis and energy into each step, which are a priority in social tango classes in Buenos Aires.

Stepping back.

Women step back too, or at least they ought to...

London tango seems to me to be between eras. Generally, people learned and still learn to dance in 'open embrace' (which isn't an embrace at all!) That's inevitable at present. In open embrace you're in contact with your partner with your hands and arms so it simply doesn't matter how you walk. But when you embrace your partner, torso to torso, the whole dance changes. How you walk suddenly becomes important. Perhaps teaching here hasn't caught up with this change in the kind of dancing.

This becomes particularly obvious when I dance with a partner I've not met before; I step forwards and my knees bump her knees. Oh no... She assures me that in her beginners' classes there's a lot of walking, but I suspect it's an emphasis on walking to the beat, rather than on posture and the mechanics of walking suited to close embrace. My partner is walking backwards as you would in normal life: her knees come up a bit, and then as each foot goes down her torso jerks slightly backwards. Which is fine in normal life, but it's a dangerous combination to anyone dancing close with her. Maybe she's been told and it simply hasn't registered that it's important, or maybe walking just hasn't been taught in the classes she's been to.

(I remember the story Christine Denniston tells in a short film about tango: she was taught to walk at her first class, and went home and practiced it every evening for a month. It was years ago now, and she didn't mention who taught her, but she practiced it to perfection: when she went to Buenos Aires she says she fitted in easily as a dancer.)

It's simple enough to step back in tango. The woman reaches back with her foot, to some extent straightening her leg. Her other leg, the leg her weight is on, might flex a bit, which can give energy to the step. It's not stepping back in the everyday sense, it's reaching back. Well done, it looks great, energetic and purposeful. Reaching back has a second effect: as you reach back, your torso pushes forwards, which means the embrace is firmer: perhaps this is how the really close embrace of the Buenos Aires dance arises. The pivotal point is the lower back, and perhaps that's why this aspect of tango gets ignored here. If your lower back is weak, 'reaching back' might feel uncomfortable at first. & if you are hesitant about committing to close embrace you might not want to push your torso forwards.

In Buenos Aires it's taken for granted that tango is danced close, and even complete beginners are expected to dance close. I've been to all the group classes and pre-milonga classes I could, and in all of them walking can take up the first 30 or 40 minutes of a 90-minute class. It's walking to the beat, and also correction of posture and the practice of walking. Cacho Dante gets his assistants to take a separate class for newcomers, where they only walk. He's strict about it; until their walking is good, they don't join the main class. Some very beautiful dancers come out of his classes, dancers who look at ease, effortless and comfortable even in crowded milongas, as they've been well drilled, from the basics of walk upwards. Sadly, I've never spent long enough there to become that well drilled. & I think Cacho allowed me into his main class out of politeness: I suspect he really thought I needed a month or so with his assistants, practicing just walking.

Ricardo Vidort website

There were several comments about the proposed Ricardo Vidort website, which was laid out by Jantango, and remains currently unpublished. I got some news about it a couple of days ago. The email I received isn't altogether clear, but I understand that translation has taken time: there are a number of interviews which had to be subtitled in English, and texts which have had to be translated, as the site needs to be bi-lingual. The good news is that much of this has now been completed, and it's possible that it will be available later this year.

I'm afraid the problem isn't uncommon: if you work at something out of love, it's easier for other things to get in the way, family commitments, illness, other work. It's a bit sad, but money does focus the mind! Anyway, I understand that the project is well on its way, and I hope we can look forward to seeing it fairly soon. I've suggested it could be published chapter by chapter, as work is completed, rather than waiting for everything to be finished. Let's see what happens!

The backstep

We started to talk about the back step. My partner claimed that good leads make deep backsteps, which she maintained gives energy to the dance. I wasn't so sure about the depth. In any case, deep backsteps can be a health hazard.

When I got home I started to look through some videos of the old guys. Ricardo Vidort steps back occasionally, but it's rarely a formal backstep, more like a quick rebound: most of the time he seems to be running forwards and around his partners. Tete took big backsteps in demos, but he took big steps anyway. Other dancers are like Ricardo Vidort: you don't really notice the back step although it is there. I don't think you can dance without stepping back sometimes.

I remembered that Ricardo Suarez has a very quick, energetic and precise backstep. How is it possible to get so much energy into a counter-intuitive and possibly awkward step? I watched some videos, and all the answers seem there in this short clip, first in real timethen in slow motion. He dances with his weight well forwards, as is usual for his generation. Then as he steps back, his right knee bends and his body sinks onto it, a smooth, swooping movement with a rebound back up onto a straight left leg. I think the big point is that he doesn't just step back; his whole body moves back and down, and he carries his partner with him. She's drawn downwards and forwards into a positive step. & since Ricardo's whole body moves back the foot stepping back stays almost flat to the ground.

My impression is that the energy comes from the whole body movement, and the precision of Ricardo's timing itself creates energy. This flexing of the leg you are stepping away from, and landing on a straight leg, is fairly consistent across the older dancers. It's the same pattern when taking a simple step to the left.

(Ah! The parquet floor of Maipu 444, and the red and black table cloths of Cachirulo! Ricardo's partner in March 2009 was Florencia Bellozo.)

So my partner was right in one way, there's energy in the backstep, but the energy isn't the consequence of a long step. Ricardo Suarez makes clear and relatively deep backsteps, but they don't need to be big to make sure they are full of energy.

More on Troilo and the arrangers

Many thanks to Mike Lavocah for taking the trouble to email and correct me on the story of Troilo and his arrangers. He writes:

'Troilo's main arrangers in those years (1941-1944) were Argentino Galván and the neglected Héctor María Artola. Piazzolla made only ten arrangements back then. He was the main arranger for the band for a time, but much later, in the early 1950s. This information and more besides is in my book on Troilo - I worked hard to research the contribution of the arrangers, as they were such an important part of the Troilo story.'

I relied (as usual) on the information on Todotango which is curiously and sadly incomplete: it says Galván arranged for Troilo in 1940 and in 1945, and makes no mention of his prominent part in that astonishing run of recordings between those years.

I wish I'd seen Mike's book, Troilo, earlier. I got hold of it a couple of days ago. It's a great combination of stories about the people, and insight into the music, how it was made and played. It's researched with access to the Troilo archives in Buenos Aires and includes a discography that mentions the arrangers whenever possible. It's wonderful to have such an excellent and readable account of the people and the music in English, and I can only hope that there will be similar works on other great tango musicians.

It's a great read. 'Troilo... is loved by everybody because he loved everybody. He extended the hand of friendship to everyone, placing himself as the model of humanity. He is everyman, and his music speaks to, and for, everyman.'

Two interviews with Ricardo Vidort

Many thanks to Jantango for posting links to two interviews with Ricardo Vidort. Both are full of insights both into tango and into human life and nature. The second is particularly significant: I assume it is from the film made by the hospice where Ricardo passed away, as part of a record of the insights of people who are dying. It feels like an exceptional privilege to be able to listen to it. There's no indication if this is the entire section featuring Ricardo, or whether the film includes more.

I also received the following comment from Tom Tubbs concerning the unpublished Ricardo Vidort website: 'Any detail on the unpublished site? Is there any contact that people could drop a line of encouragement to? His notes on his class might be very interesting to read.'

Is there any contact that people could drop a line of encouragement to?

Martha Anton

Very sad to read Irene and Man Yung's post about the death of Martha Anton earlier today. Canyengue classes with her and Manolo were always one of the highlights of my visits to Buenos Aires, and it was a privilege during a class when Martha would say, right, dance with me! One of the friendliest people I've met. Amazingly she'd always recognise me from visit to visit. All those wonderful people leaving us, one by one. & I've always been looking forward to turning up at their classes again, and her looking at me: you again! How much do you remember?

Troilo and the arrangers

(Please check out this later post.)

I received a comment on my earlier post telling me that an 82-minute film about Troilo, called simply Pichuco, was released last year.

I checked it out. It tells how a teacher of the School of Popular Music in Avellaneda, together with his students, is digitizing around 500 original handwritten arrangements from the Troilo orchesta that have come to light, an astonishing trove of scores. It immediately occurs to me that handwriting can be recognised: it should be easy to work out who was responsible for each tango arrangement. I'd also expect the scores will throw light on the creative process. I hope that one day arrangers will get some credit for their work in the development of tango.

I found the website for the film, which has the trailer. (You have to switch on subtitles.) People who knew and worked with Troilo talk about him, and these include Leopoldo Federico, Horacio Ferer and Raúl Garello. (Very sadly, Federico and Ferer both died last December.) Their recollections are going to be fascinating. There's also a calendar of showings: it will be seen at events in Europe this year, although there are no planned viewings yet in the UK. I await with great interest!

I wrote that arrangers don't get much credit, but I guess that's because the development of a tango was usually a group effort. A classical composer could expect his music to be performed much as he wrote it, but a tango arranger was less sure of such respect. In fact there's a great story told by Garello: he says Troilo didn't write much music, but he erased a great deal. Arrangers would present their work and he'd go through it, cutting out whole chunks, to the arrangers' despair, although when they heard the recordings they knew he was right. (I can imagine Piazzolla turning up with a new score and Troilo pulling it apart, and augmenting it with feedback from the band, after which they'd all go out to lunch, leaving their 22-year old arranger to pick up the pieces and put the new version together, so they could finish their rehearsal.)

The same comment also informs me that 'His arrangers were Argentino Galvan, Julian Plaza, Ismael Spitalnik, Raul Garello, Alberto Caracioli and Astor Piazzolla.' 

I've checked them out on Todotango. However, Garello was born in 1936, and Julián Plaza in 1928, so they would have been 8 and 16 respectively in 1944, the year when Troilo and Piazzolla parted company, and any contribution by them to the 108 Troilo recordings between 1941 and 1944 can be ruled out.

Galván was much older, and according to Todotango, he was the arranger who created the sound of the Caló orquesta, writing virtuoso solos for the strings. (His favourite composer was Debussy.) He was associated with Troilo in 1940, in particular with Troilo's version of Pimienta, but if Troilo recorded it it doesn't seem to have survived. Troilo regarded his 1946 recording of Recuerdos de Bohemia in a Galván arrangement as his most important. (At 5:22 it must be one of the longest for the time. It's a marvelous piece of music, but it's hardly danceable: it looks forward rather to the late 50s and 1960s. It's on YouTube.) So Galván was certainly around in the period. 

Ismael Spitalnik was born in 1919, so he was a close contemporary of Piazzolla. Between the late 1930s and 1943 he was with the D'Agostino orquesta, while beginning to study composition seriously, and completing his studies in industrial chemistry! He seems to have worked with Troilo somewhat later. Alberto Caraccioli was born in 1918, and also seems to have started studying composition in the mid-1940s.

Between 1941 and 1944, the period in which the 108 tangos were recorded, Piazzolla was Troilo's in-house and in-orquesta arranger, and it seems likely that most of the recordings were arrangements he had a big part in. But perhaps the manuscripts of the arrangements will make possible a more complete history of Troilo and his arrangers. 

(I've not mentioned who sent the comment, as the same person emailed me a few days later complaining rather bitterly that I hadn't posted the information as a post! Well! For a start, I decide where a comment is published, indeed, if it is published! & as it happens I do other things, apart from blogging and going out dancing, and I can't always find time to check things out carefully and follow up on what interests me. I don't think we need to know the names of people who can't be courteous on the internet.)

Tango foxtrot

There seems to be something missing in the tango world, something I can't find anywhere, and it's foxtrot. We have it from older dancers, especially from Osvaldo and Coca (in the MP interview I think - I don't have time to check it out) that foxtrot was one of the dances that defined Argentine social dancing in the 20s and 30s and 40s. I think Osvaldo said that any 'milonguero' who claims to have danced tango in the Golden Age and can't foxtrot just wasn't really there. & yet... where's the video of Osvaldo and Coca dancing foxtrot? I've never seen a couple dancing anything that seemed to me remotely like foxtrot during a jazz or rock tanda in Buenos Aires, and I've never come across it in films of milongas either. If there is a video of Buenos Aires foxtrot please let me know! I've looked but can't find it.

It was big! It's not just Osvaldo talking. Francisco Canaro recorded a lot of foxtrots like this, and also a charming foxtrot Chá para dos, better known in English as Tea for Two: sadly, the audio quality isn't great. It's curious that Canaro's syncopation in foxtrot is really lively, but he doesn't use it much in the tangos he recorded around that time, as if he felt it out of place. His jazz band recordings started around 1923, and there are plenty of them over the following years, although tango remained his main output.

I came across this video of Oscar Casas and Ana Miguel. The title calls it 'La colegiala (fox trot)' . La colegiala seems to be a popular song from a Columbian band, recorded in 1983, but I'm not sure it's really foxtrot music*. As to the dance, Oscar would be in a position to have learned foxtrot from the older dancers, but I think his dance resembles tango as much as anything. But perhaps the two dances are similar? 

Foxtrot was one of the dances of the American jazz scene in the early 1920s, but it was taken over and popularised as a ballroom dance at some stage, with the characteristic open embrace. There are a few old Pathe clips of foxtrot on YouTube which suggest the original dance. To me, this, danced in close embrace, remains the best: others are more flamboyant and showy. It also seems to show patterns that aren't that far from stuff that's danced in tango and I get the feel of a relaxed musicality, although the bouncy tip-toe style is very far from salon tango. These Pathe videos are early all right, but that means from the silent era, so the music was added later. & there's a foxtrot lesson here, taught by 'Santos Casani, the well-known Teacher of Dancing', using an novel 'special glass floor', from 1931. Maybe something of the old version survived: the great photographer Don McCullin talks in a documentary about dancing foxtrot, 'the naughty kind, not the ballroom version' when he was growing up in the UK in the late 1940s.

But the Buenos Aires version? I'd be very interested to see it. 

* See comments! 

Troilo's arranger

(Please check out this later post.)

'TodoTroilo', the available recorded works, consists of 464 tracks out of the 480-odd that were released: a few seem to have have gone missing, but it's great that so many are still around. I've been listening a lot recently to the recordings made between 1939 and 1944. & then, late one evening, a question hit me: who wrote all this music?

After all, tango is written music. Tangos are often composed as piano scores, simple basic music on two staves, or as a chord sequence for guitar. Anyone with good basic music skills can compose a piano piece and write it down for someone else to play. But what we hear on a recording is quite different, it's an arrangement. To write an arrangement, a tango score, requires much more advanced skills, skills of composing, of orchestration: it involves imagining and creating the drama of a three-minute track, deciding how it begins and ends, how the sounds of the different instruments are used, the speed and mood of the whole; it involves writing the lines for each instrument. Tango, the music we hear, is the art of the arranger, and sadly the arranger is rarely mentioned. We know the orquesta, the composer of the original, the author of the words – but very rarely the person who wrote the music we actually hear! Or if we know it, their name is hardly mentioned, which seems extraordinary. The arranger really is a composer. Baroque composers like Bach and Handel would take a melody from music written by another composer and re-arrange it, and it then became their own composition. Sadly, not in tango.

The general view is that Troilo's best music was made between 1939 and 1944. Most of the great tracks, the high-energy Troilo, powerfully rhythmic with wonderfully tender passages, the music we dance to at milongas, are from the 110 tracks released in these years. The Orquesta Típica Aníbal Troilo formed in 1937 and in the following year released just one 78, two tracks, on the Odeon label. Nothing in 1939, nothing in 1940. Then in 1941 the orquesta was with Victor, and suddenly in that year a dozen 78s were released, 24 tracks. Two tracks a month, all year! & they kept coming: altogether, 108 tracks were released between 1941 and 1944. So who was writing this music? Who was Troilo's arranger? & yes, his name is known: Astor Piazzolla. 

Piazzolla's family had emigrated to New York, where he picked up the bandoneon and learned to play Bach with a student of Rachmaninov. When he was 15 his family returned to Mar del Plata, where he began to play in local orquestas. In 1938 he moved to Buenos Aires to continue his musical career, and he was still just 19 in 1939 when Troilo auditioned him to fill in temporarily for his third bandoneon, who was ill. The legend is that Troilo asked him what he could play, and he replied that he could play the bandoneon parts of all Troilo's music. 'So play something else' said Troilo. Piazolla played Rhapsody in Blue, and got the job. When the third bandoneon returned, Troilo kept Piazzolla on as fourth bandoneon, as a fill-in pianist (his band pianist was apparently a bit unreliable) – and as an arranger. As Troilo's arranger, Piazzolla wrote the music we hear and dance to, although for sure Troilo and the musicians had control, and no doubt made changes during rehearsal. Which isn't to say that Troilo played exactly the same phrases in exactly the same way every time, but a group of eight or ten musicians can't change direction on the spot. Jazz allows space for improvised solos, but tango has a much tighter structure.

Piazzolla certainly didn't create the 'Troilo sound', which is already there in the two 1938 Odeon recordings. Listen to Troilo's 1938 recording of Comme il Faut. It's sharp, percussive, lively, with tender lines, recognisably Troilo. Troilo doesn't seem to have recorded this track again, but compare it with Yo Soy el Tango from three years later: the sound is similar, but much more assured and compact, and the syncopation more daring. But I think the sheer volume of music from those years is the sign of an arranger. Someone spent a lot of time planning each tango and composing the music in the orquesta's style. 

By 1941 Piazzolla was earning enough with Troilo to pay for music lessons with the eminent Argentine classical composer Alberto Ginastera, with whom he studied the scores of Stravinsky, Bartók, Ravel. He got up early to hear the Teatro Colón opera orchestra rehearse, and he performed with Troilo in the tango clubs at night: a 21 year-old passionate about music. He stayed with the orquesta until 1944, when it's said that Troilo began to feel he was trying to develop tango too far from the popular music people wanted to dance to, and their partnership dissolved: I think this shows how strong his influence was.

I didn't used to think well of Piazzolla: I was never that keen on his music, which developed away from the music we dance to. & it's kind of irritating that his music has also come to displace public awareness of tango: classical musicians have fallen over themselves to record 'tango', which always means the later music of Piazzolla, the concert-hall music of his main career. & he devised the description 'tango nuevo'! Of course, making danceable music wasn't a priority or even financially viable at a time when few people were dancing tango. In any case he seems to have wanted to be remembered as a 'serious composer', not as someone who wrote dance music; composers and arrangers of dance music hardly got remembered anyway. But I think I should remember him with huge gratitude and affection for his legacy with Troilo: that flood of over 100 great recordings, any one of which will get me onto the floor with minimum delay, music that's astonishingly consistent in sound and quality. To me that's his great legacy. I'm not a DJ, but I'd imagine you could make a good Troilo tanda pretty much at random out of the 1938-44 recordings. I'm not sure you could do that with any other orquesta.