[Tango-L] Goodbye bs as rentals...welcome Color Tango

[Jake Spatz (TangoDC.com)]

Howdy list,

Tom Stermitz wrote:
> It seems to me that if we  want live music, the tango orchestras  
> [nowadays] should look to honoring and reviving the styles of the 1930s and 1940s instead of the 1970s.
I agree with Tom's sentiment here, but would add that new orchestras 
might benefit by delving into the non-Decarian line of that period. 
Especially as most rhythm-centric dance music from the Golden Age was 
dance-to-ably rhythmic because the band was often playing accompaniment 
to a vocal line. Trios and other small ensembles tend to present these 
traditional tangos (e.g., the ones originally w/ vocals) in a more 
straightforward way, preserving the once-vocal melody without 
sacrificing invention in the arrangement.

Also, I notice that as the Golden Age waned to a close, the lyricists 
lost their sense of order, and wrote many more recitative passages 
almost as filler... Shortly thereafter the lyricists seem, in my very 
limited purview, to disappear entirely. (Perhaps someone can enlighten 
me as to the accuracy of this general impression.)

But at any rate... Since most of the tango dance music originated either 
in the theater or as radio numbers with a singer, I wonder if the key to 
making better songs again might lie precisely here-- in the making not 
of Music, but of plain old Songs.

I mean shit you could do with just a guitar and a singer, even. The new 
trios succeed more often, in my opinion, because they start with music 
on that scale, and enlarge it to a degree that keeps the original 
simplicity while increasing the complexity Just Enough. The new 
orchestras, meanwhile, most often seem to start with someone else's full 
arrangement, and in the blow-up process they just get bloated and 
disproportionate. If they went all the way back to the original sheet 
music, and treated the vocal line as such, I suspect they'd have a 
tighter order and probably wouldn't seem like such copycats & clones.

Just a few stray thoughts from a verse-monger...

Jake Spatz
DC