Tango in Buenos Aires conjures up a vast range of cultural stereotypes. Perhaps the favoured among tourists is smoky brothel bars in less than salubrious barrios where beautiful girls dance with dangerous men, or sophisticated milongas filled with a belle epoque charm imported direct from Paris. For many Argentines, it’s that strange dance their grandmothers told them about, or the places where tourists allow 150 pesos to slip through their fingers and into the pockets of money-grubbing restaurant owners hoping a dance will distract from uninspiring meals.
Tango Contempo conforms to none of the above. It is an ongoing series of concerts at Café Vínilo with a weekly-changing programme which features two groups showcasing different styles of modern tango. The concerts are normally instrumental, although unusually a singer was present at the performance I attended.
The venue is a cavernous room at the back of an agreeable Palermo restobar. Among the audience backpackers rub shoulders with the architect class and a wide range of age groups is represented. Both Argentines and foreigners crowd around tables with the obligatory glass of malbec and a picada or two.
On the night I attended, tango-jazz outfit Mario Herrerias Sexteto and the Orquesta Típica Criolla took to the stage.
The first group fused tango with contemporary jazz. Perhaps it’s a personal prejudice, but clarinet-dominated smooth jazz for me evokes impersonal hotel bars. Nevertheless, it is clear that the group purvey complex melodies born of a skillful musicianship. They offer a very contemplative, ‘intellectual’ form of tango, with song titles featuring cultural in-jokes such as ‘Un Tango para Frank’ in homage to Frank Zappa. It was an almost cinematic set in which motifs are developed throughout the course of the piece, growing in intensity.
Where the sexteto pushed the boundaries of tango to experimental limits, the second act was resolutely traditional. It was an enchanting orquesta típica comprising two violins, two bandonéons, a piano and a double bass. The musicians were uniformly dressed in slick black and white ensembles, presided over by a singer with bold, rich vocals. He cited numerous tango authors and song title ‘yo soy un porteño’ seemed to summarise the nostalgia for old Buenos Aires hanging in the air.
With two such contrasting acts as the line-up for the evening it is no surprise that project director for Tango Contempo, Esteban Falabella’s aspiration is to create an environment in which “traditional and contemporary tango can coexist.” He enthuses that the musicians “play by their own rules,” borrowing elements from traditional tango repertoires and making them their own.
The initiative is run by a group of seven musicians, each of whom have their own projects. They have united, however, in order to promote what Falabella describes as “a modern vision of tango.” Tango Contempo’s mission is to offer a forum for what it perceives to be the most interesting in new music. The focus is on concert tango, a more musically complicated form than the dance-orientated Milonga tunes.
They believe that in the last ten years, the quantity of musicians exploring popular tango music has grown significantly. Indeed, Falabella declares that “tango in Buenos Aires is experiencing a period in which there are a lot of people with new ideas. It’s undergoing a lot of experimentation.” This new vision of tango, unfortunately, receives limited press coverage and is often sidelined from the commercial circuit.
Falabella opines that after reeducating themselves in traditional tango, the time has come for musicians to find “their own voice.” He perceives tango as intimately bound to the history of Buenos Aires: “it’s the sound of a city, a mix of cultures and people and professions.”
On the subject of its limited relevance to young porteño life, he views this as an issue which needs urgent addressing: “they don’t experience tango as their own culture, they don’t have easy access to what tango really is, they just see these old things from other eras. There’s a whole new generation doing new things at the moment, it just lacks an outlet.”
Tango Contempo aims to blow the cobwebs away from the fusty attic of tourist tango. It showcases a variety of highly skilled and classically-trained musicians who have pieced together segments of tango’s history and turned it into something new. Falabella asserts that it is this interweaving of history and innovation which makes contemporary tango so unique, as “it has such important history, but also a power which is something tangible and alive, in constant movement. In that sense it’s not historical. It’s a way of life and of perceiving art.”
TangoContempo is held every Thursday at 9.30pm in Cafe Vínilo, Gorriti 3780 (tel. 4866-6510). Tickets are $25. The cycle runs until the end of November, restarting in March. See http://www.myspace.com/tangocontempo for further information.
