[Tango-L] dance music

[Jake Spatz (TangoDC.com)]

Hi Charles,

Yes, I've also read that history. But I'm talking about the dance music 
made _in_ the Golden Age, and about _vocal lines_-- not necessarily 
_vocalists_. D'Arienzo and many others often mined the older tunes for 
material in the 30s and 40s (which is how the milonga got a facelift at 
that time). It's said that D'Arienzo returned to the older 2/4 tempo 
thereby, but from what I've read it seems just as likely that that's how 
Biagi had been transcribing his parts for years. Regardless, D'Arienzo, 
as you mentioned, often dropped the singer: I'm simply arguing that he 
kept the singer's music, and distributed it among the sidemen while he 
(et al.) made new arrangements.

In short, we (dancers) nowadays know a great many songs as 
"instrumentals" (El recodo, A la gran muneca, El flete, Don Juan, etc.) 
because the Golden Age bandleaders & arrangers frequently kept the vocal 
line while dropping the vocalist. There was ALSO a new integration of 
the singer into the dance band, yes-- but these two evolutions, which 
have a superficial dissimilarity, were happening at the same time.

Whether the songs originated as old dance numbers or in musical theater 
(which a great many did) doesn't much matter. The D'Arienzo/Biagi 
"revolution" basically rebuilt a bunch of old songs from two-part sheet 
music, one part being a vocal line. That, I surmise, was their 
"formula," or at least a major element of it. So, rather than suggesting 
that new bands today set down to copy the _finished product_ of such 
groups-- which is rather lame advice to offer an artist-- I'm suggesting 
that they might find a better avenue for creativity by looking to the 
_method_ of, e.g., D'Arienzo, Biagi, Di Sarli, and so forth.

But for that matter, the method wasn't unknown to De Caro either 
(Derecho viejo, Catamarca, El abrojito, etc.)

In any case, if we're going to offer musicians any Useful advice, I 
think we have to dig a little deeper than the cursory write-ups on 
TodoTango.com.

No?

More below.

Crrtango at aol.com wrote:
> Many early tangos and those from the golden age were originally instrumental, some with lyrics being added after the fact, for example La Cumparsita (originally a brass-band marching song transposed by Firpo into a tango) and El Choclo, just to name two very famous ones.
Not to quibble here, but the majority of _songs_ are written tune-first; 
the text coming first seems to be relatively uncommon. And both songs 
you mention have multiple sets of lyrics (and problematic copyright 
histories because of it)-- which argues in favor of, if anything, so 
strong a _vocal line_ as to demand sufficiently strong lyrics. I'm using 
songwriter terms here: "vocal line" = "lead melody" (as opposed to 
rhythm section or countermelody or harmony or what have you).
> Tango was mostly about dancing early on but there were always vocal tangos meant to be listened to and not usually played at milongas. Later as more vocals entered into the milonga tangos, they were often nothing more than a few lines, most of the song being instrumental. The singers (called estribillistas) were considered as backups to the more important musical line. In other words tangos were composed specifically as dancing songs.
First of all, how songs were composed and how they were played are two 
quite different things: even in the Golden Age, with the singer 
integrated into the dance band, they usually drop half the words (in the 
recordings anyway). Secondly, the estribillista period as well as what 
came earlier was kinda primitive for tango, both as music and as dance. 
I can find very few songs from the Golden Age, recorded _then_ as 
instrumentals or known today as "tangos," that were actually copyrighted 
& printed without any lyrics.

And in any case, I'm arguing in favor of looking at the vocal line for 
inspiration today. The aim of inspiration being to make new 
arrangements. I honestly wonder why anyone would prefer the bloated 
sound of Color Tango (on the recordings I've heard: maybe they have 
newer shit now) to Pugliese's much better recordings of the same 
arrangements. If they had at least made new arrangements of the 
material, as De Angelis did with "La yumba," at least it would have 
originality going for it.
> I think it is an age-old problem of musicians playing for themselves or playing for dancers.
In defense of musicians, dancers are hardly the only _audience_ one can 
have.
> Too many musicians today [...] think that the traditional tangos are too prosaic and boring. They want to show off their musicianship.
So did D'Arienzo, so did Biagi, so did D'Agostino, so did practically 
EVERYONE. I'm trying to address HOW ELSE talent can shine today, besides 
ripping off Pugliese, late Troilo, and other then-concertmasters (and/or 
their arrangers).
> Perhaps this is an opportune time for a good tango musician to emulate D'Arienzo [...]
>   
"Emulate," exactly-- not rip off. Encouraging more Xerox "creativity" is 
not the best way toward anything vital: we already have recordings we 
can dance to. If new bands are going to make their mark now, they have 
to do something original, either by making new material (as some do) or 
by giving a fresh treatment to old material. Much of the 
singer-integration that happened during the Golden Age came in with NEW 
songs. That's one great option bands have today. Another is to dip into 
the method (not the other results, mind you) that guys like D'Arienzo 
did often use-- which is what this and my prior message describe.

I want to see and hear GOOD live tango dance music as much as anyone, if 
not more. But if I can press Play and get better results of the same 
arrangement (hiss notwithstanding), I can't call that GOOD. What I can 
do is tell musicians that the small ensembles often have more order, and 
a more danceable sound, because their point of departure isn't some 
earlier arrangement, but most likely the two-part sheet music for (most 
often) piano and voice. I heard good, danceable results, with a 
sufficiently original treatment, in Atlanta last week. And I knew the 
words, and I could hear the vocal line, and there was no vocalist. The 
task of arranging becomes much easier if you have such a vocal line to 
set down first, and can then line up everything else to support it.

And I will now stop repeating myself.

Jake
DC