Category Archives: musicality

The hardly discussed Tango Question

Who, what, where, how, why and when?

In many areas of life these 6 short question words are important as we question ourselves and our projects.

In Tango, we learn as a couple ‘how’ to perform various fragments and sequences, and as leaders we decide ‘when’ we will do them.

The follower is more responsible for architecting their response – since in general terms the ‘what’ has been decided for them, they live more in the world of ‘how’.

Once the intent is understood they interpret, through choices, how they will move.

They might respond to move simply, low, high, with presence, stronger dissociation, with adornos, with delay – just as examples…

These are important decisions that define the visual aesthetics of the couple. And in her well communicated decisions we find much of the pleasure of improvised Tango.

It is of course important ‘who’ we dance with – so much of the codes and world of tango is concerned with this important subject.

‘When’ is an easy one – every day.

Which leaves us with the one that few people discuss – the many, many layers of “why?”

Why, actually, am I studying, practising and dancing Tango? This is important – but not the question that I am currently thinking about and working on.

The “why?” that concerns me the most is “why exactly did I make that decision, to lead that structure at that energy level, to that phrase, with this person, right then?”

Why that and not something else from the myriad of options that I had? How connected was I to that moment? How deliberate was the choice? How grounded was I in the music and how connected to her – how present was I – and ultimately – was it the best choice ?

Did I understand the implications for our structure as the music moves on? Did I take account even of where the music was going? Of how my partner is dancing?

Of course I am not talking about simple decisions to lead melodic paradas to Di Sarli, or quebradas and cuts to Biagi – but a deeper understanding of the implications if in fact I do lead this specific structure right now – to this – with her.

This is challenging me.

Because as leaders we want to seamlessly flow from one moment to the next – after a significant time investment the act of thinking ‘what next’ seems to belong back in those first few painful years of learning the craft of leading in tango.

Our mental world needs of course to be engaged, to plan  navigation and safety – but we need to find enjoyment and that wonderful tango connection which cannot  be based on a highly intrusive mental decision process.

I am interested to learn if we naturally improve at this – if we make sure we are connected to the music, the floor, and to our partner – and we make these choices hundreds of times a week – perhaps we just get better at making the right choice?

Or damn it do I need to think more? I was just starting to relax…

Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash

De Angelis – The Singers

As we learn more about ourselves and our Tango the music itself becomes a more and more important part of our emotional response.

For all of us it is hard enough to learn about the orchestras and the individual tracks they recorded. But in addition I do feel it is so worth understanding more about the individual singers.

The first singer in De Angelis’s orchestra was Floreal Ruiz, and others included Carlos Dante, Julio Martel, Oscar Larroca, Roberto Florio, Juan Carlos Godoy and Roberto Mancini.

At the Lewes Milonga on Sunday we will hear the orchestra with Oscar Larroca, Carlos Dante, Julio Martel and Godoy – from the 40s and the 50s

As De Angelis himself did I would like with this very short post concentrate on Tango itself – rather than Vals.

I have picked 2 of my favourite Tango tracks from the Sunday milonga – both from the 1950’s

Entre tu amor y mi amor – with Juan Carlos Godoy

Lágrimas De Sangre – with Oscar Larroca

To me these are both spectacular – wonderful to dance to – rich in emotion and so true to Tango. They show so well the impact and versatility of these amazing singers.

I do hope you enjoy dancing to them as much as I will.

Featured Orchestras – An Explanation of what this means at our Milongas.

At the Lewes and Tango Revolution Milongas I will each month be featuring an orchestra. As this sounds a bit academic – and it isn’t at all –  I wanted to briefly explain this.

Although I play music that often extends past the golden age – because I love to dance to that full orchestral sound and because there is so much amazing music into the 50’s and even beyond – apart from that I am in so many ways a traditionalist.

 I follow the time honoured rules – such as always playing at least one Tanda – and almost always more – from each of the big 4 ( D’Arienzo, Troilo, Pugliese and  Di Sarli). I follow the established format of TTVTTM. I don’t play Nuevo. Our Milongas are inclusive – welcoming to all, and encourage the Cabaceo. 

What the featured orchestra means is simply that I will play two Tango tandas within the 4 hours from that Orchestra. I will chose tandas that show the different sides of their work – because to me that is the interesting part.

A featured orchestra will always be outside of the classic top orchestras –  because they will often already be repeated in a 4 hour Milonga – out of respect and more importantly because their music is amazing.

I will normally be illustrating different singers or different decades. If they are strong in Milonga or Vals I may also play one of their tandas in that genre. But only if it is truly great to dance to – the dancers mean everything to me.

Please don’t worry if you are not yet that concerned with the music! There are over 20 tandas in a 4 hour Milonga – you won’t notice and please just enjoy the dance, the Cava, the cake –  and the company of your friends.

But if you are interested in learning more about the music – just watch the heads up display – and there will always be a post before the event announcing who the featured orchestra is this month – presenting a side from each of the tandas and adding a bit more context for you.

I hope you enjoy this approach. Increasing our understanding of the music improves our dancing and our respect for the amazing musicians who made this whole thing possible.

It adds so much to our amazing tango world.

Starting a new journey – Studying Individual Songs in Great Depth

I have always been thrilled to watch the great performers being able to improvise and leverage the individual track they are dancing to.

It’s like they know every note.

In one of those moments we all get in Tango I now realise that this is because they actually do. They really do know every note. They aren’t pretending they do. They really do.

And this took a heck of a lot of focussed listening. It isn’t some freaky genetic gift or super hero talent – they put the work in.

They can improvise with such great speed, inspired creativity and heightened enjoyment precisely because they really do know exactly what is coming – their focus is free to emotionally respond to it – and how to express that with their partner.

So I am starting this journey. I guess that I will need to listen to each track 500 times to be anywhere near where I need to be. And to avoid going crazy I decided to work on this with 3 different songs.

Based on the songs I have chosen that is already going to take 8:34 * 500 which is 70 hours of listening.  If I can be disciplined I can do this 6 days a week – we all have off days – and on those days I listen to them all 3 times. That is mathematically fairly neat – it is going to take 6 months of effort.

So – now to the songs.

Criteria for selection :

  • They get played in Milongas. We all want the chance to show off a bit after so much effort – don’t we?
  • They are emotionally complex.
  • They vary in rhythmic and melodic sections.
  • They vary in emphasis between piano, strings, bandoneon and – where there is one – the singer’s voice.
  • I actually wanted a majority of instrumentals as I thought after a few hundred listens the words might irritate me.
  • There are frequent pauses and still areas.
  • They aren’t Pugliese tracks – I couldn’t survive listening to the same Pugliese track 500 times in a row, 6 days a week for 6 months. No one is that strong.
  • They are tracks I just love to dance to.

So here they are – with – just for interest – the number of times I have listened to each one at home to date ..

El Último Café – Juan D’Arienzo & Jorge Valdez (97)
Pura Clase – Biagi ( 275 )
Felicia – De Angelis ( 223 )

I am going to fall asleep to these songs. I am going to wake up to them. Eat and drink with them. Walk with them. I plan to waft around the room to them pretending to be Carlitos.

Wish me luck!

Tango – You, Her, the Music and both of your Alter egos

You have been so aware of her. There is a moment, a chance, a stillness. You ask. Your heart races. She accepts. You are scared.

She waits and then slowly walks towards you, in control of every part of her body.

She walls in your space with her eyes, stretches herself to meet you and in that singular moment offers herself to you – and you know you are both reaching for this quietly opening door that leads to a world that can  shut you out of everything mundane. Are you going to blow everything?

He is searching you with his eyes. You have been so aware of him, You sense it. You raise your eyes. He asks, and you accept. You are scared. You walk towards him, and he calmly and confidently offers himself. He lets you in and embraces you. He is so incredibly still. You feel what might be. Are you going to blow everything?

You are entering that world again. That password protected place, that all so fragile other world built on such a solid foundation of years and years of learning and hard practise.

Your partner is the key that you need to enter this other world. And that magic is a code that is written into the first long seconds of a completely silent embrace “Yes – I do understand. I am listening and I can hear you. And I am going to explore you, your dreams, myself, my dreams – and this music.”

When you try to be one with them all, with the music and  both of your dreams then everything else is silent.

Four dancers. Four songs.

Two of the dancers you can feel. Of the others one you know, one is waiting for you. Of this one you as yet have no understanding of and need to find in the silences. To liberate them all.

Your own alter ego always offers you a promise to redefine yourself. To change fundamentally what you are capable of. It wants to wake you up. This is a moment where you can see it and understand it so clearly.

You want to be there, to be suspended from time – to become the person you might have been, perhaps might yet be.

The other you is standing on a quiet shore with the person who held your eyes for a second – only to look away and offer a code to you, who embraced you and who – like you – has been working for so many years to be able to stand here with both of you on this silent beach.

They have brought their alter ego – and so have you.

No noise. Just whatever your movement and stillness create.

All four of you have earned  the right to be here. All of you have always been working for this moment. Each of you offering – negotiating – suggesting, retreating, learning, calling.

Trying.

Dreaming.

Now all of you have one hand on this door handle – and all four of you breathe in and together start to turn it.  You slowly open the door and walk together into the unknown. Into a room where perhaps all four of you can finally breathe.

In the real world this doesn’t happen.

In Tango – sometimes it does.

Hearing not Listening in Tango

I was at Leroy’s class today and he said something that really struck a chord. He said that he hears – whereas others just listen.

I thought this was really an interesting concept. Don’t just listen to your partner -that doesn’t change anything – instead – make sure you hear them. Work harder.

Once we become a reasonable standard of course we want to listen. It is all about our shared dance – the music – and how we interpret it and communicate with each other. So we listen – of not with our ears – but with our bodies,

She – or he – may not have much to say. Or they do – but they speak very quietly. Or perhaps you aren’t the kind of person they normally show themselves to on a first date.

Or they have a lot to say – and they are saying it to you – but you really can’t hear them. How frustrating is that – I am actually trying very hard to talk to you and you can’t hear me. You are on the wrong frequency.

Or – if you can hear me you don’t take any notice. You just blunder through it all.

You listened but you didn’t hear.

Leroy was I think saying that he hears everyone. The quiet ones, the distracted ones, the loud ones, the people he doesn’t normally feel a fit for. The incoherent ones,

He listens so well that he hears them all.

And then he acts.

I am sure we can imagine a farcical situation where both tango dancers are listening so much that no-one is in fact saying anything at all. But to me this is not normal – I think reasonable Tango dancers are both trying to hear and to communicate.

But they might be listening instead.

Tune yourself to hear …  Listening is for Wimps.

Dancing in the Eye of the Biagi Storm

Students like me often respond to Biagi in mysterious ways. Ways that frankly – given our experience levels – are borderline suicidal.

I am talking here about rhythmic Biagi of course – we all know them – amazing, exciting sides like Humiliación, Indiferencia, Pura Clase and perhaps the most challenging of all – Bélgica.

As leaders the default is that we up our energy levels – we try to catch the cuts. We run and run to keep up with him.

But he is always an annoying half beat and a wry smile ahead of us – unless we have 10+ years of experience.

In our practise sessions recently we have been working on dancescapes for individual composers – especially to D’Arienzo and Biagi. And with Biagi I have been concentrating for months now on lowering the energy and finding the humour and playfulness that he offers us.

Last week we recorded this session – and I was so interested to watch it.

It seems to me that I have learned – at least a bit – to change my approach – to be patient and playful – and not to chase the cuts. Of course I can see a million errors – practise videos show all as it is – that is their value – they have no concerns with our self perceptions.

But it is calmer. So much quieter than I used to be. Simple movements – often just syncopated walking – always repeating, allowing the follower to relax more and more.

And the result of this lower energy – this calmer approach to Biagi – is that my partner Jo is able to follow this naturally, and to smile, relax and join in the game. She has time to be neat and beautiful with her feet – to laugh with me, and with Biagi, at the endless fun of improvised Tango.

And that  – surely – is what we as student leaders are striving for?  To help her to enjoy the dance.

Tango, Poetry and Spanish

Recently I have been trying to understand what makes Spanish tango lyrics so beautiful – when their English translations are normally less than inspiring.

I suppose there are some obvious linguistic differences –

  • Spanish has softer consonants and longer vowels, and this helps the words to flow easily.
  • Spanish requires verb conjugations, so it’s easier to create rhymes in Spanish, which makes it an ideal language for poetry and music. And for that reason when we are translating back to English we often  find it impossible to generate a rhyme in quite the same way – if at all.
  • As a descendent of Latin, Spanish also builds upon a long heritage of music, poetry, art and culture that contribute to its overall romantic essence.

To me the Spanish of Tango often seems to me to be in some way clipped – like modern Latin American fiction it often uses the rhythms of small words that leave big spaces for your mind. Spaces into which we fall, and are invited to fill with our thoughts. An english translation often feels more cluttered – and less inviting to our imagination.

And then there is the Lunfardo issue – the local prison slang of Buenos Aires full of sexual innuendos, references to drug dens and speakeasies, and melancholic verses expressing pain and destitution.

Lunfardo is a barrier to us both in the complete lack of understanding of a word – but perhaps more dangerously that we don’t understand at all what a ‘Mariposa’ [butterfly] really meant in Lunfardo – so we don’t know what we are missing. But we know we don’t get it – because it just doesn’t make sense.

Or we sort of get it  – ‘Mina’ – yes its a mine but it of course in Tango is a beautiful woman as precious as a jewel – but still as Europeans in 2018 we are not so likely to  understand the historical context and  pejorative implications.

And they can imply all of this in just one short word.

So for all these reasons – it’s not my native language, it rhymes better, it sounds easier and it is packed full of Lunfardo and historical context – I am just not going to get it and no translation that could be sung to the same music is ever going to work as a lyric for that melody.

But to me there is something else – something I feel quite strongly but I can’t easily explain.

It is to do with an emotional emphasis – that in some way the Spanish word in Tango sometimes seems to call up an emotion that explains something – whereas the English word just stops with the thing itself.

The example I often think of is the iconic Pugliese album – ‘Ausencia’ – and that amazing image of the rose on the piano because once again Pugliese was held by the authorities and so the Orchestra was playing without him.

Layers upon layers of meaning. But my point here is more basic – I can’t really find any other way to translate ‘Ausencia’ than with the English word ‘Absence’.

I cannot imagine even the most talented of British bands singing a song called ‘absence’ – I am sure someone has – but to me ‘absence’ is what gets you a bad mark at school.

I think this is a good example that brings many of these things together. Ausencia is indeed full of longer vowels and softer consonants. There are layers of meaning. Not in this case Lunfardo – just a context that it is hard to recapture.

So you are absent, in English we are inclined to write down a bad mark and move on to something more interesting – in Spanish we ask.. and desperately want to know .. why?

When it’s all worth it

We work so hard at Tango.

Sometimes we can get a bit lost, feel that it isn’t worth it – that nothing should be this hard.

 

But then you dance with someone and you both just smile.

Tango is often such a wistful, sad and yearning experience. But inside so much of it is a wonderful chance to experiment, to play and just to enjoy yourself and the way you are both moving so freely to wonderful music and to each other.

In these tandas we absolutely understand why we do this thing. We do it for this. To celebrate our acquired skills. To enjoy the miracle of moving as one.

 

To dance.

Dancing with a Goddess – part I

Last weekend I had the chance to dance a tanda with a goddess – someone so far advanced of me in every aspect of tango that we do indeed inhabit different realms.

And true to the tango leader wimpiness that is alas so very common – even though she told me days in advance that at this milonga she wanted to dance with me – I still did not have the courage to actually ask her. I am such a mortal.

Fortunately for me in the end she gave up waiting and cast a mirada in my direction that made it very clear that if I didn’t actually dance with her this second I was very likely to be vaporized. Or worse.

 

 

This was not my best moment – goddesses like to be worshipped and for her to have to initiate the invitation was more than a little inappropriate.

After this hopeless start I am pleased to say that for me this tanda was a whole new experience.

During the sleepless nights I had had before the milonga I had thought of what to do – how to approach this opportunity.

I made some fairly sensible plans and approaches ..

1. Do not pretend to be something I am not

Legends are full of people imitating gods, venturing too close to the sun and to their domain – and coming to gruesome ends.

Unfortunately being in the arms of a goddess does not make you a god – just terrified.

Be quiet, still and as confident as you can be – and never rush anything. In fact what you think of as fast is painfully slow to a goddess – just as what you think of as slow is kind of average. They are physically so adept that you are best to move at a pace that is the most appropriate for you – do try to vary the emotional landscape using musicality, compression and step length but stay in your executable zone as much as you can so that your lines are clean.

Goddesses don’t like messy lines – they are a sign of mortality.

2. Concentrate on the music

I have thought for a while now that the conversations people describe in tango are often not between the leader and the follower but instead between the follower and the music.

When you are with a goddess you have insufficient shared  vocabulary to say anything other than the dancing equivalent of “Hello – what’s your name?”.

But she has an almost unlimited way to talk to the music in the most complex and sophisticated ways – so try to give them space and to stay out of their way.  Then listen like you have never listened before. Listen with everything you have – apart from letting the music in your ears are nothing to do with it.

Listening to the way a goddess expresses the emotions of tango is a powerful shot of understanding. Don’t miss out.

3.  Don’t be too simple

Many well meaning teachers explain to us student leaders that a good follower will enjoy a beautiful walk more than a poorly executed complex figure.

This is true – the problem when you are with a goddess is that ‘beautiful’ has just been radically redefined. Me leading a goddess to walk for even one whole bar is quite likely to result in her conjuring up a taxi to rescue her from such a painful experience.

So find the middle ground. Of course a mortal should never try to back sacada a goddess – but if you love your close embrace volcadas you shouldn’t shy away from them just because they are off axis. The sensitivity and control in the axis of a goddess and their ability to suddenly become virtually weightless in your arms are a complete joy to experience – so don’t miss out by safely sticking to a true beginners vocabulary.

4. Allow her to look like a goddess

Remember that she is actually taking a risk here.

If I don’t give her her axis, if am not musical – if I block her from moving how she wants to then she is going to look mortal – and that for her is hell.

So above all let her be feminine elegant and beautiful – let her move in the way that only a goddess can.

5. Try to remember to breathe


Life after a tanda with Her

There are risks of course. Every tanda ends and once you have danced with a goddess dancing with mortals is always going to feel different.

The optimist in me tries to think of this as progress. The realist sees a narrowing corridor down which i must progress – with fewer and fewer possibilities.

My goal now is to find a wannabe goddess practise partner who has had the same all too brief encounter with a god and is as motivated as I am to experience it again. To find someone that that wants to work and work and work so that they can again tempt the god to spend just 12 minutes in their arms.

I don’t want to push the metaphor too hard but i have been quietly thinking how mortals have tried  to appease the gods over the millennia and how they have attracted their favours.

Unfortunately I don’t have the skill or strength to build a temple. Sacrifices are basically out of the question. I am no prophet and I lack the ability to move mountains or to part the waters.

So I am pinning my foolish mortal hopes on nice chocolates and flowers.

And that practise partner.