South American music and culture magazine

This is an edited extract from the second edition of the Bradt guide, Argentina by Erin McCloskey (2011). Continue Reading

Last month marked the seventy-sixth year since Argentine music maestro, Carlos Gardel’s, untimely death. To this day however, his name and suave, iconic image remain as popular as ever. The propensity of Gardel’s fame as a national treasure can be seen in the hundreds of images presented on shop fronts, buildings and walls. His reputation as the “king of tango” can even be spotted as far as Scotland where numerous statues have been recently erected in honour of his extensive tour of the country’s rural areas. Continue Reading

Like every other big city in the world, there is a musicality that oozes from the streets of Buenos Aires. The incessant humming of old, rusty buses trying to make their way through cobbled roads, explosive symphonies of taxi horns alerting pedestrians not to cross a corner, choirs with half-covered faces singing political slogans in the middle of an avenue.
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Last week Luz Sinatra, our Tango expert, told you about the history and benefits of tango. This week we look into what it takes to become good at tango and hit the milonga floor. These are some interesting points to consider before you go and buy your first pair of tango shoes. Continue Reading

Ah… Tango! No doubt, the most idealised paired dance in the world. And there’s plenty of reasons for that. The closeness, the intimacy, the cadence, the wordless conversation of the bodies, the acute polarisation of the gender’s roles… All of that and so much more makes tango an extremely rich field of exploration for the brave souls that dare step into it. Because, true enough, it takes time and dedication to harvest the fruits of its practice, but when it arrives their sweetness is such, it can become quite addictive indeed. Continue Reading

Buenos Aires’ hottest new tango band brings incredible energy and excitement to this passionate traditional music. This all-acoustic group revel in raw, adrenalin-soaked emotion, adding a daring, youthful edginess to create their own vision of tango. The sounds of Astillero are the sounds of Buenos Aires today. The way they play their music reflects the incongruities and madness of this urban jungle; it kicks, breaks, hurts and jumps. The fresh lyrics add to the rawness – a rough but tender voice, that cares and tears at the same time. The concept goes even beyond music, developed further by video images, both poetic and political, projected live to complement the deluge of sound.

Following two sold out London Jazz Festival shows, Astillero are back in London for a one off performance.

“More musically daring and athletic than any other Tango Orchestra around. These boys can chew the scenery, masticating in wild abandon. Your Mama’s tango, this most certainly is not.” Time Out

The concert will be on April 10th at the Barbican

We’re over halfway through Argentine month and we’re yet to even mention tango. It’s not that we have anything against it it’s just that it gets its fair share of publicity as it is. I’m not sure our two-pennies worth is really that noteworthy. However, we do feel that one area which needs a little extra light shining on it is some of the new forms of tango that have emerged in the last ten years, with names such as electro-tango, neo-tango and techno-tango, as well as tango nuevo which has been going for a lot longer. With that in mind we decided to put together the Experiments in Tango mixtape.
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In many ways Montevideo is seen as synonymous with Buenos Aires. They are both capital cities of countries that lay claim to being the originators of Tango (Carlos Gardel, the master of Tango, was born in Uruguay yet grew up in Buenos Aires.) Music coming from these cities is generally known as Rioplatense, due to the river that seperates them, but this all-encompassing nom de plume can be somewhat misleading as Montevideo has managed to carve itself out a very distinctive identity. Drums play a leading role as the calling card of the streets, Spanish influence has lad to a unique style of theatre and the man who mixed all of these things together with a touch of Brazilian flair stands as their main musical icon.
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They say that every fifteen minutes, somewhere in the world, someone is playing Tango Jalousie, one of the most beloved of all tangos. Dizzy Gillespie jammed to it. The British blockbuster film “The Full Monty” includes it. Tenor Placido Domingo recorded it, as did the Boston Pops Orchestra. But it wasn’t until influential KCRW DJ Tom Schnabel handed music professor, folklorist and retired attorney Donald Cohen a Vietnamese recording of it that he realized few know its story. In his newest book Tango Voices: Songs from the Soul of Buenos Aires and Beyond, (complete with scores, lyrics, and a CD recording), readers have a chance to both hear and learn the stories behind the Danish-composed, Khanh Ly-recorded Vietnamese translation of the English lyricized tango favorite.
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“It’s such a vast and huge theme, love. You can approach it in different ways,” reflects Buenos Aires-born songwriter and guitarist Federico Aubele, whose new album Amatoria has been released by ESL Music. “Love is such an important thing for every human being, whether we notice it or not. We all experience it at least once in life. It’s one of the few things, along with dying, that is guaranteed to happen to you.”
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