[Tango-L] Why are you dancing tango if you don't like tango?

[Alexis Cousein]

On 09/05/2010 00:54, Huck Kennedy wrote:
>       Nope.  It means just what I said:  I've yet to hear one that
> comes even remotely close.

The devil is in the implicit qualifiers: "to the Golden Age
bands that I've heard, which were probably not a representative
sample of all Golden Age bands".

>        But it does mean being able to tell the difference between an
> incredibly talented Golden Age band whose members spent their entire
> lives playing tango for their living, and some group of hobbyists that
> started playing tango in their garage a couple nights a week a few
> years ago while trying to hold down their day jobs.

There's more than just these. Eva Wolff is 100% dedicated to her music
and she's 30, i.e. she didn't sprout out of the Golden Age. By the
way, I don't think she plays that much for the dancers these days,
but she certainly *can*, and isn't as hostile to it as people like
e.g. Kraayenhof from Sexteto Canyengue.

[I don't think that many Argentineans know here by name, but they
may know the short woman from Belgium playing the bandoneon -
there aren't many of these around.]

If you *want* real talent to emerge, you have to give it the
right substrate. Otherwise, you *will* be stuck with hobbyists,
and even worse, you'll ensure that they'll never become more than
hobbyists practicing a couple of times a week in their garage. And
if someone with talent emerges and wants to become more than
a hobbyist, an unsupportive environment will simply make him
("him" used as a gender neutral pronoun) emigrate and you'll still
be stuck with nothing.