[Tango-L] Cortinas (not the old car from the '70s)

[Alexis Cousein]

WHITE 95 R wrote:
> The use of tandas and traditional dance 
> music are not crutches any more than the use of the proper, high quality 
> ingredients in the preparation of a classical food recipe.

The high quality ingredients, of course, are the music, not the cortinas.

Oh, in case you missed it, I wasn't implying that tandas were *necessarily*
crutches - but they sometimes are (if the DJ is bad). It's not because
a bad DJ is playing with tandas of one orchestra and period, never plays
anything that isn't from the 20s and 30s, always plays orchestral music
just to be safe, and is using cortinas that he suddenly becomes a good
one - colouring between the lines is neither a sufficient nor, in my
opinion, a necessary condition for being a good DJ.

I'm advocating for tolerance and diversity, not trying to force-feed
*my* personal way of DJing on all and sundry.

> 
> Inflicting pain and suffering on tango lovers from the DJ booth is 
> inexcusable.

I don't. I'm actively trying to be in tune with my audience, despite
the lack of cortinas and that my tandas are composed of more
than one song or more than one orchestra.

Sometimes I am a bit mischievous (and you can be mischievous with
traditional music just as well), but I don't think that wrongfooting
people or surprising them is *always* necessarily torturing them.

As I said, you haven't attended a milonga at which I was a DJ, so
you're presuming too much.

As being in tune with an audience is hard work, I force myself to use
set lists as little as possible, and to improvise as much as possible.
I am at heart a dancer (which cannot be said of all the DJs), so I'm
usually aware of things -- if I'm not aching to dance instead of
DJing, I'm not doing a great job. [Fortunately for "all" of you, I
like dancing so much that I only DJ on invitation these days.]

For the record, I do use tandas (I find it horrible when you don't know
whether the next song would be a vlas, tango or milonga), I do mark the
end of a tanda with a short pause (5 seconds) and I do use traditional
music (though I won't, as some do, consider tangos by the great
orchestras played at the end of the forties heretical), but most of
my tandas have a beginning, an end, and evolve in between these
(and sometimes blend in with the next tanda, one tanda ending on
a tango by one orchestra and a tanda of valses starting with one
from the same orchestra), so they *are* stubbornly idiosyncratic.

When I do use a cortina (if people want them, I'll give them what they want),
I:
-use always the same throughout the evening (that usually makes it eminently
clear it's a cortina, which in Belgium is rather hard)
-keep it short, because long ones would kill a milonga where I live, and
that's because people change partners within a tanda without blinking
(fortunately, navigating to the outside before they do so).